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An electronic health record (EHR) program to help primary care doctors address child obesity is an effective tool to promote positive body mass index (BMI) trends, especially among young children with obesity, according to a new University of Missouri School of Medicine study that examined the effectiveness of the FitTastic tool over an average follow-up period of nearly three years.
FitTastic was developed in 2011 to support health care teams in communicating with families about five lifestyle behaviors: aiming for at least one hour per day of physical activity, limiting screen time to two hours per day or less, drinking three servings a day of low-fat milk or calcium, drinking at least four servings per day of water instead of sugary drinks and eating at least five servings per day of fruits and vegetables.
The FitTastic intervention includes a patient behavior assessment, an EHR interface that supports providers with the behavior data for use in goal setting with the family, discussion of the FitTastic goals, and a handout and participation incentives to encourage families to achieve the goal such as a frisbee or water bottle.
“Childhood obesity is a growing problem in Missouri and across the country which has been exacerbated by the COVID 19 pandemic,” said principal investigator Amy Braddock, MD, associate professor of clinical family and community medicine. “Over 30% of children in this country meet criteria for obesity or being overweight. Primary care providers have an opportunity to play a pivotal role in providing screening and counseling for obesity, and we wanted to test the long-term effectiveness of FitTastic as a tool to help in this effort.”
Braddock’s team conducted a multi-year study to determine if overweight or obese children at the beginning of the study exhibited a more favorable body mass index (BMI) trajectory in clinics that used the FitTastic tool over a period of years, compared to children seen at clinics without the tool.
“We found a nearly 20% more favorable BMI pattern in the FitTastic group compared to the control group when looking specifically at children who were either overweight or obese,” Braddock said. “The data was especially favorable for younger children, between the ages of two and five-years-old.”
Braddock’s team discovered parental educational level was a risk factor for child obesity at the beginning of the study, but the results showed no influence of parental education on the BMI pattern of FitTastic versus control participants, suggesting that FitTastic can be equally effective in children with parents of different educational levels.
“The marriage of clinic-based interventions and EHR data assessment offers the opportunity for significant innovation and can be useful for partnering health care teams and families in the important tasks of setting positive, family-centered healthy lifestyle goals,” Braddock said. “FitTastic is the first of hopefully many new and exciting technologies to support physicians working with families to promote positive health behaviors. Only by developing creative new approaches that improve the environments that our children live in can we expect to curb the child obesity epidemic.”
Braddock’s MU co-authors included Richelle Koopman, MD, the Jack M. and Winifred S. Colwill Endowered Professorship in Family and Community Medicine; Jamie Smith, research analyst; medical students Andy Lee and Natalie Miller; Samuel Holt McNair, MD, resident physicians; Nuha Wareg, research specialist; and Megan Clary, MD, assistant professor of clinical child health.
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Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a Zika vaccine technology that is highly effective and safe in preclinical mouse models. In a pregnant mouse model, the vaccine prevented both the pregnant mothers and the developing fetuses from developing systemic infection. The research is published in Microbiology Spectrum, a journal of the American Society for Microbiology.
“Engineering the vaccine involved deleting the part of the Zika genome that codes for the viral shell,” said Vaithilingaraja Arumugaswami, D.V.M., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Molecular and Medical Pharmacology at UCLA. “This modification both stimulates an immunogenic reaction and prevents the virus from replicating and spreading from cell to cell.”
Vaccinated mice showed elevated levels of cell-mediated immune response, in the form of increased effector T cell populations, as compared to mice that had not been vaccinated. The researchers also tested the vaccine in a variety of other mouse models, in which it proved safe and protective.
The impetus for the work was the 2016 outbreak of Zika virus, which spread rapidly in the Americas and affected millions of people, leading to severe socioeconomic hardships. Zika was the first mosquito-borne virus that showed the ability to affect human reproduction.
To date, no vaccines or other treatments have been approved for Zika virus. Nor have investigations into other ways of fighting the virus led to clearly effective countermeasures. “But given that RNA viruses — the category to which both Zika and the SARS family of viruses belong — are highly prone to evolving and mutating rapidly, there will likely be more outbreaks in the near future,” said Arumugaswami.
The average length of time between periods of extensive Zika viral spread is approximately 7 years. “It is only a matter of time before we start seeing the virus spread again,” said Kouki Morizono, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Medicine at UCLA and co-senior author of this study.
