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THURSDAY, April 1, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Patients who have surgery for esophageal cancer commonly see the disease return, but a drug that boosts the immune system may help delay or prevent that, a new trial has found.The drug, called Opdivo (nivolumab), doubled the amount of time patients lived without a recurrence when it was given after surgery: from a typical 11 months, to 22 months.The improvement is a "big step forward," said lead researcher Dr. Ronan Kelly, of Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.Opdivo is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating various advanced-stage cancers -- including esophageal cancers that are inoperable and have spread to distant sites in the body. Its use in earlier, operable esophageal cancer is not yet...

THURSDAY, April 1, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- COVID-19 can harm multiple organs in the body, including the brain. Now, a new study says some hospitalized COVID-19 patients have non-convulsive seizures that may increase their risk of death."Seizures are a very common complication of severe critical illness. Most of these seizures are not obvious: Unlike seizures that make a person fall down and shake, or convulse, seizures in critically ill patients are usually non-convulsive," said study co-author Dr. M. Brandon Westover, an associate professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School."There is increasing evidence that non-convulsive seizures can damage the brain and make outcomes worse, similar to convulsions," Westover said in a hospital news release....

THURSDAY, April 1, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Pandemic-related stress has prompted many smokers to light up more often, new research shows, while others smoked more because they could."Working at home allows me to smoke at will rather than being in a smoke-free environment for 8 hours per day," one study participant told researchers.Whatever the reason, any increase in smoking could put these people at greater risk of dependence and make it more difficult for them to quit, said study author Jessica Yingst. She's an assistant professor of public health sciences at Penn State's College of Medicine, in Hershey, Penn.Figuring out why folks are smoking more "can help us identify how to better address cessation efforts during the pandemic," Yingst said in a Penn State news release. "New...

WEDNESDAY, March 31, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans are significantly underrepresented in U.S. health professions, with little indication that diversity will improve, a new study says.In 2019, Black people made up about 12.1% of the U.S. workforce, but their representation in 10 health professions studied ranged from 3.3% for physical therapists to 11.4% for respiratory therapists."Our findings suggest that Blacks, Latinos and other people of color have been left behind when it comes to the health professions," said lead author Edward Salsberg, co-director of the Health Workforce Diversity Tracker project at George Washington University's Fitzhugh Mullan Institute for Health Workforce Equity in Washington, D.C. He spoke in a university news release.In...