Resistance exercise may be superior to aerobic exercise for getting better ZZZs

 Resistance exercise may be superior to aerobic exercise as a way to get better sleep, and sleep is important for cardiovascular health, according to preliminary research to be presented at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology, Prevention, Lifestyle & Cardiometabolic Health Conference 2022. The meeting will be held in-person in Chicago and virtually Tuesday, March 1 -- Friday, March 4, 2022, and offers the latest in population-based science related to the promotion of cardiovascular health and the prevention of heart disease and stroke.

"It is increasingly recognized that getting enough sleep, particularly high-quality sleep, is important for health including cardiovascular health. Unfortunately, more than a third of Americans don't get enough sleep on a regular basis," said study author Angelique Brellenthin, Ph.D., assistant professor of kinesiology at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. "Aerobic activity is often recommended to improve sleep, yet very little is known about the effects of resistance exercise versus aerobic exercise on sleep. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' 2018 Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee Scientific Report identified the need for more research into resistance exercise and sleep outcomes. Our study is one of the largest and longest exercise trials in a general adult population to directly compare the effects of different types of exercise on multiple sleep parameters."

Previous research has confirmed that not getting enough sleep (the recommended amount for adults is seven to eight hours a day) or getting poor quality sleep increases risks for high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol and atherosclerosis, which happens when fatty deposits build up in arteries. Not getting enough sleep is linked to weight gain, diabetes and inflammation, all of which can worsen cardiovascular disease. Sleeping too much or too little also has been shown to increase the risk of stroke, heart attack and death.

For this study, researchers enrolled 386 adults who met the criteria for overweight or obesity, which was a body mass index from 25-40 kg/m². Participants were inactive and had elevated blood pressure, measuring from 120-139 mm Hg systolic (top number) and 80-89 mm Hg diastolic (bottom number). Participants were randomly assigned to a no-exercise group (for comparison) or one of three exercise groups (aerobic only, resistance only, or combined aerobic and resistance) for 12 months. Everyone in the exercise groups participated in supervised 60-minute sessions, three times a week, with the combination exercise group doing 30 minutes of aerobic and 30 minutes of resistance exercise.

The various workouts included:

• Aerobic exercise participants could choose among treadmills, upright or recumbent bikes or ellipticals for their aerobic modality during each session. Researchers monitored their heart rates to keep them continuously in the prescribed heart rate range for a moderate-to-vigorous intensity exercise.
• The resistance exercise group completed their sets and repetitions on 12 resistance machines to work all the major muscle groups in a session. The machines included leg press, chest press, lat pulldown, leg curl, leg extension, biceps curl, triceps pushdown, shoulder press, abdominal crunch, lower back extension, torso rotation and hip abduction. Participants performed three sets of 8 to 16 repetitions at 50-80% of their one-rep maximum.
• The combination group did 30 minutes of aerobic exercise at a moderate-to-vigorous intensity, and then two sets of 8 to 16 repetitions of resistance exercise on 9 machines instead of 12.

Study participants completed a variety of assessments at the start and at 12 months including the self-reported Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), which measures sleep quality. Researchers also measured sleep duration; sleep efficiency (how much time one is actually asleep divided by the total amount of time the individual is in bed); sleep latency (how much time it takes to fall asleep after getting into bed); and sleep disturbances (how frequently sleep is disturbed by things like being too hot or too cold, snoring or coughing, having to use the bathroom or having pain). Lower scores on the PSQI indicate better quality sleep, ranging from 0 for the best sleep to 21 as the worst possible sleep. Scores greater than five are considered "poor quality sleep."

The study found:

• More than one third (35%) of study participants had poor quality sleep at the beginning of the study.
• Among the 42% of participants who were not getting at least 7 hours of sleep at the study's start, sleep duration increased by an average of 40 minutes in 12 months for the resistance exercise group, compared to an increase of about 23 minutes in the aerobic exercise group, about 17 minutes in the combined exercise group and about 15 minutes in the control group.
• Sleep efficiency increased in the resistance exercise and combined exercise groups, but not in the aerobic exercise or no exercise group.
• Sleep latency decreased slightly, by 3 minutes, in the group assigned to resistance exercise only, with no notable change in latency in the other participant groups.
• Sleep quality and sleep disturbances improved some in all groups including the group that did not exercise.

