Combining a 16-week initial course of the medication omalizumab with oral immunotherapy (OIT) greatly improves the efficacy of OIT for children with allergies to multiple foods, new clinical trial findings show. After 36 weeks, more than 80 per cent of children who received omalizumab and OIT could safely consume two-gram portions of at least two [...]

Fresh insights into key hormones found in commonly prescribed medicines have been discovered, providing further understanding of their side-effects. The study in immune cells may help to explain why some people develop resistance to these drugs, which have powerful anti-inflammatory benefits. Its findings are significant because glucocorticoid hormones – also known as steroids – are [...]

A synthetic cannabis-like drug in a pill was safe and effective in treating obstructive sleep apnea in the first large multi-site study of a drug for apnea funded by the National Institutes of Health. The study was conducted at Northwestern Medicine and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). There’s currently no drug treatment for [...]

Researchers at Dartmouth, Stanford University, and IBM Research, conducted a critical review of existing literature to determine whether social media big data can be used to understand communication and behavioural patterns related to prescription drug abuse. Their study found that with proper research methods and attention to privacy and ethical issues, social media big data [...]

As temperatures in the UK plummet – putting four million people with asthma at risk of life-threatening asthma attacks – Asthma UK is urging pharmacists to get behind its #Scarfie campaign, where ‘a scarf could save a life’. Cold air is a major trigger for asthma attacks, with 75 per cent of the 5.4 million [...]