News by Subject Medicine & Health

What The Study Did: This study included 647 patients with untreated nonmetastatic prostate cancer (269 patients during the pandemic and 378 from before the pandemic). During the initial COVID-19 lockdown, only 1% of Black men underwent prostatectomy, while 26% of white patients did.

A computational analysis of COVID-19 tests suggests that, in order to minimize the number of infections in a population, the amount of testing matters more than the sensitivity of the tests that are used. Philip Cherian and Gautam Menon of Ashoka University in Sonipat, India, and Sandeep Krishna of the National Centre for Biological Sciences TIFR, Bangalore, India, present their findings in the open-access journal PLOS Computational Biology.

Being more physically active and spending fewer hours per day sitting watching TV is linked to a substantially lower risk of developing obstructive sleep apnoea (OSA), according to new research published in the European Respiratory Journal. The study of more than 138,000 US men and women is the first to simultaneously evaluate physical activity and sedentary behaviour in relation to OSA risk.

What The Study Did: This study at an institution of higher education in Colorado evaluated the association between self-reported protective behaviors and how common SARS-CoV-2 infection was among essential in-person employees during the first six months of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

Firefighters at the centre of the battle against the massive Fort McMurray, Alberta wildfire in 2016 have persistent lung damage, according to new findings published by a University of Alberta occupational health research team. The firefighters had more than double the risk of developing asthma compared with the general population. They also exhibited a number of changes in lung function tests supportive of an effect on the lungs, including greater lung hyperreactivity and increased thickening of the bronchial wall.

An experimental drug reported in Nature Communications suggests that a "path is clearly achievable" to treat currently untreatable cases of cystic fibrosis disease caused by nonsense mutations. This includes about 11 percent of cystic fibrosis patients, as well as patients with other genetic diseases, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, β-thalassemia and numerous types of cancers, that are also caused by nonsense mutations.

The impact of high breathing efforts on the lungs of patients suffering with acute respiratory failure due to COVID-19 has been investigated by researchers at the University of Warwick, who assessed the likelihood of resulting lung injury.