Episode notes
The weekly consolidation for the week of September twenty-eighth, covering four episodes — Monday's sweep, early-onset colorectal cancer, pediatric asthma and single maintenance and reliever therapy, and part one of the dementia series. It leads with six things worth keeping: the failure of pelacarsen and what it does to the lipoprotein(a) story, the short-acting beta agonist feedback loop and the four-to-five-course lifetime oral steroid budget, the distinction between the threshold for investigating a symptom and the age at which you screen, the way kidney disease pushes Alzheimer blood biomarkers above the diagnostic range while sarcopenia hides the kidney disease, the two strong tobacco recommendations most likely to change a prescription this week, and the one age band in which heavy drinking is rising. It also reports a correction made to the September seventeenth lipid episode. It closes on three appraisal threads: the gap between moving a number and changing an outcome, screening and diagnosis as genuinely different activities, and tests that behave differently in your patient than in the population where they were validated.