To make matters worse, climate change is expanding the permissible habitats of mosquitoes like Aedes aegypti, which transmits Zika virus to humans, increasing the at-risk population.
“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has shown us the power of a strong pandemic preparedness plan and clear communication about prevention methods — all culminating in the rapid rollout of safe and reliable vaccines,” said Arumugaswami. As such, it is essential to develop a strong pandemic preparedness plan. “Our research is a crucial first step in developing an effective vaccination program that could curb the spread of Zika virus and prevent large-scale spread from occurring,” said Arumugaswami.
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Despite significant advances, mortality from brain tumors remains high with five-year survival rates of 36%, according to the National Cancer Institute. More accurate diagnoses might improve the situation, but tissue biopsies are invasive and can miss important information about a tumor’s make-up. Imaging-based methods, meanwhile, do not offer sufficient sensitivity and resolution. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have developed a biosensor that could help physicians precisely diagnose brain cancer from a minute blood sample.
To effectively treat brain cancer, physicians need to not only confirm the presence of a malignant tumor but also identify whether it originated there (primary tumor) or moved to the brain (secondary tumor) from other organs. Physicians also need to know where in the organ the tumor is located. Because no existing diagnostic technique can accomplish this feat without surgery or a painful spinal tap, Bo Tan and colleagues wanted to develop a noninvasive test using a tiny amount of serum.
The researchers used high-intensity laser beams to form 3D nickel-nickel oxide nanolayers on a nickel chip. This process resulted in an ultrasensitive biosensor that allowed them to detect minute amounts of tumor-derived materials, such as nucleic acids, proteins and lipids, that made it through the blood-brain-barrier into the circulation. The sensor detected these components using a method known as surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy, which generated molecular profiles, or fingerprints, for each sample. The researchers then analyzed these profiles with a DEEP neural network to find evidence of a brain tumor and define its type, as well as predict its location within the brain.
Using the liquid biopsy platform, the researchers could detect brain cancer from just five microliters of blood serum, and they could distinguish it from breast, lung and colorectal cancer with 100% specificity and sensitivity. They had similar success distinguishing primary brain tumors from secondary tumors that had metastasized to the brain from the lung or breast. Profile analysis also allowed the researchers to determine in which of nine brain compartments the tumor resided with 96% accuracy. The noninvasive nature of the test should allow healthcare specialists to monitor cancer development over time so they can make better treatment decisions, the researchers say.
The authors acknowledge funding Faculty of Engineering and Architectural Science Deans Research Fund; Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants; and NSERC Discovery Grant, Idea to Innovation and Alliance Grants.
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With the legalization of hemp cultivation, products containing cannabidiol (CBD) have become popular. Many of these oils and creams claim to alleviate pain and other conditions, and now, new research reported in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces suggests that CBD could have another function: as a bioplastic. The research team created a CBD-based bioplastic material that could one day be used in medical implants, food wrappers and more.
Cannabis (Cannabis sativa) is well known for the euphoric “high” it gives users, caused by a chemical called tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Another component, CBD, is responsible for feelings of relaxation and calmness, but unlike THC, it doesn’t produce a high. In hemp plants bred to contain little-to-no THC, CBD can make up to 20% of the plant’s weight. Because it’s now federally legal in the U.S. to grow hemp, the price of CBD has dropped dramatically, opening up the possibility of using CBD in other applications.
In recent years, the bioplastic called poly(lactic acid), or PLA, has become a popular option for sustainable plastics because it’s made from corn and sugarcane instead of fossil fuels, and can be industrially composted. Many single-use consumer goods, such as utensils and soda bottles, as well as medical devices, such as facial fillers and implants, now contain PLA. Just as lactic acid is a good building block for PLA, CBD’s chemical structure also has the right stuff to be repeated as a polymer. So, Gregory Sotzing, Lakshmi Nair and colleagues wanted to see whether CBD could be used to make a new bioplastic.
To create cannabinoid polymers, the researchers performed a condensation reaction with adipoyl chloride — also used to create nylon — and either CBD or the closely-related cannabigerol (CBG), producing a polyester. Polymeric CBD had a broad melting temperature range and stretchability, and to show its ability to function as a plastic, the researchers formed it into a hemp leaf shape with a mold. Because bioplastics are often used in medical contexts, they also investigated the polymers’ bioactive properties. Neither CBD nor CBG polyesters was cytotoxic. Unlike the conventional bioplastic PLA, the CBD polyester had an antioxidant activity. Although the polymer version of CBD didn’t confer the same therapeutic effects as it does in oil form, Sotzing says that future versions of the plastic could be engineered to have anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties, and this is the goal of his start-up company Polycannabinoid Therapeutics Rx.
