Clinical

A look at the millions of tax filers who chose the penalty over insurance coverage; the cost of unnecessary or excessively expensive medical care; Takeda begins the first Zika vaccine trial.

Patients are significantly overestimating the pain they will feel after surgery, indicating that providers can do a better job of educating patients on what they can expect.

A non-fasting test to measure low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol has many advantages for patients and physicians, but payers can also see some benefits, explained Eliot A. Brinton, MD, FAHA, FNLA, president of the Utah Lipid Center.

Coverage of our peer-reviewed research and news reporting in the healthcare and mainstream press.

Chemotherapy and radiation therapy should be the first line of treatment for certain prostate cancers and lymphomas with a major genetic weakness, according to researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

VA Secretary David Shulkin wants the private sector to play a larger role in veterans' healthcare; Arizona's Supreme Court ruled in favor of a component to keep the state's Medicaid expansion; Acorda ends drug development of tozadenant for Parkinson's disease.

Most US adults would prefer to find other ways to manage their pain, such as neck or back pain, before taking prescribed pain medication, a Gallup research brief found.

A recent abstract presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting compared 2 risk models for patients with intermediate chemotherapy-induced neutropenia (CIN) risk and compared them to guidelines from ASCO and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network to determine when colony-stimulating factor should be ideally used to prevent CIN. ​​​​​​

With an expansion that includes immunotherapy combination treatments, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO)’s Targeted Agent and Profiling Utilization Registry (TAPUR) Study has now grown to 500 participants and 16 therapies.

The new hypertension guidelines made major changes to the classification of blood pressure, in general, and changed the name of one category to convey more importance, explained Robert Carey, MD, MACP, professor of medicine and dean emeritus at the University of Virginia.

Recent results from a team-based, scalable intervention to promote medication adherence highlighted that the relationship between adherence and clinical outcomes is not always clear cut, said Niteesh Choudhry, MD, PhD, associate professor at Harvard Medical School.

The outcomes in the COMPASS trial of rivaroxaban to treat patients with peripheral artery disease have been very positive, and a new analysis has looked at the cost impact of bringing the drug to market, explained Andre Lamy, MD, MHSc, FRSC, a cardiac surgeon with the Population Health Research Institute in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.