Category Health/Medical

A Phase III clinical trial led by Neeraj Agarwal, MD, FASCO, senior director of clinical research at Huntsman Cancer Institute and professor of internal medicine at the University of Utah (the U), has found that a combination prostate cancer treatment could prevent the disease from progressing into a harder-to-treat form of cancer in select patients.

Combination therapy targets gene-altered tumors
The study, TALAPRO-3 (NCT04821622), evaluated a combination of two drugs—talazoparib and enzalutamide—in patients with metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer. This is a form of the disease that has spread beyond the prostate but remains susceptible to standard hormone therapy treatment.

The patients involved also had prostate cancer affected ...

Osteoporosis is a silent disease where bone loss develops gradually before fractures occur. Current clinical screening recommendations mainly focus on older women and selected high-risk groups, leaving some men, younger adults, and individuals with normal body weight completely outside routine screening pathways.

To close this care gap, researchers from St. Paul’s Hospital and National Taiwan University have demonstrated how AI can leverage routine chest X-rays to detect asymptomatic bone loss, closing critical gaps in screening healthy Asian populations. Their paper is published in the journal npj Digital Medicine.

Strikingly, the study found that more than half of the confirmed abnormal bone-density cases...

A Mount Sinai-led research team has demonstrated that autoimmunity, in which the body’s immune system attacks its own tissues, is responsible for the often-debilitating and confounding symptoms of long COVID in a subset of people.

Findings from the study, published in Cell, could lead to important new approaches to treating patients with long COVID, including already-validated therapies for management of autoimmunity as well as new ways of clinically identifying which patients are most likely to benefit from these therapies.

Autoimmunity emerges as key driver
“We’ve known for some time that long COVID involves not just one but a variety of phenotypes, and now we have validated that autoimmunity is a major contributor to the symptom burden,” says David Putrino, Ph.D...

At age 49, Jan Janisch-Hanzlik’s multiple sclerosis was destroying her freedom to live the life she wanted. She gave up her active nursing job for a desk role. Frequent falls made her afraid to carry her grandchildren. She had to move to a bigger house to make room for the wheelchair she feared she might end up needing full-time.

Even the best available medication wasn’t improving Janisch-Hanzlik’s symptoms, and she worried they’d only get worse...