More than 70% of early COVID-19 patients who have been admitted to intensive care units in the UK are men, according to the first report from the Intensive Care National Audit & Research Centre.
The analysis is of 196 patients receiving critical hospital treatment after testing …

Pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) will be made ‘routinely available’ to people at risk of contracting HIV from April. NHS England has announced it will cover the costs of the drug, having carried out a three-year study involving more than 20 000 people.
PrEP is already available in …

Sexual dysfunction following use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) is under-recognised and can be debilitating both psychologically and physically, says a sexologist writing in the BMJ.
Sexual difficulties after treatment with SSRIs were first reported to regulators in 1991, but it was only in 2006 …

Recent figures from Public Health England (PHE) show a sharp rise in cases of mumps. There were 5042 laboratory confirmed cases of mumps in England in 2019, compared with 1066 cases in 2018.
Students and young people who may have missed out on their measles, mumps, …

For the first time, the World Health Organization (WHO) reports that the number of men who smoke is falling. The findings demonstrate how government-led action can protect communities from tobacco, save lives and prevent people suffering tobacco-related harm, it says (https://www.who.int/publications-detail/who-global-report-on-trends-in-prevalence-of-tobacco-use-2000-2025-third-edition)
During the past two decades, …

Prostate cancer has become the most commonly diagnosed cancer in England, provisional figures from Public Health England show.
There were 49 029 diagnoses of prostate cancer in 2019, 7828 more than in 2018. The disease has now overtaken breast cancer as the most commonly diagnosed cancer.
According …

Nearly a fifth of patients with aortic dissection (AD) die before reaching hospital and half die before reaching a specialist centre, according to a report by the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (https://www.hsib.org.uk/investigations-cases/delayed-recognition-acute-aortic-dissection/final-report/).
The report on delayed recognition of acute AD was prompted by a case investigation …

Almost 20% of all global deaths are caused by sepsis, according to a study published in the Lancet (doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(19)32989-7).
The study used cause-of-death data from 109 million individual death records to calculate mortality related to sepsis from 19 countries around the world in 2017. An estimated …

Taking folic acid and zinc supplements does not improve men’s sperm quality or increase the likelihood of their partners getting pregnant, according to a large study of couples seeking infertility treatment published in JAMA (doi:10.1001/jama.2019.18714).
In the study, the men in 2370 couples attending infertility centres …

Testicular cancer can be prevented from recurring using half the amount of chemotherapy that is currently used, a new clinical trial has shown.
The study published in European Urology (doi:10.1016/j.eururo.2019.11.022) and led by The Institute of Cancer Research and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust, involved …