Darcy Lewis

Consider this scenario: You’re a physician working in the emergency room (ER) of a hospital. You have a patient who has shown up in your ER 30 times in just one year; 15 of those visits ended up in hospitalization. Despite effective treatment at each visit, your patient continues to be sick. To help stabilize this patient’s health, perhaps you write a prescription, suggest follow-up care through a primary care physician or outline a change in diet or exercise.

Let’s complicate the story a bit: Your patient is unhoused or lacks consistent housing. Now what?

According to conventional wisdom, white women who live far from the equator and have possible or confirmed histories of vitamin D deficiency and/or prior infection with Epstein-Barr virus are the most likely candidates for a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis (MS), the chronic autoimmune demyelinating condition affecting the central nervous system.

This clinical shorthand is both convenient and well established, but a recent study suggests it may also encourage clinicians to overlook patients with MS who don't fit the paradigm.

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system (CNS), which includes the brain, spinal cord, and optic nerves. In MS, your immune system attacks myelin, the protective cover that shields nerve fibers throughout your central nervous system.
Whether you've recently been diagnosed with MS or are still going through the diagnostic process, you may have noticed that making a diagnosis of MS can be complicated and even confusing. If so, you're not alone.

For decades, the standard of care for muscle-invasive bladder cancer has been chemotherapy to shrink the tumor followed by surgery to remove the bladder. But a recent clinical trial found adding immunotherapy to chemotherapy may allow certain patients to avoid surgery.

Women in the workplace at midlife often reap the rewards of decades of experience, reaching their peak earning power and professional success. And then menopause occurs. Hot flashes, mood disturbances, sleep problems—these common symptoms can cause problems both at home and at work. About 1 in 4 women reported that their symptoms caused them to miss at least one day of work in the preceding year or that they experienced reduced productivity, fewer hours or even job loss.

The statistics may surprise you: Lung cancer kills more women in the U.S. than any other cancer.
About 120,000 women are diagnosed with lung cancer each year and about 60,000 women die from the disease. Although lung cancer is commonly associated with smoking, it’s important to know that non-smokers can get lung cancer, too.
Here’s what you need to know about the different types of lung cancer and how they’re treated.

The skin and the joints are seemingly unrelated organs. Yet about a third of the 8 million Americans with the skin condition psoriasis will eventually develop psoriatic arthritis. In this disease, the body’s immune system causes painful inflammation in the joints in addition to the overproduction of skin cells that creates itchy, scaly psoriasis plaques. But how?
This seeming paradox has intrigued Alexis Ogdie-Beatty, MD, MSCE, since early in medical residency at Penn.

Patients are the backbone of clinical trials, playing an essential role in the drug development process. However, patients also play a vital role in engaging directly with the FDA. This engagement is often less understood and can be underused by sponsors, meaning a significant element of the trial and drug experience is missed during sponsor engagement with the FDA.
To spur more frequent engagement between patients, sponsors, and regulators, Richie Kahn and Jenn McNary co-founded Canary Advis...

A small study finds no cancer recurrences after two years in patients who skipped breast surgery following a complete response to chemotherapy—but experts say the research is in its very early stages.
FOR YEARS, the standard of care for many women with early-stage triple-negative and HER2-positive breast cancers required chemotherapy to shrink the tumor, followed by surgery and often radiation therapy to destroy any cancer cells that survived.

Every day, nearly 1,000 Americans die from sudden cardiac arrest, a catastrophic event in which the heart suddenly stops functioning. The most common cause of sudden cardiac arrest is a sustained, super-fast heart rhythm called ventricular tachycardia, commonly called V-tach.
If ventricular tachycardia lasts for only a few seconds, the result may be a feeling of lightheadedness or breathlessness. Some people lose consciousness. But if ventricular tachycardia lasts longer than a few seconds, the heart may stop.

Repurposed tamoxifen failed to delay disease progression as an adjunct to corticosteroids among boys with Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), the phase III TAMDMD trial showed.
In an intention-to-treat population, no significant differences were observed from baseline to week 48 in D1 domain scores (measuring lying, sitting, and standing positions) of the Motor Function Measure, with changes of -3.05% in the tamoxifen group and -6.15% in the placebo group (P=0.33), reported Dirk Fischer, MD, o...

Clinicians and researchers in paediatric intensive care are working with AI-enabled monitoring technologies to avert crises before they begin.

Rohit Rao, medical director of the cardiothoracic intensive care unit (CTICU) at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego, knows the value of quick reactions in a crisis. But better still, and the preferable model in any health-care setting, is to anticipate and resolve a crisis before a patient comes to harm.

World Conference on Lung Cancer attendees received a sneak peek at the 9th Edition TNM Staging Classification during a special plenary session dedicated to the proposed updates.

Revisions to the global tumor, node, metastases (TNM) staging classification criteria for lung cancer, mesothelioma, and thymic cancer are in the final stages of preparation. The 9th Edition is set to be published jointly by IASLC, the Union for International Cancer Control, and the American Joint Committee on Cancer ...