Health | WPN World People News

The Trump Administration on Mar 17,2020 announced expanded Medicare telehealth coverage that will enable beneficiaries to receive a wider range of healthcare services from their doctors without having to travel to a healthcare facility. Beginning on March 6, 2020, Medicare—administered by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS)—will temporarily pay clinicians to provide telehealth services for beneficiaries residing across the entire country.

Among African adolescent girls and young women who took HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) daily, levels of the PrEP drug tenofovir were more than 30% lower in those who were pregnant than in those who had recently given birth. All 40 study participants took PrEP under direct observation, confirming their near-perfect adherence. PrEP drug levels were lower to a similar degree in the pregnant African adolescent girls and young women compared to American men and non-pregnant, non-lactating women who took PrEP daily under direct observation in an earlier study. These findings were reported at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI).

The new drug-delivery technology uses a harmless virus to deliver an antibody gene into human cells.

One quarter of Italy's population is in lockdown under a new emergency decree Sunday.

Italy has experienced more COVID-19 deaths than any other country outside China.

Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Wisconsin have demonstrated that using artificial intelligence to analyze CT scans can produce more accurate risk assessment for major cardiovascular events than current, standard methods such as the Framingham risk score (FRS) and body-mass index (BMI).

A method of testing for prostate cancer developed at the National Cancer Institute (NCI) leads to more accurate diagnosis and prediction of the course of the disease, according to a large study. This method, which combines systematic biopsy, the current primary diagnostic approach, with MRI-targeted biopsy, is poised to greatly improve prostate cancer diagnosis, thereby reducing the risk of both overtreatment and undertreatment of the disease. NCI is part of the National Institutes of Health.

When the spinal cord is injured, the damaged nerve fibers — called axons — are normally incapable of regrowth, leading to permanent loss of function. Considerable research has been done to find ways to promote the regeneration of axons following injury. Results of a study performed in mice and published in Cell Metabolism suggests that increasing energy supply within these injured spinal cord nerves could help promote axon regrowth and restore some motor functions. The study was a collaboration between the National Institutes of Health and the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis.

In a study of epilepsy patients, researchers at the National Institutes of Health monitored the electrical activity of thousands of individual brain cells, called neurons, as patients took memory tests. They found that the firing patterns of the cells that occurred when patients learned a word pair were replayed fractions of a second before they successfully remembered the pair. The study was part of an NIH Clinical Center trial for patients with drug-resistant epilepsy whose seizures cannot be controlled with drugs.