Permitting medical device manufacturers to submit bulk summary reports of adverse events to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), rather than reporting individual cases, often fails to promptly detect potential safety signals, finds a study published by The BMJ today.

In a recent policy view, researchers from Mass General Brigham and around the world call for the formal recognition of traumatic brain injury and spinal cord injury as chronic, rather than acute, conditions with long-term health risks.

The first 90 days after starting antipsychotic treatment are crucial for changes in blood sugar and weight, finds a new study led by UCL researchers.

The rapid expansion of private testosterone prescribing risks extending treatment beyond men with clearly defined need to people with non-specific symptoms and borderline test results, for whom the balance of benefit and long term risk are less certain, warn experts in The BMJ today.

Scleroderma (systemic sclerosis) is a rare, chronic, autoimmune disease that causes the body to produce too much collagen, leading to the hardening and thickening of the skin and internal organs. For more than 50 years, physicians have relied on manually pinching the skin to assess its thickness, a subjective approach that remains central to the diagnosis of systemic sclerosis, assessment of disease extent and progression, and monitoring of response to treatment. Despite being the accepted standard practice, doctors can score the same patient differently based on their own unique touch and judgement, making it difficult to accurately track changes in skin thickening over time or assess a patient’s response to treatment.

 

For the first time, researchers at Boston University Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine and the Boston University Department of Biomedical Engineering have developed and tested a camera-based technique called spatial frequency domain imaging (SFDI) to assess skin changes in scleroderma patients. SFDI works by shining patterns of harmless light on the skin, without touching it, and measuring how the light bounces back. “We have been developing SFDI for almost 15 years in my lab, but this is the first time anyone has applied this technology to scleroderma” explained Darren Roblyer, PhD, professor of biomedical engineering and co-author on the manuscript.

Scientists and policymakers use scenarios called Shared Socioeconomic Pathways to project how today’s choices affect tomorrow’s world. But for complex subjects like public health, these intentionally simple scenarios don’t capture every complexity.

Researchers at UChicago Medicine have launched a first-of-its-kind clinical trial testing a new type of personalized cell therapy designed to help the body's own immune system recognize and destroy cancer cells. The study will evaluate the treatment's safety and early effectiveness in patients with metastatic ovarian cancer and several other advanced solid tumors.

Climate change is a global crisis and the search for solutions is increasingly technological. A new, 700-page volume edited by a sociologist from the University of California, Merced demonstrates that moving people, institutions and communities to act may be just as consequential as technological solutions to climate change. “The Oxford Handbook of Climate Action” gathers 39 chapters from over 60 top environmental and climate scholars around the world.