Latest healthcare news

Stomach Cancer This mostly affects older people.  The average age of people when they are diagnosed is 68.  About six out of every ten persons diagnosed with stomach cancer each year are 65 or older.  The risk that a man will develop stomach cancer in...

Upper Gastrointestinal Tract Screening At present, screening for these cancers only exists for those with symptoms.  Oesophageal Cancer Oesophageal cancer is more common among men than among women. The lifetime risk of oesophageal cancer in the United States is...

Colorectal Cancer Screening This is the third most common cancer diagnosed in both men and women in the United States.  The overall lifetime risk of developing colorectal cancer is about 1:23, that is 4.4% for men and 1:25, that is 4.1% for women. Many lifestyle...

Most screening programmes evaluate patients with a high short term risk of developing cardiovascular disease. Clearly though, cardiovascular disease begins in early life and with the exposure to risk factors determines a lifetime risk for clinical cardiovascular...

Cancer, COVID and Screening; Where do we go from here? It is reported in the papers this weekend that thousands of lives may be lost to cancer because 250,000 patients were not referred to hospital for urgent checks. Apparently, there was a 43% drop in referrals...

Elimination of COVID-19 - Is This Possible and What Would It Look Like? An interesting article published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases August 6, 2020 by Anita Heywood and Macintyre looks at this in detail.  In countries that have achieved a low incidence of...

SARS-CoV-2 Viral Load - Can it predict COVID-19 mortality? An interesting letter in The Lancet Respiratory Medicine published August 6, 2020 by Pujadas and others reports on the association of viral load and COVID-19 mortality. Currently SARS-CoV-2 PCR swabs do not...

Wendy Armstrong in the Journal of the American Medical Association of July revealed that 87% of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 had persistent symptoms more than two months after the onset of the disease despite resolution of viral infection. Investigators in...

An article by Baker and others published in Science July 2020 used climate-dependent epidemic modelling to simulate the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic by proving different scenarios based on known coronavirus biology. Studies using a regression framework have found a role for...

An interesting article highlighted by Professor Justin Stebbing in his science update this week highlighted the fact that over 150 students at an Israeli secondary school were infected by SARS-CoV-2 after students were allowed to remove their masks during a heat wave....