Medical Journal News

Dermatomyositis is a chronic autoimmune disease characterised by muscle weakness, skin lesions, and systemic complications. Its global prevalence ranges from one to ten cases per million people annually, with a higher incidence in women, who are affected approximately twice as often as men.1 This condition substantially diminishes quality of life due to its debilitating symptoms and systemic impacts.2

An urgent plea to all concerned with the defence of health and human rights: the Argentine government's decision to close the Haroldo Conti Cultural Centre at the Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada in Buenos Aires from Jan 2, 2025, is an act of violence against the families of 30 000 victims who were murdered by Argentina's 1976–83 military junta. It is a decision that must be reversed if Argentina is to retain credibility as a nation concerned with protecting and advancing the wellbeing of its citizens.

Founded more than 20 years ago, the Sexual Violence Research Initiative has grown into the largest network on research on violence against women and children. Sophie Cousins reports.

Researcher Ajit Lalvani is a pioneer in the understanding of immune responses to respiratory infections and in translating that knowledge to improve care. He is Chair of Infectious Diseases, Founding Director of the Tuberculosis Research Centre, and Director of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Respiratory Infections at Imperial College London, UK, and Honorary Consultant Physician at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. Tuberculosis has been the major focus of his 30-year research career.

The illness memoir is now a well-established literary genre. This phenomenon gives the subliminal impression that as a society, we are anxious to do away with taboos around sickness, and to support the sick. The truth, to our discredit, is that many people are keener on reading books about the illness of strangers than helping friends with major illness. The stigma of psychiatric illness is well-recognised, but that associated with physical illness much less so. In high-income countries, sick people and their families are in many respects socially isolated; even worse, society does not generally recognise this issue.

I knew the way to go to see no one at all. From the pharmacy adjacent to the surgery where my parents worked as general practitioners for 30 years—in which my surname called at the counter could not but turn heads—I took the paper bag of mood stabilisers and antipsychotics, which were not helping, and trailed my slow feet beyond the pale of the village and into the trees.

HIV and LGBTQI+ rights advocate. Born on Sept 30, 1961, in Sodus, NY, USA, he died of hypertensive atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease on Nov 8, 2024, in Washington, DC, USA, aged 63 years.

The Editorial on the fertility industry rightly stated that insufficient public funding has driven the commercialisation and financing of assisted reproductive therapies.1 However, if it were not for the private sector, no effective fertility treatment would be possible in many countries. In Poland, for example, there was scarce access to in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) for many years due to a paucity of public financial support. According to the recent data, Poland had one of the worst rates of access to fertility treatment in Europe.

We were pleased to read the Editorial on cholera1 and its emphasis on water, sanitation, and hygiene practices to address the root cause of the cholera pandemic. However, what we missed was emphasis on strengthening local health systems to detect and respond to these outbreaks—axis 1 of the Global Task Force on Cholera Control roadmap.2 Strengthening local health systems has synergistic potential to improve health in relation to other pathogens and diseases, and has been advocated as best practice for interventions in low-resource settings.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) set up its Access Campaign in 1999 to tackle the policy, legal, and political barriers that prevent people from accessing health tools in the communities where MSF work and beyond.1 In its Nobel Peace Prize speech, MSF demanded “change, not charity”, and has since challenged systemic inequities where pharmaceutical companies price lifesaving health tools out of reach and determine research priorities based on commercial prospects.2

In the World Report, Talha Burki1 reported on what we believe to be the misguided decision by a consortium of senior leaders in Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to dismantle its highly regarded Access Campaign.

We read with interest the results of the iCOMP collaboration from Anna Lene Seidler and colleagues.1,2 These individual participant data meta-analyses comparing immediate cord clamping, delayed cord clamping, and umbilical cord milking, including short, medium, and long deferral of delayed cord clamping, are commendable for their size and quality. In particular, we welcome the exclusion of 14 trials following integrity concerns.

We thank Jeremy Nielsen and Ben W Mol for their interest in our iCOMP Articles,1,2 and for commending our assessments of study integrity. They raise two key points: they suggest integrity assessments should be made available for each trial to increase transparency and they express concerns about the randomisation process of two included studies based on observed baseline characteristics.

FT596 was well tolerated as monotherapy or with rituximab and induced deep and durable responses in patients with indolent and aggressive lymphomas and the RP2D was preliminarily identified to be 1·8 × 109 cells for three doses per cycle. This study supports that cell therapy using iPSC-derived, gene-modified NK cells is a potent platform for cancer treatment and suggests that such a platform might address limitations of currently available immune cell therapies, including manufacturing time, heterogeneity, access, and cost.

Dazukibart resulted in a pronounced reduction in disease activity and was generally well tolerated, supporting IFNβ inhibition as a highly promising therapeutic strategy in adults with dermatomyositis.

A 62-year-old man with a parastomal hernia at the site of a urinary conduit and symptoms of urinary obstruction lasting several months presented to our hospital.

Axial spondyloarthritis manifests as a chronic inflammatory disease primarily affecting the sacroiliac joints and spine. Although chronic back pain and spinal stiffness are typical initial symptoms, peripheral (ie, enthesitis, arthritis, and dactylitis) and extra-musculoskeletal (ie, uveitis, inflammatory bowel disease, and psoriasis) manifestations are also common. Timely and accurate diagnosis is challenging and relies on identifying a clinical pattern with a combination of clinical, laboratory (HLA-B27 positivity), and imaging findings (eg, structural damage on pelvic radiographs and bone marrow oedema on MRI of the sacroiliac joints).

Prasad A. Sabina Faiz Rashid: building social justice in public health. Lancet 2025; 405: 19—In this Profile the year that BRAC was founded has been corrected to 1972 in the second sentence of the second paragraph. This correction has been made to the online version as of Jan 10, 2025.

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has published draft guidance aimed at improving the performance of pulse oximeters across all skin colours, following research suggesting the medical devices may be less accurate in people with darker skin.1Once finalised, the guidance could see a prominent label added to the packaging of pulse oximeters proven to perform “comparably across groups of individuals with diverse skin pigmentation.”It also provides manufacturers with actions they can take to better assess their products, such as increasing the number of clinical trial participants and using the Monk skin tone scale2 alongside other methods for classifying skin pigmentation.Pulse oximeters became more widely used during the covid-19 pandemic as a way for people to monitor blood oxygen levels while at home. But research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2020 found that the devices may be missing three times as many cases of occult hypoxaemia...

“Eco-anxiety” is growing worldwide, especially among young people.1 Considerable anxiety about the climate crisis is rational, particularly for young people, for whom even 2100 is a tangible date. Deep concern for future human and ecological wellbeing is justified among all ages, not only because of the disturbing evidence of climate breakdown, but also because of the apparent climate change policy paralysis, especially in so-called developed countries—the global North. Climate policy paralysis and hypocrisy are stark given the disturbing evidence of rising global temperatures in the last 18 months. The primary responsibility for climate change lies with the lifestyles and intransigence of the world’s most affluent people, most of whom live in high-income nations including Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia. Although these populations have, to date, been comparatively insulated from the harm caused by climate change, more extreme climate related weather events are becoming increasingly frequent, such as wildfires in...