TTHealthWatch is a weekly podcast from Texas Tech. In it, Elizabeth Tracey, director of electronic media for Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore, and Rick Lange, MD, president of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, look at the top medical stories of the week.
Get ready for this week’s podcast as we dive into some fascinating medical topics including AI and breast cancer screening, vaccination and long COVID, mailed cervical cancer screening kits, and cancers after treatment for sickle cell.
Here’s a sneak peek at what’s in store for this episode:
0:42 – Long COVID after vaccination
1:42 – Full range of vaccines included
2:42 – Two vaccines
3:00 – Gene therapy for sickle cell and cancer
4:00 – Related to chemotherapy?
5:00 – Some way to screen cells
5:20 – Cervical cancer screening by mail
6:20 – Get education or not, or queried on desire
7:20 – Not surprised for overdue
8:20 – AI to improve early detection of breast cancer
9:20 – Achieve 0.2% more
10:20 – Troubling for women with too much recall
11:18 – End
Transcript:
Elizabeth: Can we improve cervical cancer screening with mailed HPV self-sampling kits?
Rick: Why do people with gene therapy for sickle cell disease develop malignancies?
Elizabeth: What’s the impact of COVID vaccination on the development of long COVID?
Rick: And using artificial intelligence to improve early detection of breast cancer.
Elizabeth: That’s what we’re talking about this week on TT HealthWatch, your weekly look at the medical headlines from Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso. I’m Elizabeth Tracey, a Baltimore-based medical journalist.
Rick: And I’m Rick Lange, president of Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in El Paso, where I’m also dean of the Paul L. Foster School of Medicine.
Elizabeth: Rick, how about if we turn first to the BMJ? We have in the past always treated COVID material first, and then we’ve kind of abandoned that practice. I’m going to recall it, at least for today.
In this study, performed in Sweden, they looked at just shy of 600,000 individuals and looked at their COVID-19 vaccine status, and examined, “What was the impact of that on the development of so-called long COVID?”, which they identify as “post-COVID-19 condition,” or PCC. This, of course, points up the need for some international agreement on what we’re going to call this condition, since it seems to be so prevalent.
What they did was look at all adults with COVID-19 first registered between December 2020 and February 2022 in the two largest regions in Sweden. They looked at individuals who had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine before infection. It was the full range of the COVID vaccines that were considered in this study. The vaccine effectiveness against post-COVID condition for one dose, two doses, and three or more doses was 21%,