Day: November 7, 2016

6 ways to get your patients immunized this flu season

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Influenza sends about 200,000 Americans to the hospital each year, on average, and thousands of patients die of the illness. That morbidity and mortality burden can be greatly reduced by widespread influenza immunization, yet ensuring that each of your patients gets vaccinated is no easy task.

Here are six key steps you can take this flu season to help your patients get the protection afforded by vaccination, according to Capt. Carolyn Bridges, MD, associate director of adult and influenza immunizations in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.

My lede. Read the whole shebang.

Yale researchers dig for new kidney biomarkers

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

An automated immunoassay has been created for symmetric dimethylarginine, or SDMA, a biomarker that can detect chronic kidney disease between 10 to 17 months earlier than creatinine, with 100 percent sensitivity and 91 percent specificity. And, unlike with creatinine, a patient’s muscle mass does not influence the biomarker’s reliability. SDMA has already been incorporated into the kidney-function testing advice that guides clinician ordering worldwide. Since the automated SDMA test was launched in July 2015, 5 million samples have been analyzed and 80 percent of clinicians are aware of the test.

There is a hitch in SDMA’s forward march to a place of prominence in chronic kidney disease testing: It has gone to the dogs—and cats.
The automated SDMA assay is available only from Idexx Laboratories, a Westbrook, Me., company with a 40 percent share of the veterinary lab testing market. In veterinary medicine, the weaknesses of serum creatinine as a CKD biomarker are pronounced because there are no estimated glomerular filtration calculations for laboratories to use and report.

My latest feature article in CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang.