(This is an excerpt of the Health Rounds newsletter, where we present latest medical studies on Tuesdays and Thursdays)
(Reuters) – A common bacterial infection of the vagina is actually a sexually transmitted disease that can be helped by also treating male sexual partners, researchers have discovered.
Bacterial vaginosis affects nearly a third of women worldwide and can cause infertility, premature births and newborn deaths. It has long been attributed to an imbalance in the distribution of healthy organisms living in the vagina, researchers said in a report in The New England Journal of Medicine.
More than 50% of women have recurrent bacterial vaginosis within three months after the usual treatment with oral antibiotics.
In a trial, 164 women with recurrent infections who were in monogamous relationships all received the recommended antibiotics. Their male partners received either an oral antibiotic and a topical antibiotic cream, or placebo.
The researchers stopped the trial early when it became clear the recurrence rate was 50% lower in the partner treatment group.
They say their findings hold the key to reducing the high recurrence rates of bacterial vaginosis.
“This successful intervention is relatively cheap and short and has the potential for the first time to not only improve bacterial vaginosis cure for women” but also to prevent the infections and associated serious complications, study leader Catriona Bradshaw of Monash University in Australia said in a statement.
KIDNEY RECIPIENTS WITH DIABETES BENEFIT FROM GLP-1 DRUGS
Kidney transplant recipients with diabetes have better outcomes if they are prescribed GLP-1 drugs, a review of U.S. medical records suggests.
Those who started taking a drug from that widely used class of medicines post-transplant were 49% less likely to experience failure of the new organ and 31% less likely to die within five years of starting treatment, compared to similar patients who did not receive the medications, researchers reported in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.
The roughly 18,000 study subjects underwent kidney transplantation between 2013 and 2020. About 11% of them were prescribed any of several GLP-1 drugs at a median of 19 months post-transplant.
Eli Lilly’s Trulicity (dulaglutide) was the most commonly used GLP-1 drug in the study. Some patients received Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic (semaglutide) or the company’s older Victoza (liraglutide). Several other drugs in the class, also known for its weight-loss effects, were used in the trial.
Most of the serious GLP-1-associated complications such as pancreatitis and liver problems were not seen in the transplant patients, researchers said. The drugs also were not associated with medullary thyroid cancer as has been reported before in patients taking the types of immunosuppressive medications used after transplants.
The GLP-1 drugs did increase the risk of diabetic eye disease.
To manage the risk of diabetic retinopathy, study lead author Dr. Babak Orandi from the NYU Grossman School of Medicine recommends ensuring blood sugar levels are controlled before starting GLP-1 medications. He also advises gradually increasing GLP-1 doses for kidney transplant recipients with severe diabetes or a history of eye problems.
“Our research offers a large amount of real-world clinical data to guide the management of benefits and risks of GLP-1 use in kidney transplant recipients,” Orandi said in a statement.
ROBOTIC SLEEVE MAY SOMEDAY SUPPRESS HAND TREMORS
People whose hands tremble and shake uncontrollably may someday be able to wear a robotic device in a soft sleeve that will suppress their tremors and improve their ability to perform daily activities, a new invention suggests.
Such devices are not yet commercially available, but researchers in Germany have come a step closer to making them a reality.
They designed a “mechanical patient” with a biorobotic arm that can precisely simulate the shaking of an individual patient’s wrist and hand. They also came up with lightweight strands of artificial muscles that can contract and relax in a way that compensates for the movements of the robotic arm until the tremor can hardly be felt or seen.
“We see a great potential for our muscles to become the building blocks of a garment one can wear very discreetly so that others don’t even realize the person suffers from a tremor,” study leader Alona Shagan Shomron of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems said in a statement.
Writing on Thursday in Device, the team expressed hope that their biorobotic arm will serve as a platform not just for their own work but also for other research teams to test artificial muscles, avoiding some of the time-consuming and costly clinical testing on real patients.
“With the combination of mechanical patient and biomechanical model we can measure if any tested artificial muscles are good enough to suppress all tremors, even very strong ones,” study coauthor Daniel Haufle of the University of Tubingen said in a statement.
(Reporting by Nancy Lapid; editing by Bill Berkrot)
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