Medicines & safety
Cardiology professionals were less likely than the public to take recommended blood pressure drugs
Heart specialists spend their working lives telling other people to manage risk factors. Screening 1,366 of them at a cardiology congress and comparing against 2,732 matched members of the public.
Sep 8, 2026
COPD patients left hospital without guideline inhalers in more than one in five cases
A severe flare-up is the moment lung disease treatment is supposed to be corrected. Auditing 3,928 admissions across 85 German hospitals found the discharge prescription often was not.
Sep 8, 2026
Antihistamines helped eczema too little for patients to notice, across 47 trials
Antihistamines are routinely added to eczema treatment for the itch. Pooling every randomized trial found an effect that is real, measurable, and smaller than the smallest change a patient would call worthwhile.
Sep 4, 2026
An old antibiotic beat a newer drug at preventing COPD flare-ups, 17% fewer
Two maintenance drugs for chronic lung disease have never been compared head to head. An analysis built to imitate that missing trial, across 15,100 matched patients, found a clear winner.
Sep 4, 2026
Getting the steroid as an injection rather than a tablet halved the odds of still taking it a year later
Steroids are meant to be a bridge in early rheumatoid arthritis, and for many people they become permanent. Across 2,222 newly diagnosed patients, how the drug was given predicted whether they got off it.
Aug 31, 2026
A phone app lifted tuberculosis cure rates from 74% to 82% in a randomized trial
Tuberculosis treatment runs for months and people stop taking it. A BMJ trial of 525 patients in a low-resource setting found an interactive digital adherence tool raised treatment success by 7 percentage points and cut dropout by a third.
Aug 28, 2026
Pharmacist deprescribing cut 2.5 drugs per patient, but six-month totals held steady
A Dutch trial trained pharmacists to strip back prescriptions for 318 people aged over 75 on long medication lists. They cut or stopped more drugs than usual care did. Six months on, the total count and quality of life were unchanged.
Aug 17, 2026
High-dose statins tracked less macular degeneration
An analysis of hospital records matched 8,633 pairs of adults with high blood pressure. Those on sustained high-dose atorvastatin or simvastatin had fewer new cases of macular degeneration. Statins in general showed nothing at all.
Aug 17, 2026