Healthcare Weekly News

Cognitive impairment and COVID-19; FDA approves new pill for acute pain - Weekly News 26 October Findings from a new study show that cognitive impairment can persist for months in COVID-19 patients, even those not hospitalised.
Impairments in executive functioning, processing speed, category fluency, memory encoding and recall were predominant among hospitalised patients. Future studies are needed to identify risk factors and mechanisms underlying cognitive dysfunction. The FDA has approved a combination pill containing celecoxib, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug and tramadol, an opioid agonist, for the treatment of adults with acute severe pain. The combination drug uses four different mechanisms of analgesia and offers healthcare providers an option to treat acute pain that is severe enough to require an opioid and for which alternative treatments are inadequate. Lakshman Swamy, an ICU doctor at Boston Medical Center, has developed a card game called Critical Care in which players can diagnose, treat and heal patients using real ICU therapies and diagnoses. With patient-friendly language and descriptions, players learn the world of ICU medicine. The game has over 300 unique cards and can be played by one to four players. Social media can help communicate health information, but some of it can be misleading. A recent review looked at social media posts before March 2019 and found that Twitter contained the most health misinformation - mostly about smoking products and drugs. This misinformation may lead to an increase in fear, anxiety, and poor health choices.