geoffrey modest medical blogs

one of the issues with covid is that assessing clinical outcomes lag the ever-changing virus (the important clinical information needed takes a while to see what the effects are for the newest variant; and by the time that information is available, yet another variant or so has evolved...). one frequent question now is what is the incidence of long covid with omicron. a brief UK study found that long covid was much less common from omicron than from the delta variant ( see covid long covid less with omicron vs delta lancet2022  in dropbox, or doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)00946-1). Details : -- case-controlled observational study comparing long covid over 2 periods of time:     -- 56,003 adults in the UK tested positive for covid by either PCR or lateral flow antigen test between 20December 2021 and 9March2022, at a time when >70% of UK cases were from omicron     -- 41,361 adults tested positive between 1June2021 and 27November 2021, at a time when...

    A new data-mining study found that though diabetes continues to be a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, it is not an equivalent risk factor to having had prior cardiovascular disease as had been found in older studies ( see  dm cardiovasc risk dec jama2022  in dropbox, or doi:10.1001/jama.2022.14914     Details :  -- a retrospective population-based Canadian study, relying on administrative healthcare data, including roughly 2 million people aged 20 to 84, compared cardiovascular mortality in 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, and 2014  -- 25% of each cohort were followed for up to five years  -- these cohorts were divided into those with diabetes, those with prior cardiovascular disease (CVD), or both; the reference group was those with neither diabetes nor CVD -- there was a general shift to a somewhat older populations over these time periods, reflecting the aging population. but overall about 20% were age 20 to 29, 20% age 30 to 39, 20...