EurekAlert! News by Subject: Medicine & Health - News by Subject: Medicine & Health

Medicine & Health

Updates every hour. Last Updated: 30-Apr-2025 20:08 ET (1-May-2025 00:08 GMT/UTC)

Avoiding patient abandonment – ethical approaches to 'untenable' patient relationships

Wolters Kluwer Health
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Plastic surgeons sometimes face challenging relationships with patients, especially those with underlying psychiatric issues. An ethical framework to managing untenable surgeon-patient relationships is presented in a special Plastic Surgery Focus article in the February issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

Journal: Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery

New tool can detect fast-spreading SARS-COV-2 variants before they take off

University of Melbourne
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers have developed a powerful tool that can detect variants of SARS-CoV-2 with high transmission potential before they become widespread. This approach could significantly support public health efforts to control outbreaks and help identify new variants that need closer monitoring.

Journal: Nature Communications
Funder: National Institutes of Health, Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, Australian Research Council

AI-driven multi-modal framework revolutionizes protein editing for scientific and medical breakthroughs

Health Data Science
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Researchers from Zhejiang University and HKUST (Guangzhou) have introduced ProtET, an innovative AI-powered multi-modal protein editing model published in Health Data Science. ProtET leverages advanced transformer-structured encoders and a hierarchical training paradigm to align protein sequences with natural language instructions, enabling precise and controllable protein editing.

The model was trained on over 67 million protein-biotext pairs from Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL databases and demonstrated significant improvements across key benchmarks, including 16.9% enhanced protein stability, optimized enzyme catalytic activity, and improved antibody-antigen binding affinity. ProtET’s zero-shot capabilities successfully designed SARS-CoV antibodies with stable 3D structures, highlighting its real-world biomedical applications.

This research represents a major advancement in AI-driven protein engineering, offering a scalable and interactive tool for scientific discovery, synthetic biology, and therapeutic development.

Journal: Health Data Science

Pennington Biomedical’s Pediatric Obesity and Health Behavior Laboratory authors Childhood Obesity’s most downloaded paper of 2024

Pennington Biomedical Research Center

"Closing the Gap Between Evidence and Practice for Childhood Obesity Treatment," authored by Pennington Biomedical’s Pediatric Obesity and Health Behavior Laboratory’s Dr. Amanda Staiano and Dr. Alyssa Button, was the most downloaded paper in 2024 from Childhood Obesity, a leading peer-reviewed journal dedicated to strategies for obesity prevention and weight management in children and adolescents.

Journal: Childhood Obesity

Chiropractic associated with reduction in opioid-related adverse drug events: new study

University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center
Peer-Reviewed Publication

A new study led by researchers at University Hospitals Connor Whole Health found that adults with newly diagnosed sciatica who initially received chiropractic spinal manipulation were significantly less likely to experience opioid-related adverse drug events such as overdose and poisoning over a one-year follow-up compared to those receiving usual medical care.

Journal: PLOS One

Body weight trends upwards after breast reduction surgery in teens

Wolters Kluwer Health
Peer-Reviewed Publication

Many adolescents and young women gain weight in the years after breast reduction surgery – particularly those who were at a healthy body mass index (BMI) before surgery, reports a paper in the February issue of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery®, the official medical journal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). The journal is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

Journal: Plastic & Reconstructive Surgery

Most mental health crisis services did not increase following 988 crisis hotline launch

RAND Corporation
Peer-Reviewed Publication

The national 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline debuted in July 2022 to provide an easy-to-remember phone number to access trained crisis counselors and emergency mental health services. A new study finds that the launch did not coincide with significant and equitable growth in the availability of most crisis services, except for a small increase in peer support services.

Journal: JAMA Psychiatry
Funder: NIH/National Institute of Mental Health