Gale Scott

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved secukinumab (Cosentyx/Novartis) for adults with moderate to severe plaque psoriasis. The European Commission approved the same drug on Jan. 19. Its active ingredient is an antibody that binds to interleukin-17A and interferes with inflammation. The binding prevents that protein from triggering the inflammatory response that results in psoriasis patches.

The ultimate fate of the ACA may rest with the Supreme Court, which will soon hear arguments in a case that will determine whether people who purchase insurance through a federally run exchange are eligible to receive subsidies.

The practice of medicine is changing: the days of solo practice are disappearing as more physicians are choosing to become employees of hospitals and larger health systems. What effect has the ACA had on this phenomenon?

In addition to being complex and hard to understand for most people, the ACA has several other substantial flaws, including a failure to cut costs to the extent its supporters claimed it would.

Though research on the possible medical uses and benefits of marijuana in ongoing Colorado physicians are seem some unexpected consequences. Those include severe accidental burns, pediatric poisonings, and toxic reactions to eating too many marijuana-laced cookies.

Autologous human stem cell transplantation can apparently reset the immune systems of patients with relapsing remitting MS (RRMS) and lead to improvements in their degree of disability, according to a JAMA study. Richard Burt MD and colleagues looked at 123 patients with RRMS and 28 with secondary progressive MS, 85 of whom were women.All were treated at Northwestern University in Chicago, IL with peripheral blood stem cells between 2003 and 2014 and followed for 5 years.The authors also said that 80% of patients were relapse-free at the 4-yr point.

Older adults hospitalized with pneumonia show an increased risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) according to a JAMA study. Researchers at the University of Ottawa in Ottawa, Canada looked at the health histories of 5,888 patients enrolled in the Cardiovascular Health Study and 15,792 enrolled in the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study. Patients in the first groups were 65 or older and those in the second group were 45 to 65. Of 591 who were hospitalized in the first group, 206 had CVD events within the next decade. In the second group, of 680 hospitalized with pneumonia, 112 had CVD events in the next 10 years.

The Obama administration's former health policy guru Ezekiel "Zeke" Emanuel, MD, PhD, wants to bring back asylums. Deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill has been underway since the 1950s. But Emanuel, MD, and colleagues at University of Pennsylvania want the US to reopen these inpatient psychiatric facilities to provide long-term care for some patients. "Few high-quality accessible long-term care options are available for a significant segment of the approximately 10 million US residents with serious mental illness," he and colleagues write in a JAMA opinion piece.

Prolonged sitting is a health hazard even when people exercise regularly, a new Canadian study has found. Writing in Annals of Internal Medicine, David Alter, MD, PhD, and colleagues quantified the association between sedentary time and negative health outcomes. Those included hospitalizations, mortality, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer in adults.

Older people can safely eat just as much salt daily (2300 mg) as younger adults, according to a community-based study reported in JAMAInternal Medicine The current recommendation is 1,500 mg for adults over 50, or a little more than a teaspoon.

Television ads for alcohol-with their portrayals of good times and cool people -- are reaching adolescents and likely having a negative effect on their behavior, a Dartmouth research team has found. Adolescents were tested on their ability to identify brand names when viewing ads for beer and liquor that had been stripped of logos. Those who were best at doing that were later found to be more likely to engage in underage drinking and binge-drinking, the team found.

The 2014-2015 US seasonal flu tallies as of Jan. 10, 2015 show the epidemic has started to wane. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the current estimated rate of doctor visits due to flu-like illness is 4.4%, down from a peak of 6.1%, but still higher than the national annual baseline of 2.0%.

The US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) plans to spend $2.7 billion in emergency funds to counter the spread of Ebola. On Jan. 13 the agency detailed its spending plans. Spending categories range from over a half billion dollars for international projects to a half million dollars for regulatory work that includes monitoring for fraudulent Ebola products.Separately, on the international front, J&J Pharmaceuticals announced it has formed an Ebola vaccine development group with international funding of 100 million euros.

Though the flu vaccine for the 2014-2015 season is only 23% effective, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) continues to recommend flu shots for those who do not have the illness, and antivirals for those who do. The effectiveness estimate is based on data from 2,321 children and adults with acute respiratory illness tested from Nov. 10, 2014 to Jan. 2, 2015 at 5 study sites with outpatient facilities. The cases were all laboratory confirmed.

