Medicine & Healthcare Primary care

Specialised physician training, nurse-led motivational conversations and follow-up with patients, and subsidy on combination medication significantly lowered BP among patients with uncontrolled hypertension, according to findings from Singapore.

Multi-country intervention trial to improve hypertension management, led by Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore, in partnership with the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Diseases Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B), Aga Khan University in Pakistan, the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka and the Singapore Clinical Research Institute (SCRI), leads to “clinically meaningful” reductions in blood pressure and better blood pressure control in patients receiving the multi-component intervention. Researchers call for national scale-up of the intervention.

Despite great investments, an effective drug-based treatment for Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia among the elderly, remains elusive. Scientists led by Duke-NUS Medical School, in collaboration with Monash University, have published an online atlas of gene expressions at single-cell level in Alzheimer’s disease brains, aiming to boost to efforts to identify gene targets for drug development.