Preventive anti-clotting therapy does not boost survival of critically ill COVID patients

Studies examining the effectiveness of treatments for COVID-19 often do not include the very populations hardest hit by the disease, according to a new review by University of Chicago Medicine researchers. The findings, based on an analysis of all US COVID-19 treatment trials registered on ClinicalTrials.gov, were published Jan. 27 in the Journal of General Internal Medicine. "This study highlights the blind spot in how clinical trials are done in the United States," said senior author Neda Laiteerapong, MD, MS, a general internist and associate director of the Center for Chronic Disease Research and Policy at the University of Chicago. "Researchers, hospitals and pharmaceutical ...

UPTON, NY - Hundreds of naturally occurring specialty fatty acids (building blocks of oils) have potential for use as raw materials for making lubricants, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and more--if they could be produced at large scale by crop plants. But attempts to put genes for making these specialty building blocks into crops have had the opposite effect: Seeds from plants with genes added to make specialty fatty acids accumulated dramatically less oil. No one knew why. Now two teams of biochemists working on separate aspects of oil synthesis at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory have converged to discover the mechanism behind the oil-production slowdown. As described in the journal Plant Physiology, they crossbred model plants and conducted detailed ...

TAMPA, Fla. -- The prognosis of ovarian cancer is poor, with an estimated five-year survival of only 40% for advanced disease, the stage at which most ovarian carcinomas are diagnosed. These poor outcomes are partly due to the lack of effective therapies for advanced disease and recurrence. Immunotherapies hold promise for many types of cancer; however, studies have shown that patients with ovarian cancer do not have strong responses to existing drugs. In a new article published in Nature, Moffitt Cancer Center researchers demonstrate why some ...

There is an impassioned debate taking place in medicine on whether race-based considerations should be a factor in research, diagnoses, or treatments. Those on one side assert that race should be ignored entirely because it is a societal construct with no biological basis, and accordingly many hospitals are abandoning long-established "race corrections" in medical algorithms and diagnostics. Others, like Meghan McGarry, MD, MS, assistant professor of pediatrics at UC San Francisco, say that we can't completely ignore race, precisely because science is rarely free of societal influence - the structural inequality ...

Since element 99 - einsteinium - was discovered in 1952 at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) from the debris of the first hydrogen bomb, scientists have performed very few experiments with it because it is so hard to create and is exceptionally radioactive. A team of Berkeley Lab chemists has overcome these obstacles to report the first study characterizing some of its properties, opening the door to a better understanding of the remaining transuranic elements of the actinide series. Published in the journal Nature, the study, "Structural and Spectroscopic Characterization of an Einsteinium Complex," was co-led by Berkeley Lab scientist Rebecca Abergel and Los ...

The Arctic Ocean was covered by up to 900 m thick shelf ice and was filled entirely with freshwater at least twice in the last 150,000 years. This surprising finding, reported in the latest issue of the journal Nature, is the result of long-term research by scientists from the Alfred Wegener Institute and the MARUM. With a detailed analysis of the composition of marine deposits, the scientists could demonstrate that the Arctic Ocean as well as the Nordic Seas did not contain sea-salt in at least two glacial periods. Instead, these oceans were filled with large amounts of freshwater under a thick ice shield. This water could then be released into the North Atlantic in very short periods of time. Such sudden freshwater inputs could explain rapid climate oscillations for which no satisfying ...

What The Study Did: Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were used to look at changes in emergency department visits for mental health, suicide attempts, drug and opioid overdoses and outcomes of violence before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. Authors: Kristin M. Holland, Ph.D., M.P.H., of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2020.4402) Editor's Note:  Please see the article for additional information, ...

What The Study Did: COVID-19 outcomes including hospitalization and in-hospital death were compared between people living with or without diagnosed HIV in New York State. Authors: Eli S. Rosenberg, Ph.D., of the State University of New York in Rensselaer, is the corresponding author. To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/ (doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.37069) Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and ...

Mechanism for control of antibiotic production in soil bacteria is visualised for the first time by scientists at University of Warwick and Monash University Research reported in Nature could lead to improved manufacturing of existing antibiotics, and open up opportunities to discover new ones The majority of clinically used antibiotics are derived from soil bacteria, but can be hard to find because their production is switched off in laboratory cultures The discovery of how hormone-like molecules turn on antibiotic production in soil bacteria could unlock the untapped opportunities for medicines that are under our very feet. An international team of scientists working at the University of Warwick, UK, and Monash ...

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - The suicide rate among American adolescents has rose drastically over the last decade, but many at-risk youths aren't receiving the mental health services they need. In fact, one of the greatest challenges is identifying the young people who need the most help. Now, researchers have developed a personalized system to better detect suicidal youths. The novel, universal screening tool helps caregivers reliably predict an adolescent's suicide risk - alerting them to which ones need follow-up interventions - according to Michigan Medicine-led findings published in JAMA Psychiatry. "Too many young people are dying by suicide and many at high risk go completely unrecognized and untreated," says lead author Cheryl King, Ph.D., ...