The authors acknowledge funding from the National Institutes of Health for the biological aspects of this work.
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Hitherto, scientists have not fully understood why ticks are such dangerous disease vectors. A research team led by Johanna Strobl and Georg Stary from MedUni Vienna’s Department of Dermatology shows that tick saliva inhibits the skin’s defence function, thereby increasing the risk of diseases such as tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) or Lyme disease. The study was recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.
The researchers carried out their investigations on skin samples from volunteers and also on models of human skin, mimicking the bite of the most common European tick (Ixodes ricinus). In both cases, the team led by Georg Stary (MedUni Vienna’s Department of Dermatology, CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases) in collaboration with the research group of Hannes Stockinger (Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology at MedUni Vienna) identified rapidly occurring patterns of immunomodulation. For example, it was found that the function of immune cells, especially T cells, which are important for immunological memory, was disrupted by contact with tick saliva.
Tick saliva modulates immune system
The scientists made similar observations in early stages of model infection by Borrelia burgdorferi, the most common cause of Lyme disease. They found that pre-incubation of Lyme disease-transmitting bacteria (B. burgdorferi spirochetes) with tick salivary gland extracts impedes the accumulation of immune cells in the skin and increases the pathogen burden. “Overall, we found that tick feeding causes profound changes in the skin’s immune system inhibiting the local immune response. This means that dangerous pathogens that are introduced into the skin together with tick saliva, can multiply more easily, leading to infection,” says Johanna Strobl, lead author of the study, summarising the main research findings.
Climate change increases danger from ticks
Austria is one of the countries with the greatest prevalence of ticks. Nearly every second European tick is infected with pathogens, Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) being the most common tick-borne diseases. The arachnids become active at a temperature of seven degrees. Due to rising temperatures associated with climate change, ticks now also pose a threat in higher-altitude regions of Austria and well into late autumn.
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Charts of costs for three abortion patients, in which the cost of the procedure and other expenses including travel and […]

Within the cabinets and drawers of the world’s herbaria are nearly 400 million dried plant specimens. These collections have long served as a vital record of what plant species exist on Earth and where they grow. But hidden within the desiccated leaves, stems, flowers and roots is far more information on how the plants interacted with their environment while they were alive. Knowing about these “functional traits” — aspects like leaf structure, chemical composition and water content — could help researchers understand how plant communities change over time, and ultimately how we can help ecosystems thrive in the future.
Until now the only way to learn about these traits from herbarium collections has required destroying bits of the precious specimens. But recently researchers from the University of Minnesota and Université de Montréal in Quebec, developed a fast, nondestructive way of estimating the functional traits of herbarium specimens.
The researchers used a technique called reflectance spectroscopy, which measures how much light a material reflects at different wavelengths to obtain leaves’ spectroscopic “fingerprints,” or spectra. On more than 600 plant samples from northern temperate and boreal forest biomes of North America, they measured the spectra of fresh, living leaves; leaves that had been pressed like herbarium specimens; and ground-up leaves. They also measured the leaves’ chemical and structural traits using conventional means. They then used the data to develop models that use spectra to estimate functional traits and evaluated how well the models performed on new plant samples from the same biomes at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. Finally, they tested how well the spectra could be used to tell species apart.
Their findings: Fresh-leaf spectra yielded the best predictions for traits relating to leaf structure and water content, while ground-leaf spectra worked best for traits relating to leaf chemistry. Pressed-leaf spectra yielded very good predictions — usually in between fresh-leaf and ground-leaf spectra. For example, they predicted more than 75% of the variation in leaf nitrogen content and more than 90% of the variation in leaf mass per area. Both pressed-leaf and ground-leaf spectra yielded nearly perfect predictions of species identity.The research, published this month in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, offers ecologists a powerful new tool for using biological collections to understand how plant communities change over time, providing insights into how we might best keep ecosystems healthy in the future.
“This study opens the door to using the world’s herbarium specimens to study the evolution of functional traits across the plant tree of life,” said co-author and University of Minnesota professor Jeannine Cavender-Bares. “It’s a very exciting advance for the integration of ecology and phylogenetics.”
