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.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Example of Button Battery
Kris R. Jatana, MD, FAAP, FACS
Associate Professor
Director, Pediatric Otolaryngology Quality Improvement
Department of Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery
Nationwide Children’s Hospital & Wexner Medical Center
at Ohio State University
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: More than 2,500 pediatric button battery ingestions occur annually in the United States. When lodged in the esophagus, rapid injury can occur from the tissue and saliva connecting the circuit of the battery. Serious injury can occur in a matter of hours. This results in a highly alkaline caustic injury that dissolves tissue, a process called liquefactive necrosis. There was a need for novel mitigation strategies to slow the progression of esophageal injury caused by presence of a button battery. This study aimed at identifying a palatable liquid that can be given at home or hospital setting to reduce esophageal injury until the battery can be removed. Continue reading
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Seoyoung C. Kim, MD, ScD, MSCE
Associate Professor of Medicine
Division of Pharmacoepidemiology & Pharmacoeconomics
Division of Rheumatology, Immunology and Allergy
Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Since patients with gout are at an increased risk of cardiovascular events, we wanted to examine comparative cardiovascular safety of the two most commonly used urate-lowering drugs – febuxostat and allopurinol.
Using claims data from US Medicare, we conducted a cohort study of 24,936 febuxostat initiators PS-matched to 74,808 allopurinol initiators.
We found the risk of the primary cardiovascular endpoint (MI or stroke) was similar between the two groups. Analyses on secondary endpoints as well as all-cause mortality showed similar findings except that febuxostat was associated with a modestly reduced risk of heart failure exacerbation among patients with preexisting heart failure. In our sensitivity analysis, the risk of all-cause mortality associated with long-term use of febuxostat v. allopurinol appears to be increased but statistically not significant.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Hip Replacement
NIH Image
Samuel Hawley | Research Assistant (NIHR PhD Project) |
Pharmaco- and Device Epidemiology Group |
Centre for Statistics in Medicine | NDORMS |
University of Oxford
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The aim was to disentangle some of the potential reasons for the recent decline in joint replacement rates among rheumatoid arthritis (RA) patients in the developed world.
The main findings from our UK patient-level analysis indicated that joint replacement rates were not significantly different for users of TNF inhibitors versus the patients who remained only on conventional synthetic DMARDS, however we did find that TNF inhibitor use amongst older RA patients was associated with a 40% reduction in hip replacement rates. Continue reading
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Jeffrey Wilson, MD, PhD
Research Fellow, Allergy & Immunology
University of Virginia
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Galactose-α-1,3-galactose (α-Gal) represents an oligosaccharide that is present in mammalian products and is the causal allergen in a syndrome of delayed red meat allergy (commonly called α-Gal syndrome). Sensitization to this allergen has been linked to tick bites, specifically the lone star tick in the United States.
Thus, sensitization to α-Gal (and the prevalence of subjects with symptomatic red meat allergy) is relatively common where the lone star tick is common, i.e- the southeast.
For a variety of reasons we hypothesized that specific immune sensitization (which relates to IgE antibody production) to α-Gal would be a risk factor for coronary artery disease. To address this possibility we measured IgE specific to α-Gal in 118 adults subjects from central Virginia who had undergone advanced cardiac imaging with a technique called intravascular ultrasound. Out of the cohort 26% of the subjects in the study had the sensitivity to α-Gal.
The main finding was that subjects with the IgE sensitization to α-Gal had greater amounts of atherosclerosis, as well as atherosclerotic plaques with more unstable characteristics. This association was significant when controlled for traditional cardiovascular risk factors such as hypertension, diabetes and lipids levels.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
André Wilke, Ph.D.
Post Doctoral Associate
Division of Environment & Public Health
Department of Public Health Sciences
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine
Clinical Research Building
Miami, Florida 33136
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study?
Response: As vector-borne diseases pose an increasing public health threat to communities in South Florida and elsewhere, a new study led by public health researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine has revealed that ornamental bromeliad plants contribute to breeding of the Aedes aegypti mosquito—a key culprit for the Zika outbreak that hit Miami-Dade County and other areas of Florida and the Americas in 2016.