Based on these findings, interventions focused on resistance exercises may be a new way to promote better sleep and improve cardiovascular health.

"While both aerobic and resistance exercise are important for overall health, our results suggest that resistance exercises may be superior when it comes to getting better ZZZs at night," Brellenthin said. "Resistance exercise significantly improved sleep duration and sleep efficiency, which are critical indicators of sleep quality that reflects how well a person falls asleep and stays asleep throughout the night. Therefore, if your sleep has gotten noticeably worse over the past two stressful years, consider incorporating two or more resistance exercise training sessions into your regular exercise routine to improve your general muscle and bone health, as well as your sleep."

A study limitation is the researchers' use of a self-reported sleep questionnaire to assess sleep rather than objectively monitoring sleep.

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Materials provided by American Heart Association. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220303215826.htm

More alcohol, less brain: Association begins with an average of just one drink a day

 Even light-to-moderate drinking is associated with harm to the brain, according to a new study. Researchers analyzed data from more than 36,000 adults that found a link between drinking and reduced brain volume that begins at an average consumption level of less than one alcohol unit a day -- the equivalent of about half a beer -- and rises with each additional drink.

The research, using a dataset of more than 36,000 adults, revealed that going from one to two drinks a day was linked with changes in the brain equivalent to aging two years. Heavier drinking was associated with an even greater toll. The science on heavy drinking and the brain is clear: The two don't have a healthy relationship. People who drink heavily have alterations in brain structure and size that are associated with cognitive impairments.

But according to a new study, alcohol consumption even at levels most would consider modest -- a few beers or glasses of wine a week -- may also carry risks to the brain. An analysis of data from more than 36,000 adults, led by a team from the University of Pennsylvania, found that light-to-moderate alcohol consumption was associated with reductions in overall brain volume.

The link grew stronger the greater the level of alcohol consumption, the researchers showed. As an example, in 50-year-olds, as average drinking among individuals increases from one alcohol unit (about half a beer) a day to two units (a pint of beer or a glass of wine) there are associated changes in the brain equivalent to aging two years. Going from two to three alcohol units at the same age was like aging three and a half years. The team reported their findings in the journal Nature Communications.

"The fact that we have such a large sample size allows us to find subtle patterns, even between drinking the equivalent of half a beer and one beer a day," says Gideon Nave, a corresponding author on the study and faculty member at Penn's Wharton School. He collaborated with former postdoc and co-corresponding author Remi Daviet, now at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Perelman School of Medicine colleagues Reagan Wetherill -- also a corresponding author on the study -- and Henry Kranzler, as well as other researchers.

"These findings contrast with scientific and governmental guidelines on safe drinking limits," says Kranzler, who directs the Penn Center for Studies of Addiction. "For example, although the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism recommends that women consume an average of no more than one drink per day, recommended limits for men are twice that, an amount that exceeds the consumption level associated in the study with decreased brain volume,"

Ample research has examined the link between drinking and brain health, with ambiguous results. While strong evidence exists that heavy drinking causes changes in brain structure, including strong reductions in gray and white matter across the brain, other studies have suggested that moderate levels of alcohol consumption may not have an impact, or even that light drinking could benefit the brain in older adults.

These earlier investigations, however, lacked the power of large datasets. Probing massive quantities of data for patterns is the specialty of Nave, Daviet, and colleagues, who have conducted previous studies using the UK Biobank, a dataset with genetic and medical information from half a million British middle-aged and older adults. They employed biomedical data from this resource in the current study, specifically looking at brain MRIs from more than 36,000 adults in the Biobank, which can be used to calculate white and gray matter volume in different regions of the brain.

"Having this dataset is like having a microscope or a telescope with a more powerful lens," Nave says. "You get a better resolution and start seeing patterns and associations you couldn't before."

To gain an understanding of possible connections between drinking and the brain, it was critical to control for confounding variables that could cloud the relationship. The team controlled for age, height, handedness, sex, smoking status, socioeconomic status, genetic ancestry, and county of residence. They also corrected the brain-volume data for overall head size.

