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Background: Liver tumours observed in rats exposed to micafungin led to a black box warning upon approval in Europe in 2008. Micafungin's risk for liver carcinogenicity in humans has not been investigated. We sought to describe the risk of fatal hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) among persons who received micafungin and other parenteral antifungals (PAFs) with up to 12 years of follow-up.Methods: We assembled a US multicentre cohort of hospitalized patients who received micafungin or other PAFs between 2005 and 2012. We used propensity score (PS) matching on patient characteristics from electronic medical records to compare rates of HCC mortality identified through the National Death Index though to the end of December 2016. We computed HRs and 95% CIs.Results: A total of 40110 patients who received a PAF were identified; 6903 micafungin recipients (87% of those identified) were successfully matched to 16317 comparator PAF users. Ten incident HCC deaths, one in the micafungin-exposed group and nine among comparator PAF users, occurred in 71285 person-years of follow-up. The HCC mortality rate was 0.05 per 1000 person-years in micafungin patients and 0.17 per 1000 person-years in comparator PAF patients. The PS-matched HR for micafungin versus comparator PAF was 0.29 (95% CI 0.04-2.24).Conclusions: Both micafungin and comparator PAFs were associated with HCC mortality rates of <0.2 per 1000 person-years. Given the very low event rates, any potential risk for HCC should not play a role in clinical decisions regarding treatment with micafungin or other PAFs investigated in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Although echinocandins are generally well tolerated, there is little information on the frequency with which renal and hepatic adverse effects occur during use of micafungin or other parenteral antifungal (PAF) agents in clinical practice.Methods: MYCOS is a multicentre cohort study of adult and paediatric patients who received micafungin or other PAFs between 2005 and 2012 at seven tertiary care hospitals from six centres in the USA. PAF cohort controls were selected through propensity score (PS) matching to micafungin recipients using clinical characteristics, other treatments, procedures and hospital service where PAF treatment was initiated. Analysis was restricted to patients without chronic liver and kidney conditions at the time of cohort entry. Treatment-emergent hepatic and renal injury was documented by changes in liver enzymes or estimated glomerular filtration rate through 30 days following completion of PAF treatment. Comparisons were quantified using the HR from a proportional hazards analysis.Results: There were 2970 micafungin recipients PS matched to 6726 recipients of comparator PAFs. Balance was achieved in all baseline covariates between treatment groups. There were similar rates of hepatic injury (micafungin, 13 events per 100 patients and other PAF, 12 per 100; HR = 0.99; 95% CI 0.86-1.14) and lower rates of renal injury (micafungin, 63 events per 100 patients and other PAF, 65 per 100; HR = 0.93; 95% CI 0.87-0.99) for micafungin recipients versus PAF comparators.Conclusion: For a wide spectrum of underlying conditions, we observed no increase in liver injury by micafungin and possibly a reduced risk of renal dysfunction in comparison with other PAF medications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work (N = 1906 U.S. residents) investigates the extent to which peoples' evaluations of actions can be biased by the strategic use of euphemistic (agreeable) and dysphemistic (disagreeable) terms. We find that participants' evaluations of actions are made more favorable by replacing a disagreeable term (e.g., torture) with a semantically related agreeable term (e.g., enhanced interrogation) in an act's description. Notably, the influence of agreeable and disagreeable terms was reduced (but not eliminated) when making actions less ambiguous by providing participants with a detailed description of each action. Despite their influence, participants judged both agreeable and disagreeable action descriptions as largely truthful and distinct from lies, and judged agents using such descriptions as more trustworthy and moral than liars. Overall, the results of the current study suggest that a strategic speaker can, through the careful use of language, sway the opinions of others in a preferred direction while avoiding many of the reputational costs associated with less subtle forms of linguistic manipulation (e.g., lying). Like the much-studied phenomenon of "fake news," manipulative language can serve as a tool for misleading the public, doing so not with falsehoods but rather the strategic use of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]