“Far from just being dead plants in musty drawers, herbaria are some of the most important tools we have to understand the stunning diversity of plant life,” added co-author and former University of Minnesota graduate student Shan Kothari, now a postdoctoral researcher at Université de Montréal. “We hope this method can take its place among the many clever and innovative ways ecologists have repurposed herbarium collections to new ends.”
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Published21 hours agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Getty ImagesTrial results of a drug appearing to slow Alzheimer’s disease represent a “historic moment”, experts say.Pharmaceutical companies Eisai and Biogen have said their drug works when given in the early stages of the disease. The full details have yet to published, but it appears to slow the pace of the brain’s decline.And even the limited data has generated excitement among dementia scientists and charities. Mental agilityThe drug, lecanemab, is designed to remove clumps of toxic beta-amyloid proteins that build up in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease. Dozens of other drug trials have failed, leading to questions about whether amyloid was really causing the disease. In this trial, 1,795 volunteers in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease were injected with lecanemab every two weeks and regularly had their memory and mental agility tested. The pace of cognitive decline had been reduced by 27% over the course of the 18-month trial, compared with people given a dummy, or placebo, treatment, the pharmaceutical companies said.They also showed levels of the toxic protein were lowered in the brain. Side-effects included brain swelling and headaches. The drug will not work for other forms of dementia. ‘Truly encouraging’Biogen chief executive Michel Vounatsos said: “Today’s announcement gives patients and their families hope that lecanemab, if approved, can potentially slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and provide a clinically meaningful impact on cognition and function.”The companies are now applying for regulatory approval for the drug to be given in the US, Europe and Japan. Alzheimer’s Research UK research director Dr Susan Kohlhaas said it was a “breakthrough” and a “historic moment for dementia research” as it was the first large clinical trial “in a generation to successfully slow cognitive decline”.Prof John Hardy, from University College London, said the results were “truly encouraging” and “look like the first truly positive mechanistic trial results in Alzheimer’s disease”. “The results look modest but real,” he said.”This is clearly not a magic bullet but it looks like a definite ‘end of the beginning’.”‘Positive result’The same companies previously announced a much hyped Alzheimer’s drug called aducanumab. But its US launch was widely criticised and the EU refused to allow it over doubts about whether it worked. The early data for their latest drug appears clearer, but the full details are not expected to be announced until November. Prof Rob Howard, professor of old-age psychiatry, at UCL, said: “This is an unambiguously statistically positive result and represents something of an historic moment, when we see the first convincing modification of Alzheimer’s disease. “God knows, we’ve waited long enough for this.” Follow James on Twitter.More on this storyAlzheimer’s research takes ‘leap forward’4 AprilBrain stimulation boosts memory for a month22 AugustControversial Alzheimer’s drug rejected by EU17 December 2021US approves first new Alzheimer’s drug in 20 years7 June 2021

The goal of Poppy Seed Health is to connect underserved pregnant women to nurses, midwives and doulas who can offer on-demand assistance.This article is part of Upstart, a series about companies harnessing new science and technology to solve challenges in their industries.Simmone Taitt had a romanticized notion of her journey to motherhood — ups and downs, sure, but an overall beautiful experience. Then she had a miscarriage. What happened next changed the way she thought about compassionate health care, and inspired her to found a start-up, Poppy Seed Health, that aimed to support women the way she wished she had been supported.According to Ms. Taitt, during a prenatal appointment the doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. She “looked at me and said that my body had terminated the pregnancy, which was a dagger to the heart,” she said. “‘It’s normal and happens all the time,’” Mrs. Taitt recalls the doctor saying. “‘I will see you in a few months when you start trying again’ — and she left the room.”That was the extent of the support Ms. Taitt received. “I gathered my things,” she said. “I was crying. I was devastated, and that was the most emotionally insensitive and shocking thing for me to hear.”That would not be Ms. Taitt’s only miscarriage, and the pattern that emerged would propel her to take action: She didn’t want another pregnant person to endure the highs and lows of pregnancy and not feel supported. And so she founded Poppy Seed, which offers an app that connects pregnant women to on-demand support from nurses, midwives and doulas. These providers don’t offer medical advice, as Poppy Seed’s website notes, but Ms. Taitt believes their timely counseling offers a host of other benefits.The company, based in New York City, now has about two dozen employees. The app has 400 users who collectively have logged about 50,000 hours of use, according to Ms. Taitt. Simmone Taitt, chief executive of Poppy Seed Health.Brian Fraser for The New York TimesMs. Taitt, 40, hopes Poppy Seed will be a solution to “maternal