The volunteer participants in the Biobank had responded to survey questions about their alcohol consumption levels, from complete abstention to an average of four or more alcohol units a day. When the researchers grouped the participants by average-consumption levels, a small but apparent pattern emerged: The gray and white matter volume that might otherwise be predicted by the individual's other characteristics was reduced.

Going from zero to one alcohol units didn't make much of a difference in brain volume, but going from one to two or two to three units a day was associated with reductions in both gray and white matter.

"It's not linear," says Daviet. "It gets worse the more you drink."

Even removing the heavy drinkers from the analyses, the associations remained. The lower brain volume was not localized to any one brain region, the scientists found.

To give a sense of the impact, the researchers compared the reductions in brain size linked with drinking to those that occur with aging. Based on their modeling, each additional alcohol unit consumed per day was reflected in a greater aging effect in the brain. While going from zero to a daily average of one alcohol unit was associated with the equivalent of a half a year of aging, the difference between zero and four drinks was more than 10 years of aging.

In future work, the authors hope to tap the UK Biobank and other large datasets to help answer additional questions related to alcohol use. "This study looked at average consumption, but we're curious whether drinking one beer a day is better than drinking none during the week and then seven on the weekend," Nave says. "There's some evidence that binge drinking is worse for the brain, but we haven't looked closely at that yet."

They'd also like to be able to more definitively pin down causation rather than correlation, which may be possible with new longitudinal biomedical datasets that are following young people as they age.

"We may be able to look at these effects over time and, along with genetics, tease apart causal relationships," Nave says.

And while the researchers underscore that their study looked only at correlations, they say the findings may prompt drinkers to reconsider how much they imbibe.

"There is some evidence that the effect of drinking on the brain is exponential," says Daviet. "So, one additional drink in a day could have more of an impact than any of the previous drinks that day. That means that cutting back on that final drink of the night might have a big effect in terms of brain aging."

In other words, Nave says, "the people who can benefit the most from drinking less are the people who are already drinking the most."

Reagan R. Wetherill is a research assistant professor of psychiatry in the University of PennsylvaniaPerelman School of Medicine.

Henry R. Kranzler is the Benjamin Rush Professor in Psychiatry and director of the Penn Center for Studies of Addiction at Penn's Perelman School of Medicine.

Gideon Nave is the Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz Assistant Professor in the Wharton SchoolDepartment of Marketing and the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at Penn.

Remi Daviet is an assistant professor of marketing in the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Daviet was first author and Wetherill, Nave, and Daviet were co-corresponding authors on the paper.

Other coauthors were Kanchana Jagannathan, Nathaniel Spilka, and Henry R. Kranzler of Penn's Perelman School of Medicine; Gökhan Aydogan of the University of Zurich; and Philipp D. Koellinger of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The study was supported by the European Research Council (Grant 647648), National Science Foundation (Grant 1942917), National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (Grant AA023894), and Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center at the Crescenz VA Medical Center

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Materials provided by University of Pennsylvania. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Remi Daviet, Gökhan Aydogan, Kanchana Jagannathan, Nathaniel Spilka, Philipp D. Koellinger, Henry R. Kranzler, Gideon Nave, Reagan R. Wetherill. Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank. Nature Communications, 2022; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28735-5

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220304090349.htm

Single test for over 50 genetic diseases will cut diagnosis from decades to days

 A new DNA test, developed by researchers at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research in Sydney and collaborators from Australia, UK and Israel, has been shown to identify a range of hard-to-diagnose neurological and neuromuscular genetic diseases quicker and more-accurately than existing tests.

'We correctly diagnosed all patients with conditions that were already known, including Huntington's disease, fragile X syndrome, hereditary cerebellar ataxias, myotonic dystrophies, myoclonic epilepsies, motor neuron disease and more,' says Dr Ira Deveson, Head of Genomics Technologies at the Garvan Institute and senior author of the study.

The diseases covered by the test belong to a class of over 50 diseases caused by unusually-long repetitive DNA sequences in a person's genes -- known as 'Short Tandem Repeat (STR) expansion disorders'.