AstraZeneca announced that its study of ticagrelor (Brilinta) has met its primary efficacy endpoint. In the trial known as Pegasus-TIMI 54, some 21,000 patients taking the tablets twice a day at a dose of either 60 mg or 90 mg plus low-dose aspirin for secondary prevention experienced no unexpected safety issues.

Community-wide programs to help residents reduce their risk factors for cardiovascular disease (CVD) have had sporadic success. In rural Maine, however, such an effort has had sustained results lasting over a 40-year period, N. Burgess Record, MD and colleagues report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Preventing cardiovascular disease (CVD) is an important goal in population health. But according to American Heart Association guidelines on primary prevention of CVD, recommending that all healthy people take aspirin to do that is not the way to go. In a new study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, however, Ravi Hira, MD and colleagues find that not all physicians have gotten the message. The researchers looked at the National Cardiovascular Disease Registry's Practice Innovation and Clinical Excellence registry. Of 68,808 patients, 11.6% were taking aspirin inappropriately, the team found.

Getting HIV from a needle stick or other healthcare workplace exposure was once a much-feared occupational hazard-particularly in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when getting the virus was considered a death sentence. But there hasn't been such a confirmed case in the US for years, according to a report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A new study shows accidental workplace exposures resulting in HIV infection in nurses, doctors, and other healthcare workers are a rarity-with none reported since 2008 and only 1 case between 1999 and 2008.

An Albert Einstein College of Medicine observational study showed following American Cancer Society (ACS) eating and exercise guidelines was associated with a"modest but significant" reduced risk of developing certain cancers. That was particularly true for colorectal cancer and, in women, endometrial cancer. The study authors believe theirs is the largest study of its kind.

There have been some disappointing studies and contradictory recommendations on using statins to treat stroke. HCPLive's Gale Scott interviewed Koto Ishida, MD, medical director of the NYU Langone Comprehensive Stroke Care Center, about the implications for clinicians.

Several studies published in 2014 addressed the risks and benefits of prescribing aspirin to prevent cardiovascular events. In a Q&A with HCPLive's Gale Scott, Jeffrey Berger, MD, takes up the debate.

Scandinavian researchers have debunked reports that vaccination with human papillomavirus (HPV) is associated with a risk of multiple sclerosis (MS) or other demyelinating diseases.

Most followup studies of patients who had bariatric surgery focus on young women. A Seattle study of mostly male patients getting care at Veterans Affairs bariatric centers showed these patients, though older and with more risk factors than the female patients in many other studies, had lower death rates than obese patients who did not get the surgery.

Aethlon Medical, a San Diego, CA device manufacturer has FDA approval for new clinical protocol to test a blood filtering device for use in treating Ebola patients. The device, called the Hemopurifier can be connected to a dialysis machine for one-use filtering of the blood to remove virus particles. The Jan. 2 FDA approval clears the way for a planned US clinical trial of the J device. The company has an on-going trial to test its use in reducing the viral load in patients infected with Hepatitis C. The company's hope is that the device could be used to treat patients with many life-threatening viral infections, including HIV.

Just weeks after JAMA published a National Institutes of Health study refuting the idea that there are "good carbs" and "bad carbs' a new study in the journal finds eating whole grains is associated with lower overall mortality and death from heart disease

Can the Affordable Care Act survive the new Republican majority in Washington? That depends on whom you ask. In this 12-part HCPLive audio series, three experts debate the merits, flaws, and future of the ACA.

The role of the hormone leptin in promoting obesity is a growing area of research. In a case study from Germany reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, Martin Wabitsch, MD, PhD and colleagues report success in treating an obese toddler with recombinant human leptin.

Chikungunya virus could become the infectious disease of the hour-not because of any new cases in the US, but because actress Lindsay Lohan says she has it.Lohan has been tweeting about contracting the febrile, mosquito-borne illness during a vacation in French Polynesia.There have been locally transmitted cases in the US.

Treating patients with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis (RRMS) with autologous hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) has worked for most patients based on an interim report 3 years into a study. But the therapy has risks that critics say outweigh the benefits.

A Dutch trial that compared the effectiveness of treating acute ischemic stroke patients with tPA with that of using tPA plus mechanical clot removal and/or other clot-busting agents showed the more aggressive therapies got better results. Dubbed MR CLEAN, the 500-patient 16-center study also found that such measures gave treating physicians more time-up to 6 hours after a stroke vs. the 4.5 hours that is the accepted treatment window for tPA.