MedicalResearch.com specializes in exclusive interviews with medical researchers from major and specialty journals and presenters at health care meetings.
Learn directly from the researchers as they discuss the ideas behind their investigations and their plans for future studies. Over 8848 interviews to date! More than 1769 interviews with researchers from JAMA, 312 Lancet, 301 NEJM, 394 TheBMJ interviews.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Véronique J. C. Kraaijenga MD
Department of Otorhinolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery
Brain Center Rudolf Magnus, University Medical Center Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: During the past two decades, the frequency of hearing loss among young people has increased and going to music concerts, clubs and festivals may part of the reason. Noise-induced hearing loss because of recreational noise exposure is reduced by using earplugs.
Our study evaluated 51 adults who attended an outdoor music festival in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in September 2015. The study measured music festival visit for 4.5 hours (intervention); temporary hearing loss (outcome).
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Nora Volkow
Nora D. Volkow MD
Senior Investigator
Laboratory of Neuroimaging, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism
National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD 20892
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Findings from animal studies had shown that sleep deprivation increased the content of beta-amyloid in brain, which is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease. We wanted to test whether this also happened in the human brain after one night of sleep deprivation. We found that indeed one night of sleep deprivation led to an accumulation of beta amyloid in the human brain, which suggest that one of the reasons why we sleep is to help clean our brain of degradation products that if not removed are toxic to brain cells. Continue reading
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Matthew James O’Brien MD
Assistant Professor, Medicine
General Medicine Division
Assistant Professor, Preventive Medicine
Northwestern University
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The USPSTF is an expert group that makes recommendations for screening and other preventive services. In December 2015, they recommend that providers screen for diabetes in patients who are 40-70 years old and also overweight/obese. The same recommendation stated that clinicians “should consider screening earlier” in patients who have any of the following risk factors: non-white race/ethnicity, family history of diabetes, or personal history of gestational diabetes or polycystic ovarian syndrome. Using nationally representative data, we studied the performance of the “limited” criteria based on age and weight alone vs. the “expanded criteria” mentioned above.
The main findings were that following the “limited” screening criteria of age and weight would result in missing over 50% of adults with prediabetes and diabetes. In other words, if providers followed the “limited” criteria, over 50% of adults with prediabetes and diabetes would not get screened. The “expanded” criteria exhibited much better performance, resulting in 76.8% of adults with prediabetes and diabetes who would be screened. Continue reading
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Laura K. Ferris
Laura K. Ferris MD, PhD
Associate Professor, University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute
Director of Clinical Trials, UPMC Department of Dermatology
University of Pittsburgh
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Dermatology is one of the greatest utilizers of physician extenders, including physician assistants (PAs) in medicine. The scope of practice of PAs has also expanded over time from a role in assisting the dermatologist to taking a more independent role and many PAs now do skin cancer screening examinations and make independent decisions about which lesions are suspicious for skin cancer and need to be biopsied.
Our main findings were that, overall, in comparison to board-certified dermatologists, PAs were more likely to perform biopsies of benign lesions. For every melanoma that they found, PAs biopsied 39 benign lesions whereas dermatologists biopsied 25.
In addition, PAs were less likely than dermatologists to diagnose melanoma in situ, the earliest and most curable, but also hardest to identify and diagnose, form of melanoma. However, PAs had a similar rate of diagnosing the more clinically-obvious forms of skin cancer, including invasive melanoma, basal cell carcinoma, and squamous cell carcinoma.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr Pan Pantziarka
Dr Pan Pantziarka, PhD
Program Director, Drug Repurposing: Anticancer Fund
Coordinator: Repurposing Drugs in Oncology
(www.redo-project.org)
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The Repurposing Drugs in Oncology (ReDO) project is an on-going collaboration assessing the evidence of anticancer activity in a wide range of already licensed non-cancer drugs. A subset of these drugs have a sufficient level of evidence to support clinical investigation and these are profiled in detail in order to synthesise the existing evidence and to bring it to the attention of clinical researchers.
