Patients with pneumonia who received pneumococcal vaccine have lower rate of death, ICU admission
Among patients hospitalized with community-acquired pneumonia, those who had previously received the pneumococcal vaccine had a lower risk of death and admission to the intensive care unit than patients who were not vaccinated, according to a report in the Oct. 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Community-acquired pneumonia is a common condition resulting in considerable illness and death, according to background information in the article. A vaccine against Streptococcus pneumoniae, one of the causes of pneumonia—23-valent polysaccharide pneumococcal vaccine (PPV)—has been available since 1983.
New cancer drugs could help in autoimmune disease
A new class of drugs used to treat cancer might be effective at suppressing overactive immune systems in patients with autoimmune diseases like Crohn’s disease, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.
“What we would be proposing would be a therapy that would enhance the body’s own immune system’s ability to regulate itself,” said Wayne Hancock of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, whose study appears in the journal Nature Medicine.
Family, neighborhood can affect children’s asthma
For children with asthma, problems in the family or in the neighborhood may make their condition worse, a new study suggests.
Canadian researchers found that asthma symptoms tended to be more severe among children and teens from dysfunctional families or from neighborhoods with crime problems. They say the findings suggest that improving children’s home life may also help control their asthma.
Fear of crime may erode physical, mental health
People who are worried about crime in their neighborhood tend to have worse physical and mental health than their peers who aren’t as concerned about being crime victims, UK researchers report.
“The study highlights the importance of the neighborhood, the local environment for health,” Dr. Mai Stafford of University College London told Reuters Health. “It shows that fear of crime is not just an emotional response.”
Surgery offers best survival for prostate cancer
Removal of the prostate gland, a surgical procedure also known as “prostatectomy,” offers longer survival rates than radiation therapy, careful monitoring, or hormone therapy for men with “localized” prostate cancer, a common form of the disease in which the cancer has not yet spread to other organs, new research shows.
“We observed that prostatectomy was associated with the best long term prognosis—in particular, for younger patients and patients with (aggressive) tumors,” senior author Dr. Christine Bouchardy, from Geneva University, Switzerland, told Reuters Health. “We are not very surprised that prostatectomy offers the best chance of cure at long term, but we should wait for results from (clinical) trials to confirm this.”