'They are often difficult to diagnose due to the complex symptoms that patients present with, the challenging nature of these repetitive sequences, and limitations of existing genetic testing methods,' says Dr Deveson.

The study, published today in Science Advances, shows that the test is accurate, and allows the team to begin validations to make the test available in pathology services around the world.

A patient who participated in the study, John, first realised something wrong when he experienced unusual problems balancing during a ski lesson.

'It was very worrying having symptoms that, over the years, increased in severity; from being active and mobile to not being able to walk without support. I had test after test for over ten years and absolutely no answers as to what was wrong,' says John, who was eventually diagnosed with a rare genetic disease called CANVAS, which affects the brain.

'It was reassuring to finally confirm my diagnosis genetically, and it's exciting to know that, in the near future, others with these types of conditions will be able to get a diagnosis quicker than I did,' he says.

'For patients like John, the new test will be a game-changer, helping to end what can often be a taxing diagnostic odyssey,' says Dr Kishore Kumar, a co-author of the study and clinical neurologist at the Concord Hospital.

Repeat expansion disorders can be passed on through families, can be life threatening and generally involve muscle and nerve damage, as well as other complications throughout the body.

Quicker, more-accurate diagnosis for patients avoids 'diagnostic odyssey'

Current genetic testing for expansion disorders can be 'hit and miss', says Dr Kumar. 'When patients present with symptoms, it can be difficult to tell which of these 50-plus genetic expansions they might have, so their doctor must decide which genes to test for based on the person's symptoms and family history. If that test comes back negative, the patient is left without answers. This testing can go on for years without finding the genes implicated in their disease. We call this the 'diagnostic odyssey', and it can be quite stressful for patients and their families,' he says.

'This new test will completely revolutionise how we diagnose these diseases, since we can now test for all the disorders at once with a single DNA test and give a clear genetic diagnosis, helping patients avoid years of unnecessary muscle or nerve biopsies for diseases they don't have, or risky treatments that suppress their immune system,' says Dr Kumar.

Although repeat expansion disorders cannot be cured, a quicker diagnosis can help doctors identify and treat disease complications earlier, such as heart issues associated with Friedreich's ataxia.

Scanning for known and novel diseases

Using a single DNA sample, usually extracted from blood, the test works by scanning a patient's genome using a technology called Nanopore sequencing.

'We've programmed the Nanopore device to hone in on the roughly 40 genes known to be involved in these disorders and to read through the long, repeated DNA sequences that cause disease,' he says. 'By unravelling the two strands of DNA and reading the repeated letter sequences (combinations of A, T, G or C), we can scan for abnormally long repeats within the patient's genes, which are the hallmarks of disease.'

'In the one test, we can search for every known disease-causing repeat expansion sequence, and potentially discover novel sequences likely to be involved in diseases that have not yet been described,' says Dr Deveson.

Upscaling to wider use in the next five years

The Nanopore technology used in the test is smaller and cheaper than standard tests, which the team hopes will smooth its uptake into pathology labs. 'With Nanopore, the gene sequencing device has been reduced from the size of a fridge to the size of a stapler, and costs around $1000, compared with hundreds of thousands needed for mainstream DNA sequencing technologies' says Dr Deveson.

The team expects to see their new technology used in diagnostic practice within the next two to five years. One of the key steps towards that goal is to gain appropriate clinical accreditation for the method.

Once accredited, the test will also transform research into genetic diseases, says Dr Gina Ravenscroft, a co-author of the study and a researcher working on rare disease genetics at the Harry Perkins Institute of Medical Research.

'Adult-onset genetic disorders haven't received as much research attention as those that appear in early life,' she says. 'By finding more people with these rare adult-onset diseases, and those who may be pre-symptomatic, we'll be able to learn more about a whole range of rare diseases through cohort studies, which would otherwise be hard to do.'

The work was supported predominantly by philanthropic funding from The Kinghorn Foundation.

