Closer Look
A physician's wish for Mother's Day: reclaimed time with her children
Mike Reddy for STAT
Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu cherishes childhood memories of picking out videotapes for her family to watch over the weekend. A psychiatrist and a columnist for STAT, she is the child of two doctors who, as she and her brother grew up, were working hard to find footing for the family in a new country. Her mother recently told her movie night was a way to reclaim time with her children. That resonates with Okwerekwu now, especially after overhearing someone in an airport say, "It's always easier to kill time than resuscitate it."
"As a physician and a mother, I am perpetually trying to resuscitate time," she writes as Mother's Day approaches. "Just like CPR, attempts to resuscitate time are physically, mentally, and spiritually exhausting." Instead, she gives herself time to refill her cup between her last scheduled patient and playtime with her daughters. "As a mother who works with mothers, … I'm encouraging my patients to do the same." Read more.
medical devices
Ultrasound device helps cancer drug reach the brain
The same blood-brain barrier that acts like a protective roadblock inside the skull can also keep out potentially lifesaving cancer drugs, motivating scientists to find ways to breach that barrier to deliver chemotherapy to people with glioblastoma. A small study in the Lancet shows how an ultrasound device implanted in 17 patients' skulls boosted the concentration of cancer-fighting drugs almost sixfold in their brains after their tumors were removed.
Placed in a flap of the patient's skull, the ultrasound device agitates microscopic bubbles injected into the bloodstream that reach blood vessels in the brain, where they create gaps for the drug to enter. There were no treatment-related deaths or worsening of neurological symptoms, but further research will be needed to see if the device helped patients live longer and which drugs might be the best given this way. STAT's Lizzy Lawrence has more.
public health
First U.S. cases of drug-resistant ringworm reported
Here's another dispatch from Helen Branswell: A drug-resistant form of tinea, a fungal infection that causes ringworm, has been discovered for the first time in the U.S. In the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report yesterday, doctors from New York reported they detected two cases of infection with Trichophyton indotineae, a fungus that is resistant to oral terbinafine, the normal treatment for ringworm. One was cured after a four-week regimen of another antifungal, itraconazole, a treatment being considered for the second case, which has been ongoing since last summer.
The two patients were not linked; one of them had not traveled abroad, meaning she contracted the highly contagious fungus in this country. T. indotineae has been spreading rapidly in South Asia over the past decade and has been previously detected in Europe and Canada. The authors warned that while itraconazole may resolve these infections, it can interact with other drugs, may require prolonged treatment, and resistance to it can also develop.
Correction: In yesterday's newsletter I described how a skin patch for peanut allergy was tested in a clinical trial using escalating amounts of peanut protein to increase tolerance, without making clear that the escalating doses were for measuring the participants' level of peanut tolerance only. The patch is a single, constant, tiny dose designed not to require monitoring in a doctor's office.
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