Vaccinations are up and COVID-19 cases continue to decline, but healthcare will forever be changed by the pandemic. The telehealth revolution is upon us, and health disparities are finally being addressed. Doctors and patients are working together to define what constitutes “necessary” healthcare. Discover what else the future holds for healthcare in a post-pandemic world.

Source: MedPage Today (from JAMA Oncology)Design: Analysis was from a previously published prospective cohort study that evaluated the rates of antibody response to Pfizer’s vaccine in 102 cancer patients who were on active treatment compared with 78 healthy controls. A fourth of the patients were undergoing treatment for lung cancer, 26% for gastrointestinal cancers, and 18% for breast cancer.Results: After four months from the second dose of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, 87% of cancer patients who had been on active treatment continued to produce COVID-19 antibodies.

Publication: JAMA Oncology Design: An analysis of data from the I-SPY2 randomized clinical trial that included 938 women with breast cancer.Results: In this randomized clinical trial, the prognostic significance of RCB was consistent regardless of cancer subtype and treatment.

Review Publication: Hematology AdvisorDesign: At the Annual Meeting of the Society of Hematologic Oncology, researchers presented a study identifying a higher percentage of patients with germline predisposition syndromes (GPS).Results: Following a review of medical records of patients diagnosed with GPS between 1994 and 2018, the investigators reported that the detection of GPS positively impacted medical care in 91% of cases, including proper selection of a bone marrow donor, selection of drug and conditioning regimens, and genetic counseling.

ReachMD offers this CME/video case study on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (DMD), new genetic understandings, MET inhibitor use, and presentation with extra muscular manifestations. The program also highlights the challenges healthcare professionals face when it comes to diagnosing this complex condition.

Antibodies against COVID-19 continue to perplex and confound physicians and research scientists. Although people who have gotten COVID-19 or been vaccinated against the respiratory disease develop a humoral immune response that protects them from reinfection, those antibodies decline over time, leaving people vulnerable to reinfection. Understanding why this happens is critically important to modeling how COVID-19 spreads through the general population, including children.