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Story Source:

Materials provided by Garvan Institute of Medical Research. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

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Journal Reference:

1. Igor Stevanovski, Sanjog R. Chintalaphani, Hasindu Gamaarachchi, James M. Ferguson, Sandy S. Pineda, Carolin K. Scriba, Michel Tchan, Victor Fung, Karl Ng, Andrea Cortese, Henry Houlden, Carol Dobson-Stone, Lauren Fitzpatrick, Glenda Halliday, Gianina Ravenscroft, Mark R. Davis, Nigel G. Laing, Avi Fellner, Marina Kennerson, Kishore R. Kumar, Ira W. Deveson. Comprehensive genetic diagnosis of tandem repeat expansion disorders with programmable targeted nanopore sequencing. Science Advances, 2022; 8 (9) DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abm5386

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/03/220304144646.htm

Health care workers don unnecessary protective gear: CDC, WHO need to update PPE guidance

 Every time we enter a Covid patient’s room, we first don gloves, and a disposable gown. When we come out of the room, we remove that gear and put it in one of the many bulging disposal bags lining the halls of our hospital. We go through the same process for the next patient, as do health care workers across the country and around the world. It would not be uncommon for this to happen 30 times a day for each patient as nurses, physicians, aids, and others provide care.

Multiply our actions by the thousands of health care workers who see patients every day, and the nearly 800 days since Covid-19 was declared a public health emergency in the U.S. and around the world, and the scope of the disposal problem becomes huge.

Donning and doffing personal protective equipment (PPE) made sense in early 2020, when Covid-19 began its relentless march around the globe. It was prudent to institute various infection-control practices because no one knew then how SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, was transmitted.

As the pathogen spread, health care workers were often infected with it. In our health care system, Northwell Health, more than 20 of our colleagues died of Covid-19 during the first three months of the pandemic. Frantic attempts to obtain enough personal care equipment to protect front-line workers became a major responsibility of health systems across the country.

Given all the uncertainty about viral transmission, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization conservatively assumed the virus could be transmitted by droplets, aerosols, or direct contact. The transmission of pathogens spread by droplets and aerosols can be prevented by using masks and eye protection, which is what health care workers have traditionally used when seeing patients who have or might have influenza. Gowns, gloves, and other gear are needed to prevent the transmission of pathogens spread by direct contact.

Early in the pandemic, people were being urged to disinfect everything they touched, including their packages. Hand sanitizers are still present in virtually every public venue, including schools. New York City spent hundreds of millions of dollars disinfecting the subways each night. Many other public venues still have special cleaning protocols.

Current guidelines from the CDC and WHO require health care workers who provide direct care to patients to wear masks, protective eyewear or face shields, gowns, and gloves. Many health care workers have also requested to use scrubs, shoe covers, and bouffant hair coverings, items that were once supplied only to those working in operating rooms.

Gowns, coverings, and gloves are to be replaced between each patient contact.

National data on the use of personal protective equipment are hard to come by. Our health system alone, which is the largest provider of health care in New York State, used more than 2.5 million isolation gowns a month during the first wave of Covid-19 in March and April 2020. During the Omicron wave of December and January, the number had dropped to about 800,000 per month, but that is still twice the volume used before the pandemic. There were also large increases in the use of scrubs, gloves, and bouffants.

Similar patterns have occurred in hospitals and nursing homes across the country.

Health care systems have spent billions of dollars acquiring personal protective equipment. But there’s a hidden cost that has largely gone unnoticed: All of these items are disposable, and medical waste is not recycled. Disposing this gear is costly, and damages the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that about 3 million tons of medical waste was generated yearly in the United States alone prior to the pandemic. On February 1, 2022, the WHO issued a report on the need to deal with the critical problem of medical waste and its adverse impact on the environment. It highlights the expense and climate implications of the incineration of the mostly plastic waste.

Given what is known today about the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the CDC and WHO have failed to update their two-year-old policies on protective personal equipment that add to the waste problem. Although the CDC guidelines do not carry the force of law, states and medical centers feel an obligation to follow them.

Having taken care of hundreds of Covid-19 patients, we would have no concern about entering a patient’s room without an isolation gown, because this infection is transmitted through the air via droplets and aerosols, not by touching a contaminated surface. Although hand washing is always an important part of infection prevention efforts, contamination of one’s clothes, hair and shoes have never been shown to be a problem.