In addition to Zika, bites from the Aedes aegypti mosquito can cause dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya. Zika has been linked to microcephaly and other birth defects in unborn babies when pregnant women contract the disease. The family of diseases linked to the Aedes aegypti can cause other severe symptoms. Yellow fever can be fatal.
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Becker-Dreps
Sylvia Becker-Dreps, MD MPH
Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine
Associate Director, Office of International Activities (Latin America Focus)
Director, UNC Program in Nicaragua
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7595
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Pertussis (or whooping cough) is a respiratory infection caused by bacteria. It has been becoming more common in the US over the past two decades. Infants are more likely to be hospitalized and die of the disease. They are especially vulnerable in the first months of life because they have not yet had time to complete the DTaP vaccine series themselves. (Currently, infants receive 3 doses of DTaP at 2,4, and 6 months of age.) Immunizing mothers allows the mothers to pass antibodies against pertussis through the placenta and provide passive immunity to infants early in life. In early 2013, the CDC recommended that pregnant women receive a Tdap vaccine in every pregnancy. That recommendation was based on studies of the immune response to the vaccine, not real cases of pertussis.
Our study examined clinical cases of pertussis in over 675,000 infants throughout the US. We found that in the first six months of life, infants of vaccinated mothers (those that received Tdap during pregnancy) had 75% less pertussis hospitalizations and 50% less pertussis cases overall. Continue reading
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. van Baarsen
Dr. Lisa van Baarsen PhD
Principal Investigator at the Amsterdam Rheumatology and Immunology Cente
Academic Medical Center
the Netherlands
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: The discovery that autoantibodies can be present years before the onset of clinical symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) enables us to study autoantibody positive individuals who are at risk of developing RA. In patients with established disease the target tissue of RA, the synovial joints, is characterized by cellular infiltration and inflammation. Moreover, successful therapy decreases this synovial inflammation. In the past, our department already showed (PMID: 21177292; PMID: 24574210) that in autoantibody positive at risk individuals there is no overt cellular infiltration present in the synovium.
In the current study we performed a so called discovery-based approach to investigate at a genome-wide gene expression level (using microarrays) whether the synovium is altered at a molecular level before onset of rheumatoid arthritis.
Our molecular and microscopic studies on synovial biopsies obtained from autoantibody positive individuals indeed revealed interesting differences between those at risk individuals who developed disease after follow up and those who did not. Continue reading
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Dr. Duber
Herbie Duber, MD, MPH, FACEP
Associate Professor, Emergency Medicine
Adjunct Associate Professor Department of Global Health
Adjunct Associate Professor
Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation
University of Washington
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Opioid use disorder (OUD) and opioid overdose deaths are a rapidly increasing public health crisis. In this paper, we review and synthesize current evidence on the identification, management and transition of patients from the emergency department (ED) to the outpatient setting and present several key recommendations.
For patients identified to haveOpioid use disorder, we recommend ED-initiated mediation-assisted therapy (MAT) with buprenorphine, an opioid agonist. Current evidence suggests that it safe and effective, leading to improved patient outcomes. At the same time, a coordinated care plan should be put into motion which combines MAT with a rapid transition to outpatient care, preferably within 72 hours of ED evaluation. Where possible, a warm handoff is preferred, as it has been shown in other settings to improve follow-up. Outpatient care should combine MAT, psychological interventions and social support/case management in order to maximize impact Continue reading
MedicalResearch.com Interview with:
Maarten Boers, MSc, MD, PhD
Professor of Clinical Epidemiology
Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
VU University Medical Center–F wing MedFac
Amsterdam, Netherlands
MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?
Response: Mortality in rheumatoid arthritis is increased. Recent (short-term) studies suggest the situation is improving, but in studies with long (>10-year) follow up the increased mortality persists.
We have been following a trial cohort of rheumatoid arthritis patients treated right from the beginning of disease (the COBRA trial) for 23 years and now, for the first time, show normal mortality compared to the general population.