Intensive blood pressure control reduces risk of cognitive impairment; less than 1% of clinical drug trials enroll pregnant participants; researchers develop at-home test for bladder cancer – Morning Medical Update

Intensive blood pressure control reduces risk of cognitive impairment

Researchers from Wake Forest University School of Medicine published a study in Neurology, demonstrating that just three and a half years of intensive blood pressure control continues to significantly reduce the risk of mild cognitive impairment or dementia years later in patients with hypertension and high cardiovascular risk.

“We found that the intensive treatment group had a sustained lower incidence of developing cognitive impairment compared to those in the standard treatment group,” said David M. Reboussin, PhD, a professor at Wake Forest University and the study’s corresponding author.

Less than 1% of U.S. clinical drug trials enroll pregnant participants

A study from the Brown University School of Public Health found that pregnant women are regularly excluded from clinical drug trials in the United States that test for drug safety, which raises concerns for the efficacy of these medications for maternal and child health. The study, published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, found that only 0.8% of the 90,860 drug trials that were analyzed from the past 15 years included pregnant participants, with 75% of studies purposefully excluding them.

Researchers develop at-home urine-based bladder cancer diagnostic kit

When detected early, bladder cancer can be cured more than 90% of the time. A research team of Youngdo Jeong, PhD, of the Center for Advanced Biomolecular Recognition at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and the team of Seok-Ho Kang, a professor from the department of urology at the Korea University College of Medicine, has developed a urine-based diagnostic kit for bladder cancer that is suited for at-home use and does not require any preprocessing of urine samples to detect bladder cancer biomarkers.

“When pregnant women are excluded from drug trials, it is harder to know if the medication is safe for mothers and their children,” said Alyssa Bilinski, an assistant professor at Brown’s School of Public Health.