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NEWS:
Substance Abuse in Pregnancy Doubles Cardiovascular Risk
Pregnant women with a history of substance abuse face a dramatically increased risk of death from heart attack and stroke during childbirth when compared with women without history of substance abuse, a new Smidt Heart Institute study shows.
These findings are published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Advances.
"This telling research shows that substance use during pregnancy doubled cardiovascular events and maternal mortality during delivery," said Martha Gulati, MD, senior and corresponding author of the study and the associate director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center in the Department of Cardiology in the Smidt Heart Institute. "Substance abuse also doubled the risk of acute heart failure."
The substances studied in the research included cocaine, opioids, alcohol, amphetamine/methamphetamine, and cannabis. Each substance carried a different a
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Drug Discovery On An Unprecedented Scale
Boosting virtual screening with machine learning allowed for a 10-fold time reductionin the processing of 1.56 billion drug-like molecules. Researchers from the University of Eastern Finland teamed up with industry and supercomputers to carry out one of the world’s largest virtual drug screens.
In their efforts to find novel drug molecules, researchers often rely on fast computer-aided screening of large compound libraries to identify agents that can block a drug target. Such a target can, for instance, be an enzyme that enables a bacterium to withstand antibiotics or a virus to infect its host. The size of these collections of small organic molecules has seen a massive surge over the past years. With libraries growing faster than the speed of the computers needed to process them, the screening of a modern billion-scale compound library against only a single drug target can take several
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Researchers Develop New Method To Identify Potential Stroke Therapies
Researchers have identified uric acid as a potential therapy to enhance recovery from acute ischemic stroke using a new method for conducting preclinical animal research. In the study, researchers from the National Institutes of Health’s Stroke Preclinical Assessment Network (SPAN)(link is external) rigorously tested the effectiveness of six novel therapies in reducing ischemic brain injury in rodents using strategies normally reserved for clinical studies in humans. The results suggest that uric acid warrants further investigation in additional studies, and potentially human clinical trials. The study was published in Science Translational Medicine.
Ischemic stroke, a leading cause of disability and death in the United States, occurs when a blood clot or other blockage in an artery cuts off blood supply to the brain. Current treatments are aimed at removing the clot by dissolving it wi
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New Insights On A Potentially Serious Side Effect Of The Cancer Drug Alpelisib
New research has uncovered elevated rates of high blood sugar, or hyperglycemia, among patients with breast cancer who are treated with the oral medication alpelisib. The results are published by Wiley online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society.
Alpelisib targets the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) protein that is involved in cell growth and when mutated can contribute to cancer. In 2019, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the use of this drug in combination with fulvestrant, an estrogen receptor blocker, for certain cases of metastatic breast cancer that have mutations in the gene that codes for a PI3K subunit.
Unfortunately, targeting PI3K can lead to hyperglycemia as a side effect which, if severe, can result in dehydration or kidney damage and can require hospitalization. Sherry Shen, MD, of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and he
