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COVID Brain Fog; Pandemic Grief; Handling a COVID Vax

  • What is COVID brain fog? Judith Graham describes the sudden emergence of cognitive dysfunction in seniors who have become seriously ill from coronavirus ~ Older COVID Patients Battle ‘Brain Fog,’ Weakness and Emotional Turmoil (Kaiser Health News)
  • Two recent analyses reveal a steep decline in COVID-related deaths among hospitalized patients. Geoff Brumfiel explores what factors might explain this drop in mortality ~ Studies Point To Big Drop In COVID-19 Death Rates (NPR)
  • How are you holding up? When Amrapali Maitra, MD, PhD, asks her patients this question, she never knows what she will hear. Sometimes patients express feelings of gratitude, other times they reveal a minefield of suffering. Maitra highlights one such minefield — a patient who lost her husband, aunt, and uncle to COVID ~ Holding Up (New England Journal of Medicine)
  • “Of central concern is the transformation of normal grief and distress into prolonged grief and major depressive disorder and symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder,” write Naomi M. Simon, MD, MSc, Glenn N. Saxe, MD, and Charles R. Marmar, MD. The physicians discuss the psychological toll the pandemic is taking on our mental health ~ Mental Health Disorders Related to COVID-19–Related Deaths (JAMA)
  • Christine Laine, MD, MPH, and colleagues walk physicians through the crucial role they will need to play when a COVID vaccine becomes available ~ COVID-19 Vaccine: What Physicians Need to Know (Annals of Internal Medicine)
  • When it comes to rolling out new treatments for COVID, how should researchers balance speed and efficacy? Christopher W. Seymour, MD, MSc, and colleagues highlight the conflict between adopting therapies for COVID quickly and taking time to ensure these treatments are safe and effective ~ Sensible Medicine — Balancing Intervention and Inaction During the COVID-19 Pandemic (JAMA)
  • According to Crystal M. North, MD, MPH, and colleagues “every patient not offered enrollment in a well-designed, well-conducted study represents a missed opportunity to advance scientific knowledge, develop therapeutic strategies, and ultimately improve care for everyone who will come next.” They explore the challenges of conducting a clinical trial during the pandemic and the strategies they have employed at Massachusetts General Hospital. ~ Improving Clinical Trial Enrollment — In the Covid-19 Era and Beyond (New England Journal of Medicine)

Fred N. Pelzman, MD, of Weill Cornell Internal Medicine Associates and weekly blogger for MedPage Today, follows what’s going on in the world of primary care medicine. Pelzman’s Picks is a compilation of links to blogs, articles, tweets, journal studies, opinion pieces, and news briefs related to primary care that caught his eye.

Source: MedicalNewsToday.com