Bonus: Listen to excerpts from our conversation with Dr. Weinblatt. Michael Weinblatt, MD, is the co-director of clinical rheumatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, past president of the American College of Rheumatology, and co-director of the ACR Winter Rheumatology Symposium at Snowmass, Colo. Those are…
Sleep disturbance is an important medical problem, requiring intervention, not simply to reduce latency to its onset, but to ensure achievement of the depth of sleep that has been documented to restore homeostasis and prevent the falls that are responsible for so much morbidity and mortality.1 Sleep disturbance is present in 50% of people over…
New research published in May indicates a possible connection between B cells and the occurrence of systemic lupus erythematosus symptoms.
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Tofacitinib is better than placebo (and noninferior to etanercept) for treating patients with moderate-to-severe chronic plaque psoriasis, according to Pfizer’s OPT Compare trial. In an earlier 12-week, phase 2b, dose-ranging trial, the oral JAK inhibitor tofacitinib proved to be more effective than placebo for treating patients with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis. Based on…
For six years, the Psoriasis Longitudinal Assessment and Registry (PSOLAR) has collected data to assess the infection risk for drugs treating systemic psoriasis.
NEW YORK (Reuters)—Even the astronomical price markups that consumers regularly pay for, say, wine in restaurants pale beside those in some U.S. hospitals: The price for procedures is often 10 times the cost, according to a study published Monday in the journal Health Affairs. Of the 50 hospitals with the highest markups, 49 are for-profit,…
SINGAPORE (Reuters)—Whoever was behind the latest theft of personal data from U.S. government computers, they appear to be following a new trend set by cybercriminals: targeting increasingly valuable medical records and personnel files. This data, experts say, is worth a lot more to cybercriminals than, say, credit card information. And the Office of Personnel Management…
(Reuters)—The National Institutes of Health said on Thursday it had suspended operations of a facility that makes products used for clinical research after the discovery of fungal contamination in two vials of albumin. Vials made from the same batch of albumin had been administered to six patients, though it is not known if those were…
NEW YORK (Reuters Health)—Real-world psoriasis patients receiving biologic therapies rarely stop taking the drugs because of adverse effects, researchers say. Although data from long-term registries have shown similar results, “the demographics of patients in registries are somewhat different than those of patients in real-world practices,” Dr. Jensen Yeung told Reuters Health by email. “I have…
Brodalumab, an interleukin (IL) 17 inhibitor, is currently in early clinical trials (Phase 1b and Phase 2) for a number of different autoimmune diseases.1 Amgen recently terminated its co-development and commercialization agreement with AstraZeneca for the brodalumab investigational program in trials for moderate to severe plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis and axial spondyloarthritis. Amgen’s decision to…