health deserts.” According to a March of Dimes report, 2.2 million women of childbearing age live in parts of the United States that have no hospitals offering obstetric care, no birth centers and no obstetric providers. Without access to these services, women have a harder time scheduling appointments for prenatal and postpartum care, and may be more likely to experience serious complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Telehealth can help fill these gaps in care.Even women who don’t live in maternity care deserts can benefit from an expert sounding board. Janell Hickman-Kirby, 36, turned to the Poppy Seed app‌ for reassurance ‌‌after a pregnancy loss and again after the birth of her baby. She‌‌ said she found that many parts of pregnancy ‌weren’t common sense, and ‌that maternity care functions differently from other types of medicine. A first time mother might not know when to schedule appointments or what to anticipate during pregnancy, for example. Maternity care often involves more testing and screenings than an average visit to your primary care doctor. Also, doulas can have a different approach in how they communicate with clients from OB-GYNs, something Ms. Hickman-Kirby learned through the Poppy Seed app.Loved ones may offer their support during a pregnancy, Ms. Hickman-Kirby said, but that doesn’t prevent someone from engaging in “panic-inducing” doomscrolling on Google. She also noted that while most appointments with OB-GYNs are time-limited, appointments on the app are not.“It’s nice to ask questions, especially when you’re in the beginning stages of your pregnancy,” she said. “Should I be feeling this tired, or is this normal? When should I make a doctor’s appointment?”Ms. Hickman-Kirby, who is Black, said she shares the trepidation that many Black women feel around pregnancy services: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Black women are three times more likely than white women to die during childbirth. Many of these deaths — affected by factors including underlying health conditions, lack of access to quality care and biases in the health care system — are preventable. Ms. Hickman-Kirby said Poppy Seed Health filled in some of the gaps in her maternity care.Referring to her primary OB-GYN, Ms. Hickman-Kirby said: “For my first appointment, I felt really rushed, and she had poor bedside manner and didn’t really explain a lot to me. As a first-time parent, I didn’t realize that if you had a medical emergency, you could call the doctor’s office and they connect you with an OB-GYN.”After losing her first pregnancy, Ms. Hickman-Kirby turned to Poppy Seed, which connected her to doulas who gave her various options for post-miscarriage treatment. She also learned that a woman who has a miscarriage can experience postpartum depression.In the Poppy Seed Health app, users can look up information on pre- and postnatal care.AppleAnne Schuchman, who has been a doula for 10 years, sees Poppy Seed as an extension of her practice. She takes on additional cases through the platform, which, she says, gives her the opportunity to be someone’s support when they need it most.The app functions a bit like a ride-hailing app, with users matched to an available doula or midwife in real time.“I might get that chat at 11:30 at night with someone who has had a miscarriage,” Ms. Schuchman said. “They may even have a supportive partner and a provider is giving them medical support, but an important part of being a doula is that we offer emotional support while being detached, in a healthy way.”Poppy Seed can also extend the reach of doulas like Ms. Schuchman. “I’ve gotten some Poppy chats from people preconception to people with 1-year-olds who are maybe still breastfeeding or thinking about getting pregnant again and have questions about that,” she said.In certain states, doula costs are at least partly covered by Medicaid, but they can run from hundreds of dollars to tens of thousands of dollars, and reimbursement rates can be low. Poppy Seed offers a monthly $29 per month flat rate for unlimited conversations over text messaging, or $5 for a 30-minute phone chat. Members can search in the app for information on all stages of pregnancy and early postnatal care.But the app isn’t right for everyone or every pregnancy situation. For starters, it requires access to a smartphone and a credit card. And practitioners on the app are not substitutes for doctors. Some pregnancy issues warrant an in-person visit, where procedures like an ultrasound or a pelvic exam can be conducted. And while a half-hour counseling session might cost less than an insurance co-pay, it shouldn’t replace a checkup with a medical professional.Maria Tucker Murray, an OB-GYN at Total Women’s Health in Pottstown, Pa., voiced some concerns about relying on doulas for pregnancy care. “I do support the use of doulas. They can reduce anxiety,” she said. “As far as 24/7 access, I’m not sure how comfortable I would be. They may want to intervene in medical management. Problems arise when some doulas want to intervene in medical management or overstep their boundaries with practitioners.”Though the company doesn’t release numbers regarding the income levels of their customers, Ms. Taitt said the ability to reach a broader group is a strong motivation for her.“I think the best things that we can put out in the world are based on our lived experiences, and finding solutions for those things or creating them for ourselves can be very powerful for us,” she said. “Selfishly, Poppy Seed Health is for me, but it is for the millions of people that need it that are going through very similar journeys as I went through and am still currently going through.”

