#weak-clinical-evidence

#weak-clinical-evidence

"I would like to sincerely apologise to any patients who have been affected and recalled for a scan as I understand receiving such news can be unsettling."

Aidan O'Brien faces a series of allegations including that he failed to provide good clinical care to 10 patients between 2011 and 2019.

A report last year found unnecessary surgeries were carried out, cancers were missed and poor standards of care were delivered at the University Hospital of North Durham and Darlington Memorial Hospital. CDDTF said it wanted to support the patients it had let down, including by offering access to psychological support, and to ensure they knew how to make a claim or raise concerns with police.

The condition, called recessive RNU2-2-related neurodevelopmental disorder, is associated with seizures and severe developmental delay in children less than a year-old, in areas such as speech and walking.

In children below the age of five, whose immune systems are still developing, the infections can lead to malnourishment; they cause up to 42,000 deaths annually. Soon there may be a vaccine to protect against these infections. In the Lancet Infectious Diseases last month, scientists shared the results of the first study to evaluate the safety and efficacy of an ETEC-controlling vaccine in a large pediatric population in Gambia.

Some 1 million patients in the U.S. live with a type of heart disease called heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, or HFpEF, caused by a stiffening of a chamber of the heart that makes it much more challenging to distribute blood throughout the body. The condition has few approved therapies and high mortality rates.

Public health consultant Dr Ross Keat said supporting people earlier to make small preventative changes would make "a big difference later on". Some 3,500 people in the north of the island within that age bracket are eligible for the checks. The checks will be carried out by two pre-existing nurses that support GP staff and would not replace GP appointments, Keat explained, adding that the cost would be minimal and absorbed by Ramsey Group Practice.

Yes, there has been a shocking lack of progress in developing transformative psychiatric medicine (We need new drugs for mental ill-health, 5 February), but this may be because in mental health, drugs are not always the answer (see, for example, Richard P Bentall's Doctoring the Mind). Huge progress has been made in the effectiveness of talking therapies for example, free effective treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is available to all UK army veterans through the charity PTSD Resolution.

Some clinicians have an uncanny quality. A colleague describes herself and others with this instinct as "witchy"-a capacity to know things about patients they haven't said yet, to follow a stray association to a song lyric or a half-remembered cultural reference and arrive, reliably, at something the patient urgently needed to say but couldn't reach on their own. We see with artificial intelligence these intriguing possibilities for discovery, especially as connections that human beings never would see pop out of apparently unrelated data.

Emma Dyer remembers the moment she clicked "buy now" on a set of weightloss jabs she found online. She had no medical consultation, no ID checks, and no questions about her history of anorexia and bulimia. "It was just so easy - too easy," she says. "They never asked for my medical history or what medication I was taking. It was like buying groceries."

In 2021, amid the COVID‑19 pandemic, Kristin Wall became pregnant with her second child. Her physician told her that little was known about the COVID-19 vaccine's safety and effectiveness in pregnant people. Observational data - collected from those vaccinated before they knew that they were pregnant - suggested that the vaccine was safe, so she could have it. Still, she'd have to weigh up the risks and benefits herself.

It is one of the most common reasons that adults look for medical care. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are over 58 million adults who are living with doctor-diagnosed arthritis in the US alone. In addition to this, over 25 million people battle with daily limitations caused by joint pain. (CDC, 2024). Probably, even more concerning, is the fact that an estimated 15 million adults experience severe joint pain rated

Every day, many thousands of parents across the U.S. face the difficult question of whether to place their child or teenager on a psychotropic medication. Receiving a diagnosis of a mental disorder can be scary and confusing, for the youth as well as their parents/caretakers. What is ADHD? Depression? Anxiety? OCD? Bipolar? What are the available treatments? Do we have to use medications to treat the symptoms?

Before treatment began, participants underwent neuroimaging. Instead of relying on a single modality, the researchers fused structural connectivity (how regions are physically wired) with functional connectivity (how regions co-activate at rest). The goal was not to throw every possible feature at a black box, but to learn a constrained pattern-what the authors call structure-function "covariation"-that carries the most predictive signal for outcome. In other words, the model tries to find the smallest set of connections that meaningfully forecasts symptom change.

For more than 70 years, physicians seeking to diagnose mental-health conditions have turned to the 'bible for psychiatry' - The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (). Last updated in 2022, and published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the DSM sets out diagnostic criteria for a panoply of mental-health conditions, from autism spectrum disorder to substance-use and personality disorders.

Low back pain is the most common and debilitating of all pain complaints. Heavy lifting can cause it, but so can sitting at a desk all day, especially if you have bad posture and poor back support. Think hunching over a laptop at your dining table. Most times, an acute injury causing lower back pain will get better on its own in a matter of weeks. But it also can become a more lasting problem, especially as you age. Now some new science suggests one reason for this could be that we've been approaching the inflammation that comes with back pain all wrong.

The cancer was fastacting, and if I'd left it even six months, the outcome could have been much worse,

You know that parental instinct when something just isn't quite right with your child? You text your mom friends and gut check with your partner, but you don't think you're being anxious - something might really be wrong. Well, odds are your instinct could be spot-on: A new study published in the JAMA Network found that parents were right 9 times out of 10 when they suspected their child was seriously ill or injured.

Eduardo Vilar-Sanchez has spent more than 10 years pursuing a goal that seemed very distant, but which he now sees as a little closer: to develop a preventive vaccine against cancer. The physician and researcher is leading a study that presented the first promising results of a colon cancer vaccine in a small group of patients suffering from a rare disease that makes them 17 times more likely to develop colon cancer than the general population.

Mucopolysaccharidosis type II (MPS II), or Hunter syndrome, is a rare genetic disorder primarily affecting boys, caused by a deficiency in the enzyme needed to break down sugar molecules. This harmful buildup in cells and tissues impacts multiple body systems, causing frequent infections, organ enlargement and developmental disabilities. Management involves supportive care and enzyme replacement therapy, as there is currently no cure,

The Food and Drug Administration commissioner's effort to drastically shorten the review of drugs favored by President Donald Trump's administration is causing alarm across the agency, stoking worries that the plan may run afoul of legal, ethical, and scientific standards long used to vet the safety and effectiveness of new medicines. Marty Makary's program is causing new anxiety and confusion among staff already rocked by layoffs, buyouts, and leadership upheavals, according to seven current or recently departed staffers.