It makes no sense for health care workers to gown up to go into the rooms of Covid-19 patients they often have fleeting contact with.

The CDC also needs to dial back on its messaging that cleaning surfaces and using hand sanitizer will decrease the risk of Covid transmission, when there is no evidence to support either.

As Covid moves from a pandemic to an endemic infection, it is important to communicate accurately what really is important in preventing spread. There is no doubt that proper ventilation, the use of masks, and most importantly vaccines can prevent spread both inside and outside of hospital settings.

Using unnecessary garb to interrupt a theoretical mechanism of spread is not worth the cost and damage to the environment and erodes public confidence in the CDC and its expertise.

Bruce Farber is an infectious disease physician, chief of public health and epidemiology at Northwell Health, and chief of infectious diseases at North Shore University Hospital and LIJ Medical Center. Aradhana Khameraj is a registered nurse and director of infection prevention at North Shore University Hospital.

https://www.statnews.com/2022/03/04/health-care-workers-donning-unnecessary-protective-gear/

White House transparency disputes imperil funds to buy Covid therapeutics

 The White House hasn’t publicly detailed exactly how it’s spent the more than $4 trillion Congress authorized for Covid-19 relief — and now, that lack of transparency could imperil its request for more money to fight the pandemic and buy therapeutics.

Amid heated negotiations over a government funding bill, three dozen Republican senators including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) are refusing to consider more Covid-19 relief funding unless the federal government provides a full accounting of how funds have been spent.

If lawmakers aren’t able to reach a deal for more Covid-19 funding, that’s a big problem for the Biden administration. The White House on Thursday acknowledged its Covid-19 response money has nearly run out and it needs $22.5 billion more, or it won’t be able to secure treatments, vaccines and tests for the future.

And the budget crunch is even more severe than the administration has let on. The White House has held off on buying millions of courses of Pfizer’s highly effective antiviral drug that the White House already committed to buy due to budget constraints, according to public contract disclosures and the Department of Defense, which issues the contracts.

In January, the White House announced that it was doubling its order of Pfizer’s antiviral, named Paxlovid, committing to buy an extra 10 million courses. But according to public contracts, the White House has only actually contracted for 835,000 of those courses to date.

“Contract options will be exercised when funding becomes available,” Department of Defense spokesperson Jessica Maxwell said in a statement to STAT.

Pfizer said the company believes it will get paid for the full commitment.

“We continue to collaborate with the U.S. government to help broaden patient access to this potentially game-changing therapy, and we are confident that the Administration will fulfill its purchasing commitments,” Pfizer spokesperson Sharon Castillo said.

The additional 9 million courses are not available for distribution if they were contracted right now, as Pfizer is still ramping up manufacturing capacity.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told STAT in late January that the company expects to make 6 million courses globally by March, and 24 million courses between March and June. White House coronavirus response coordinator Jeff Zients recently said that the U.S. government will have 1 million treatment courses available in March, and that amount is expected to double in April.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Friday said the administration’s funding request is urgent, and estimated its stock of antivirals will be exhausted by September without additional funding. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Thursday alluded to the need for more funding to buy therapeutics, specifically.

“The fact is, the $22 billion for Covid is absolutely necessary. In fact, we will probably need more as we need more therapies. One of the pieces of this is to buy the pills,” Pelosi said.

Public Citizen Research Director Zain Rizvi, who has reviewed dozens of contract disclosures, criticized the “gap between rhetoric and reality” from the White House, and said the incident underscores the need to fund Covid-19 response efforts domestically and globally.

“The contract details are clear evidence that the Biden administration has known for months that new Covid money was needed. It has already taken far too long for new COVID funding to be requested. This is still an emergency,” Rizvi said.

The path forward for additional funding for Covid-19 relief is unclear. Lawmakers are scrambling to finish a government funding package by March 11, including possible extra money for Covid-19 and aid to Ukraine. Democrats need to rally at least 10 Republican votes to pass the legislation.

Some of the motivation behind the transparency complaints is blatantly political, as Republicans in past negotiations have pushed to repurpose Covid-19 relief funds for other purposes.