Biogen and Eisai reported the finding from a large late-stage clinical trial of lecanemab, a drug they are developing.The pharmaceutical companies Biogen and Eisai said on Tuesday that a drug they are developing for Alzheimer’s disease had slowed the rate of cognitive decline in a large late-stage clinical trial.The strong results boost the drug’s chances of winning approval and offer renewed hope for a class of Alzheimer’s drugs that have repeatedly failed or generated mixed results.The positive data also offer Biogen a second chance after the company’s disastrous rollout of another Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm. That medication won regulatory approval last year despite little evidence that it could slow cognitive decline, received only sharply limited coverage by Medicare and has proved to be a commercial failure.The results appear stronger for the new medication, lecanemab. Cognitive decline in the group of volunteers who received lecanemab was reduced by 27 percent compared with the group who received a placebo in the clinical trial, which enrolled nearly 1,800 participants with mild cognitive impairment or mild Alzheimer’s disease, the companies said.The trial of lecanemab, which is administered via intravenous infusion, was the largest to date to test whether clearing the brain of plaques formed by the accumulation of a protein called amyloid could slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. Aduhelm is designed to work in a similar way.As with previous anti-amyloid drugs, some patients taking lecanemab experienced brain swelling or brain bleeding, but the prevalence of these side effects was lower than with Aduhelm and other experimental medications.Eisai had already applied for accelerated approval, the type of approval given to Aduhelm. The process allows the Food and Drug Administration to greenlight drugs if they have uncertain evidence of benefit but affect a disease’s biological pathway in a way that is considered reasonably likely to benefit patients. The company said on Tuesday night that it would first continue with the accelerated approval process, with an F.D.A. decision expected by early January, and then use the newer data to seek full approval. (Accelerated approval requires companies to do further trials and prove that their drug works.)Analysts predict that lecanemab, or any effective Alzheimer’s medication, would most likely be a multibillion-dollar blockbuster.“For Biogen, it puts them back in the Alzheimer’s game,” Brian Skorney, an analyst at the investment bank Baird, said.In a briefing for reporters Tuesday night, Ivan Cheung, the chairman and chief executive of Eisai, said the results represented “the first definitively positive large clinical trial to show that you can indeed slow down Alzheimer’s disease at this very early symptomatic stage.”He said that the drug started to show a benefit to patients about six months after they began taking it and that the benefit increased until the trial ended, 18 months after patients started on the drug.The companies plan to present more detailed results in November.Some experts said the drug’s ability to slow cognitive decline — by 0.45 on an 18-point scale — was modest at best and might not be a difference that patients in the mild early stages of the disease would notice.Dr. Lon Schneider, director of the California Alzheimer’s Disease Center at the University of Southern California, said the effect “is small and would not be considered by many as a minimally clinically important difference.” However, he added, “others would strongly disagree and say it’s clinically meaningful.”Dr. Schneider said the “relatively low” rates of brain swelling and bleeding “suggest that lecanemab is easier to use” than Aduhelm.He added that “although taking a press release at face value, which is often a chancy thing to do without having real data or reports, it seems that lecanemab would most likely receive regular marketing approval based on this one study alone.”In the briefing, Mr. Cheung said the company considered the results “very clinically meaningful,” but he added, “Of course, there are different opinions out there on defining what clinical meaningfulness is for this stage of disease.”Other companies are also developing treatments that could shake up the market for Alzheimer’s drugs, which before Aduhelm had not seen a novel treatment for two decades. Before the end of this year, Roche is expected to report data from two studies of a drug known as gantenerumab. The F.D.A. is expected to make a decision on whether to grant accelerated approval to an Alzheimer’s drug from Eli Lilly known as donanemab by early January, with results from a larger study of that drug due in the middle of next year.The results from the study on lecanemab “set a high bar that I think will be hard for the other drugs, if they are successful, to beat,” Mr. Skorney said.