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A double mutant coronavirus variant with features of the so-called California variant plus a mutation found in Brazil and South African variants has been detected in the San Francisco Bay Area. (
San Francisco Chronicle)
The Eek variant that partially evades vaccine protection turned up in about 70% of one Taiwanese hospital cases. (
Reuters)
Fox News,
Washington Post)
As of Monday at 8:00 a.m. EDT, the unofficial COVID-19 toll stands at 30,706,277 cases and 555,001 deaths, up by roughly 450,000 and 5,600, respectively, from a week ago.
The Hill)
NPR)
A Chinese city on the border with Myanmar aims to vaccinate all 300,000 inhabitants over 5 days. Impressive, although New York City holds perhaps an even more staggering record. (
Iora Health co-founder Rushika Fernandopulle, MD (Photo courtesy Iora Health)
Many startup companies in healthcare are entrepreneurial or innovative, but true disruptors in the field are harder to come by. These are the companies that are actually shaking the pillars of an established system. MedPage Today Editor-in-Chief Marty Makary, MD, MPH, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, selected several companies that fit the profile of a real disruptor; we re profiling them in an ongoing series.
It s the Holy Grail of healthcare: improving quality while cutting costs. But how to do it?
Rushika Fernandopulle, MD, co-founder and CEO of Boston-based Iora Health, thinks he knows the answer double down on primary care.
email article
Machine learning (ML) algorithms developed to predict in-hospital mortality after acute MI offered more meaningful gains in model calibration than in accuracy, researchers found.
Parsing through data on 29 variables from the American College of Cardiology (ACC) Chest Pain-MI Registry, extreme gradient descent boosting (XGBoost) and meta-classifier models offered no substantive improvement in discrimination compared with standard logistic regression modeling (C-statistics 0.90 for both vs 0.89), reported Harlan Krumholz, MD, SM, of Yale School of Medicine, and colleagues.
However, the two ML models showed nearly perfect agreement between observed and predicted risk across the risk spectrum. Of the people deemed moderate-to-high risk in logistic regression, 27% were more accurately reclassified as low risk by the XGBoost model and 25% by the meta-classifier model both more consistent with the observed event rates.
email article
Registry data suggested that valve leaflet laceration helped protect patients at risk of coronary artery obstruction during transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR).
Safety of the electrosurgical technique, known as Bioprosthetic or native Aortic Scallop Intentional Laceration to prevent Iatrogenic Coronary Artery obstruction (BASILICA), was reflected in the 3.4% rate of death or disabling stroke at 30 days among 214 patients.
Incidence was 2.8% for mortality, 2.8% for stroke, and 0.5% for disabling stroke, according to Ron Waksman, MD, of MedStar Washington Hospital Center, D.C., and colleagues, reporting in This is comparable to outcomes in patients undergoing TAVR who are not specifically at risk of coronary artery obstruction, the authors noted in their manuscript, presented simultaneously during the virtual Cardiovascular Research Technologies conference on Saturday.
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Close on the heels of SAMSON, a series of randomized n-of-1 trials showed no difference in muscle symptoms when people were put on a statin versus a placebo.
People who had previously reported statin myopathies ended up rating muscle symptoms similarly low during blinded atorvastatin (Lipitor) or placebo treatment (mean 1.68 vs 1.85 on a visual analog scale from 0 to 10,
P=0.40), according to Liam Smeeth, MBChB, PhD, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and colleagues in the StatinWISE group. Also, we found no differences for the effect of muscle symptoms on aspects of daily life (general activity, mood, ability to walk, normal work, relationships with other people, sleep, and enjoyment of life) between the statin and control periods, they reported in