Methotrexate is a common drug with a long history; for the past 40 years, it’s been used to treat a range of diseases. Today it is the most commonly used drug for systemic rheumatic diseases worldwide and is the first drug a physician will prescribe for a patient with rheumatoid arthritis. But despite its use by millions of people, there is not robust data on the rates of the side effects of the drug. Observational studies have suggested that methotrexate may elevate a person’s risk of a variety of adverse events, including liver toxicity, anemia and difficulty in breathing, but the magnitude of risk was unknown. Taking advantage of data from the Cardiovascular Inflammation Reduction Trial (CIRT), a randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled trial, investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital have been able to far more accurately determine rates of adverse events for people taking methotrexate, finding small-to-moderate elevations in risks for skin cancer, gastrointestinal, infectious, lung, and blood adverse events. Results are published in Annals of Internal Medicine.
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Recognizing and addressing the widespread problem of sleep disorders in military personnel and veterans, the U.S. Departments of Veterans Affairs and Defense (VA/DoD) jointly have issued new guidelines for assessment and treatment of insomnia and obstructive sleep apnea.
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Shahid Aziz has spent hours poring over the case histories of World War I soldiers who returned home with disfiguring facial injuries.
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Health care providers are constantly evolving treatments for complicated conditions to provide patients with the greatest amount of benefit while avoiding any adverse effects, like scarring.
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Scientists have created one of the most detailed maps of breast cancer ever achieved, revealing how genetic changes shape the physical tumor landscape, according to research funded by Cancer Research UK and published in Nature Cancer today (Monday).
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The new coronavirus that emerged in central China at the end of last year has now killed nearly 1,800 people and spread around the world.
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Thirteen US citizens deemed “high risk” for the deadly new coronavirus are being treated at a federally designated facility in the University of Nebraska following their evacuation from a cruise ship in Japan, officials said Monday.
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A multi-institutional group of researchers led by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) has linked a strong cancer driver gene to changes in proteins that regulate alternative splicing. The researchers created new computational tools and biological model systems for the study. This collaborative research, led by Yi Xing, Ph.D., at CHOP and Owen Witte, MD, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
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The protein β-arrestin-2 increases the accumulation of neurotoxic tau tangles, a cause several forms of dementia, by interfering with removal of excess tau from the brain, a new study by the University of South Florida Health (USF Health) Morsani College of Medicine found.
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People who rely on social media for information were more likely to be misinformed about vaccines than those who rely on traditional media, according to a study of vaccine knowledge and media use by researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
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