Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT’s free newsletter Morning Rounds. Sign up here.
Good morning. The AP Stylebook broke major news in journalism circles on Friday. Health care, they now say, is one word: healthcare. “Crying, screaming, throwing up,” one STAT staffer said on Slack. “ihateit,” another wrote. We’re clearly still digesting all our feelings, and we’ll let you know soon where we land.
On the Covid landscape, six years later
In 2020 and 2021, the SARS-CoV-2 virus killed an estimated 15 million people across the globe. Six years later, it’s mostly a political football. Over the past two winters, the flu sickened more people than Covid. So what happened? STAT’s Helen Branswell spoke with experts about the changing Covid landscape, including the latest on immunity, deaths, booster shots, and more.
“The patterns indicate that new strains are relatively more capable of overcoming our immune responses, but the infection outcomes are more mild,” virologist Vineet Menachery wrote in an email. While some experts believe that Covid has developed into more of a nuisance illness than a perilous threat, not everyone agrees. Read more for the details.
ICYMI: Psychedelics, and AI vs. doctors in Utah
Wanted to make sure you saw a few bits of news from the end of last week and the weekend:
Yesterday, STAT’s Megan Molteni got this scoop: Kristine Blanche, an integrative medicine doctor and wife of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, has been appointed to an NIH advisory council. It’s the first such appointment in over a year. On Saturday, Helen wrote about the passing of Nancy Cox, a CDC veteran and stalwart in global flu research.
From last week: Health tech startup Doctronic gained national attention earlier this year after launching a pilot with the state of Utah to use an AI system to renew existing prescriptions without clinician oversight. In a letter published Friday, the Utah Medical Licensing Board said it only learned about the pilot after it had been launched, and asked the state to halt the program. Read more from STAT’s Mario Aguilar.
And finally, more psychedelics news: As part of the Trump administration’s plan to boost access to these controversial yet promising medications, the FDA will accelerate its review of drugs from three companies, the agency announced Friday. Priority review vouchers will go to Compass’ psilocybin product for treatment-resistant depression, Usona’s similar medicine for major depressive disorder, and an MDMA-like treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder from Transcend. Read more from a trio of STAT reporters.
44%
That’s the percentage of NIH-funded research papers that analyze or report their data by sex, according to a study published this morning in Nature Communications Medicine. In 2015, the NIH introduced broad guidelines asking researchers to consider sex as a biological variable in study design, analysis, and reporting. The lack of research following those guidelines makes it difficult to know if certain science findings apply equally to people of all genders. STAT’s Anil Oza and Annalisa Merelli have more.
A hat to treat depression?
Scientists have been zapping brains to alleviate depression for decades through a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. The startup Motif Neurotech wants to build on that technology, except with a baseball hat. The idea is that each morning, the hat would activate a blueberry-sized device implanted in your skull that sends a pulse of electricity into your brain.
“Think of it like charging your phone,” Motif co-founder and CEO Jacob Robinson told STAT’s O. Rose Broderick. Read their conversation to learn more about the science, and also for Robinson’s interesting comments on how he would feel giving this device to his kids or enrolling them in clinical trials.
What’s the true risk for eating disorders with GLP-1s?
As GLP-1 weight loss medications proliferate, the potential for users to develop eating disorders has lingered in the public consciousness, largely unaddressed except for occasional media coverage. Actual research is scant, though one analysis of medical records found that, out of more than 60,000 people taking GLP-1s, 1.28% were diagnosed with an eating disorder within two years.
In an NEJM perspective published over the weekend, physician Amanda Banks calculated that, if about one in eight Americans takes a GLP-1, more than 420,000 people could develop an eating disorder. “Physicians, trialists, regulators, policymakers, and drug developers are unprepared for this coming wave,” Banks wrote.
Patients should be screened for eating disorders before being prescribed these medications, she argued. And more research is needed on both the risks for eating disorders with GLP-1s and how the drugs could be used for potential treatments, given what Banks calls the “mechanistic overlap in the underlying biology” of obesity and anorexia in particular.
$7,500
As Sarah Cady reviewed the employment contract for a job as a psychiatric nurse practitioner one day, she was shocked to see that if she ever left the practice, that’s how much money she’d owe for each patient that left with her.
The moment was a turning point for Cady. “In too many private mental health practices, patients are treated not as autonomous human beings engaged in vulnerable therapeutic relationships,” she writes in a new First Opinion essay, “but as proprietary assets to be retained, priced, and controlled.” And patients often have no idea this is even happening. Read more from Cady on what she believes patients are owed amid these dynamics.
What we’re reading
-
While advising Kennedy, top aide had more than $25 million stake in wellness company, New York Times
-
Menopause coverage bills meet mixed fates in state legislatures, News From the States
- I’m a fourth-year med student, but I only learned one historical example of medical racism, STAT
- The FTC is ramping up to target transgender rights, Wired