But American Public Health Association Executive Director Georges Benjamin said more transparency could also help advocates who want to push for more public health funding but haven’t been privy to the documentation provided privately to Congress.

“The more clarity we get on what is needed and what it’s for, the more I can make the value argument,” Benjamin said.

Transparency concerns have plagued Covid-19 relief spending on health care issues across both the Trump and Biden administrations.

In the absence of comprehensive public disclosure, reporters, auditors and congressional staff have assembled a partial picture of how money has been spent outside the purposes Congress originally intended for billions of dollars.

Both administrations funneled far more money than Congress allocated to Operation Warp Speed, in particular, and to its successor efforts to buy vaccines and therapeutics.

Nearly 10% of the funding Congress set aside to support hospitals and health care providers, or $17 billion, was funneled to buy vaccines and therapeutics, as STAT first reported. Other funding for Operation Warp Speed was taken from money designated for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Strategic National Stockpile, as Bloomberg reported. An additional $5 billion came from a fund for Covid-19 testing efforts, according to a document obtained by STAT.

Some $3 billion in Covid-19 relief money for testing and the Strategic National Stockpile was also routed to pay for costs related to the Department of Health and Human Services’ efforts to house unaccompanied children at the border, as Politico first reported and further documents obtained by STAT confirm.

https://www.statnews.com/2022/03/04/white-house-transparency-disputes-imperil-funds-to-buy-covid-therapeutics/

ADC target cut at Cantor on repositioned pipeline strategy

 

• Following Q4 FY21 results, Cantor Fitzgerald has lowered the price target on ADC Therapeutics SA 
  ADCT -5.01%
   (Get Free Alerts for ADCT) to $26 from $45 and keeps an Overweight rating.
• Analyst Brian Cheng notes that the repositioning of Zynlonta's pipeline strategy in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) came as a surprise, given the multiple Zynlonta combination trials that ADC had ongoing and planned for the near-term.
• The analyst awaits more color on the Rituxan combination's differentiation vs. Monjuvi and Polivy near-term.
• In the Q4 earnings release, ADC announced discontinuing the Phase 2 LOTIS-3 trial of Zynlonta combined with ibrutinib in third-line DLBCL and Mantle cell lymphoma (MCL). 
• The Company also announced that the comparator agent in Phase 2 LOTIS-6 study, idelalisib, was recently withdrawn from the follicular lymphoma market. 
• As such, ADC has voluntarily paused the study and will consult with its clinical advisors and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on the optimal path forward

https://www.benzinga.com/general/biotech/22/03/25991030/cantor-fitzgerald-cuts-adc-therapeutics-price-target-on-repositioned-zynlonta-pipeline-strategy

NFL, NFLPA to suspend all COVID-19 protocols

 The NFL and its players union, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), have agreed to suspend all COVID-19 protocols. 

In a memo sent to all 32 teams on Thursday, the league said the reasoning to suspend the current protocols was due to the recent decline in cases of the virus, adding it is also following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recent guidance on COVID-19. 

The CDC on Friday eased its mask recommendation for most Americans, advising that people living in communities with "low" or “medium” COVID-19 levels can go maskless.

“Encouraging trends regarding the prevalence and severity of COVID-19, the evolving guidance from the CDC, changes to state law, and the counsel of our respective experts,” the NFL said in its memo, obtained by The Hill. 

The league also told teams to abide by state and local laws regarding COVID-19 and will allow teams to “continue reasonable measures to protect their staff and players.” 

Team players and staffers are also not required to wear face coverings at team facilities unless individual teams want to require a mask mandate, and social distancing signs will not be required, according to the statement. 

“We will no longer conduct mandatory surveillance testing of any players or staff, regardless of vaccination status,” the league said. “Testing should only occur when clinically indicated or at the direction of the Club physician.” 

No regular season league games were canceled during the 2020 and 2021 seasons due to the pandemic, but some contests were rescheduled or postponed due to outbreaks. 

The league also dealt with some star players, including Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, refusing to get vaccinated. 

The NFL said in January that 95 percent of its players are vaccinated against the virus, and 100 percent of team personnel are vaccinated as well.

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/public-global-health/596765-nfl-nflpa-to-suspend-all-covid-19-protocols