In the case of the PDE5 inhibitors sildenafil, tadalafil and vardenafil the evidence is clear that these drugs have multiple anticancer mechanisms of action at clinically relevant dosing. In particular there is evidence that these drugs target anti-tumour immune responses, as shown from a small number of early stage clinical trials. This opens up the prospect of using these cheap and widely available drugs in combination with existing therapies to improve the number and duration of responses. The chance to increase the therapeutic effectiveness of immune checkpoint inhibitors is especially compelling and definitely warrants clinical research.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Ed Liu
Ed Liu, M.D
President and CEO
The Jackson Laboratory (JAX)
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: A few years ago we and others identified a complex genomic instability profile commonly found in the genomes of breast, ovarian and endometrial carcinomas, which is characterized by hundreds of isolated head-to-tail duplications of DNA segments, called tandem duplications. We refer to this configuration as the tandem duplicator phenotype, or TDP.
In this study, we perform a meta-analysis of over 2,700 cancer genomes from over 30 different tumor types and provide a detailed description of six different types of TDP, distinguished by the presence of tandem duplications of different sizes. Collectively, these profiles are found in ~50% of breast, ovarian and endometrial carcinomas as well as 10-30% of adrenocortical, esophageal, stomach and lung adeno-carcinomas. We show that distinct genetic abnormalities associate with the distinct TDPs, clearly suggesting that distinct molecular mechanisms are driving TDP formation. In particular, we provide strong evidence of a casual relationship between joint abrogation of the BRCA1 and TP53 tumor suppressor genes and the emergence of a short-span (~11 Kb) TDP profile. We also observe a significant association between hyper-activation of the CCNE1 pathway and TDP with medium-span (~230 Kb) tandem duplications, and between mutation of the CDK12 gene and medium- and large-span TDP (coexisting 230 Kb and 1.7 Kb tandem duplications).
Importantly, we find that different forms of TDP result in the perturbation of alternative sets of cancer genes, with short-span TDP profiles leading to the loss of tumor suppressor genes via double transections, and larger-span TDP profiles resulting in the duplication (i.e. copy number gain) of oncogenes and gene regulatory elements, such as super-enhancers and disease-associated SNPs. Continue reading
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Horne
Benjamin D. Horne, PhD
Director of Cardiovascular and Genetic Epidemiology
Intermountain Heart Institute
Intermountain Medical Center
Salt Lake City, Utah
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Evidence suggests that short-term elevations (even for just a few days) of fine particulate matter air pollution (PM2.5, which is particulate matter less than 2.5 um or about one-thirtieth the diameter of a human hair) is associated with various poor health outcomes among adults, including myocardial infarction, heart failure exacerbation, and worsening of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease symptoms. Studies of long-term exposure to moderately elevated levels of PM2.5 indicate that chronic daily air pollution exposure may contribute to death due to pneumonia and influenza.
Research regarding the association of short-term elevations in PM2.5 has provided some limited evidence of a possible association between short-term PM2.5 increases and infection with respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) or bronchiolitis in children, but scientifically these reports have been weak and unreliable, probably because they have only looked at a period of a few days to a week after short-term PM2.5 elevations. An evaluation of a very large population in a geographic location that provides a wide variation in PM2.5 levels from lowest to highest levels and that examines longer periods of time after the PM2.5 elevations is needed to determine whether a PM2.5 association with lower respiratory infection exists.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Robinson
Dr. Jennifer Robinson, MD MPH
Professor, Departments of Epidemiology & Medicine
Director, Prevention Intervention Center
Department of Epidemiology
University of Iowa
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: Compared to previous placebo-controlled statin trials, the FOURIER trial where all patients were on high or moderate intensity statin, had no reduction in cardiovascular or total mortality and the reduction in cardiovascular events was less than expected. However, other PCSK9 inhibitor trials performed in populations with higher baseline low density lipoprotein cholesterol (LDL-C) had cardiovascular risk reductions similar to that in the statin trails.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Jens Sundbøll
Department of Clinical Epidemiology
Aarhus University Hospital
Aarhus, Denmark
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The incidence of acute peripheral arterial occlusion is approximately 1.5 cases per 10,000 person-years. In comparison, the incidence rate of deep venous thrombosis is about 5-10cases per 10,000 person-years. It has been established previously that deep venous thrombosis in the lower limb and pulmonary embolism may be presenting symptoms of cancer and is associated with a poor cancer prognosis. However, whether arterial thromboembolism of the lower limb also can represent prodromal symptoms of occult cancer and worsen cancer prognosis has never been investigated.