In the February 27, 2024 edition of the show #știința360 on Radio Romania Cultural, Dr. Marius Geantă, President of the Center for Innovation in Medicine, commented on the latest news from the medical field published on Raportuldegardă.ro. You can listen the live showevery Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.
Here are the news of the week discussed in this podcast:
Myocardial infarction is still a very big problem and, unfortunately, the age at which myocardial infarction occurs is decreasing more and more. As I said before, health systems in general are focused on effective treatment, which of course is very important – to have a quick and quality intervention if a person suffers a myocardial infarction. At the same time I think we should also be concerned about how we could better prevent myocardial infarction.
We have the classic, traditional approach, which refers to risk factors that we know or know are associated with a higher risk of myocardial infarction: age, although young people are also having heart attacks more and more often, blood pressure , total cholesterol level, LDL-C level. These are factors that we know about but that are not even taken into account very often in establishing prevention and/or early detection programs. The solution we are talking about has two components. One is about an online application that takes into account all the factors that I mentioned and that I knew. On the other hand, it adds various relevant biological biomarkers for establishing the risk of myocardial infarction.
Now, if we look at the cardiology treatises, over time we could read that there are certain enzymes whose level increases a few hours before a myocardial infarction. Lately, there has been discussion about a peptide that is also associated with the occurrence of myocardial infarction and could be identified a little earlier. These biomarkers, along with other biological factors (48 proteins and 43 relevant metabolites identified in the study), in combination with traditional risk factors may contribute to determining the imminent risk of acute myocardial infarction.
We certainly have reason to be optimistic, from several perspectives. One is that we are talking about a type of cancer that is not very common, about 1% of skin cancer cases are melanomas. The proportion of deaths is still very high despite the development in the last 10-15 years of several types of targeted therapies or immunotherapies. There remains a proportion of patients in whom these therapeutic solutions run out or are not effective. CAR-T therapy comes and fills this need of patients.
On the other hand, it is very important from a scientific point of view because we are talking about the first CAR-T therapy approved in a solid cancer. We have talked in recent years about licensed CAR-T cell therapies for hematologic cancers, various types of leukemia, and multiple myeloma. The third important element is that we are only talking about the beginning of a new era in cancer treatment using CAR-T therapies. Once the door to new therapeutic approaches is opened we expect to have an advance, an ever greater sophistication, ever better efficacy and safety of these therapies. That’s why this moment is so important.
We expect that at the beginning of next year we will have an approval in Europe as well. This shows that there is consistent data from phase 3 trials showing the benefit of this therapy. There were 73 patients with advanced melanoma in whom the previously mentioned therapies were not effective. 3 of them showed a complete response, and 20 a partial response. Half of these people showed no signs of tumor progression at 6, 9 and 12 months after receiving the therapy. It remains to be seen how well this complete response will hold up over time.
Beyond the aesthetic aspect, comes the discussion of health benefits. Body temperature is one of the key parameters. There are certain periods or situations, some physiological, the period of ovulation for example, in which the body temperature of women increases. As there may be certain pathological situations in which an increase in temperature, but with very few units, may indicate an infection or the appearance of possible neoplasia and so on.
It is very important to value this marker, body temperature, which we traditionally measure from time to time. As the study shows, including wristbands and smartwatches that average per day, they don’t provide continuous temperature monitoring.
Other news discussed on the show:
The show can also be listened to on the YouTube channel Raportuldegardă.ro:
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2024-03-02 17:54:27
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