News by Subject Medicine & Health

Researchers assessed the number of hospital admissions for noncommunicable diseases (abnormal tissue growths, metabolic diseases, cardiovascular diseases and musculoskeletal diseases) in São Paulo, Brazil, between January and June last year compared with the corresponding periods in the previous three years.

Diphtheria - a relatively easily-preventable infection - is evolving to become resistant to a number of classes of antibiotics and in future could lead to vaccine escape, warn an international team of researchers from the UK and India.

Wearing a protective face mask has only a modest effect on the ability of healthy people to do vigorous exercise, according to a study published today in the European Respiratory Journal. This suggests that masks could be worn safely during intense exercise, for example to reduce COVID-19 transmission between people visiting an indoor gym.

In this study, many children and adolescents hospitalized for COVID-19 or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children had neurologic involvement, mostly transient symptoms. A range of life-threatening and fatal neurologic conditions associated with COVID-19 infrequently occurred. Effects on long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes are unknown.

The objectives of this study were to examine the characteristics and outcomes among adults hospitalized with COVID-19 at U.S. medical centers and analyze changes in mortality over the initial six months of the pandemic.

This Viewpoint proposes ways to maximize vaccine efficacy and allocation given the rise of coronavirus variants and authorization of a Johnson & Johnson vaccine, including reserving the latter for younger healthier populations, boosting it with a single-dose messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccination and single mRNA immunization of people with prior documented SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Current best evidence about COVID-19 vaccines, immunity and whether SARS-CoV-2 will become an endemic or seasonal virus is summarized in this Viewpoint.

This randomized clinical trials reports that among adults with mild COVID-19, a five-day course of ivermectin, compared with placebo, didn't significantly improve the time to resolution of symptoms. The findings don't support the use of ivermectin for treatment of mild COVID-19, although larger trials may be needed to understand the effects of ivermectin on other clinically relevant outcomes.

* The study has shown that patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with lower blood zinc levels require a longer recovery time and are at higher risk of death. Mortality in this patient group was 21% compared to 5% of those with higher levels of zinc in the blood. The study has also carried out in vitro tests which demonstrated the protective effect of this element by limiting the spread of the coronavirus in human cells.