Gyms are packed at this time of year, but staying motivated in these cold winter months can be difficult.

The number one thing that helps motivate a real change is having a “menu of options,” psychologist Carrie Wilkens said.

Mixing some fun and novel activities into your rotation can turn workouts from a chore into something you look forward to.

Whether you have specific fitness goals or you’re just fighting the urge to hibernate, here are fresh ways to get active indoors in the D.C. area.

Tommy McFly is taking you inside some of the most fun workouts in D.C. in The Scene’s Fit in 2024 series. Watch this week on News4 Today, 4-7 a.m., and check back here for new videos.

Climbing for the adrenaline seekers

If you’re excited to see new sport climbing events at the Paris Olympics, then why not learn the ropes yourself?

Intro to rock climbing classes are the best way to try out what can be an addictive hobby.

Jenna, who teaches climbing at Sportrock, has seen students as young as 3 and well past retirement age.

“Whatever your walk of life is, we have a Parkinson’s group here, and our oldest climber is 82,” she said.

Where to find it: You have a lot of options!  Sportrock has locations in Alexandria, Gaithersburg and Sterling, and there’s even a Groupon for introductory classes (ages 14+ only). Reviewers also like Movement, which has locations in Crystal City and Rockville. Vertical Rock was still running holiday deals as of Jan. 2.

Boxing for a workout that packs a punch

Maybe you’ve seen boxing gyms popping up all around the D.C. area, but you’re not quite an Olympic athlete.

That’s no problem at BASH, a boxing-inspired gym that’s growing in Northern Virginia.

“We’re going to call you by name and face when you come into the studio and every single time that you come into class, we’re going to take you through your six core punches right from the start,” BASH founder Alex Trakas said.

Trakas founded the gym specifically to get more women involved in the sport, but her goals have grown.

“The second that I learned how to throw a punch, the second that I learned how to connect the combos and just felt more empowered and confident in myself, I was like, ‘I really want to bring this to more women,'” she said.

Where to find it: Bash has locations in Ballston, Rosslyn, Alexandria and the Mosaic District. You can find more boxing suggestions courtesy of ClassPass.

Cycling that’s not a luxury

Leticia Long’s Wired Cycling in Eckington strives to do fitness better.

Her classes are just $20 each, or you can buy five classes for $85. But she doesn’t compromise on the quality of her machines, and schedules classes early on most mornings so anyone can squeeze in a workout.

“I want you to figure out what feels right for your body today,” she said at a recent workout.

Where to find it: Wired Cycling can be found at 2028 4th Street NE, Washington, D.C. Book classes online.

Water aerobics for the whole family

Aqua aerobics provides a low-impact exercise where almost everyone can find a comfort zone.

Tons of gyms offer group classes, including YMCA Anthony Bowen at W and 14^th streets NW.

Instructor and former Olympian Rush Mijuskovic trained at the gym before competing in the Beijing Olympics, representing Montenegro in the triathlon.

“And we have, like people, three generations in the family going together for a while. And I’m teaching this class for 16 years,” Mijuskovic said. “This is the exercise you can do for the rest of your life.”

Where to find it: Check the YMCA’s Find Your Y page or look for rec centers with indoor pools in your county. Classes are offered by most park districts, including Montgomery County and Prince George’s County in Maryland and Arlington County, Alexandria and Fairfax County.

Want to know what’s up for your weekend? Sign up for The Weekend Scene, our newsletter about events, experiences and adventures for you and for your family around the DMV.

Breakthroughs in treatments of life-altering issues; a dinosaur discovery of the century in Maryland and a teen’s cancer-fighting invention are some of our most-read and favorite science and health stories of the year.

Here’s a look at some of NBC Washington’s health and science stories about innovations that are changing lives for the better.

‘You’ve had enough’: What weight-loss drugs may teach us about addiction

The medications Ozempic and Wegovy have been all over the news for helping people lose weight — and researchers are now studying the potential impact they could have on alcoholism and other addictive behaviors.

“We’re seeing a decrease in impulsive behaviors from patients,” said Dr. Rocio Salas-Whalen, an endocrinologist. “Initially it was for food, but we’re seeing it for other types of impulses like alcohol, tobacco.”

The medications work by suppressing a person’s appetite and essentially rewiring the reward system in our brain for food and other cravings, such as for alcohol, Salas-Whalen explained.

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Alexandria, Virginia, mom Lisa Robillard first took weight-loss medication as part of a clinical trial. She was responding to chronic obesity, which she dealt with starting in childhood. On the medication, she lost 60 pounds, began to leave food on her plate and noticed her drinking habits change too.

“I just don’t have that desire. I will have a glass of wine, and where I may have had two or three, one is [now] fine or a half of a glass is fine. Something in my head says, ‘That’s good. You’ve had enough,’” she said.

Scientists at the UNC School of Medicine are taking a deeper dive with humans, studying this class of drugs and their potential effectiveness as a treatment for alcohol addiction as part of an ongoing clinical trial.

‘Most important dig site east of the Mississippi’: Ancient river ‘bone bed’ reveals dinosaur fossils in Maryland

In an undeveloped chunk of land in the middle of a heavily industrialized section of Prince George’s County, less than an hour from Washington, D.C., paleontologists have found a gold mine for the fossil record.

Paleontologists in Dinosaur Park, a public park and active dig site in Laurel, Maryland, announced in July that the park is home to what paleontologists call a bone bed. It’s the term used when one or more species are concentrated near each other, in the same geologic layer of the Earth.

“It is certainly the most significant collection of dinosaur bones discovered along the eastern seaboard in the last hundred years,” Matthew Carrano, a paleontologist with the Smithsonian, said.

One of the most exciting discoveries came on Earth Day: the three-foot-long leg bone of a large, meat-eating dinosaur. It belongs to a theropod, which is a branch of the dino family that includes carnivores like the T. Rex. But this dinosaur lived about 50 million years earlier than that.

JP Hodnett, a paleontologist with Prince George’s County Parks and Recreation, believes it belongs to an Acrocanthosaurus, a 12,000-pound, apex predator that called Laurel home about 115 million years ago.

“Finding a bonebed like this is a dream for many paleontologists,” said Hodnett in the release.

Dinosaur Park – and its many fossils – lie waiting to be discovered. If you want to try your hand at fossil hunting, visitors can take part in public programs for free on the first and third Saturdays of each month.

Virginia 14-year-old named top young scientist for cancer-fighting soap invention

Heman Bekele, a freshman at Woodson High School in Northern Virginia, spent his summer break working to cure cancer.

He was named “America’s Top Young Scientist” for creating a bar of soap designed to fight low-grade skin cancer. Out of nine students, he won the top prize of $25,000 and was named America’s Top Young Scientist.

“I wanted to try to find a way for the entire world to be able to have an equitable and accessible form of skin cancer treatment,” Bekele said.

The 14-year-old calls it skin cancer-treating soap, or SCTS for short. The soap replenishes the skin with dendritic cells, which help protect the skin and fight cancer.

Before making the soap, he reached out to University of Virginia professors to help with research.

He said he hopes to take the soap to market in the next five years and start a nonprofit so it can be available to people in need.

Diagnosed and treated for cancer all in one day, thanks to new medical tech

It can take several weeks to diagnose, and then treat someone with surgery, for lung cancer. But for some patients, INOVA Health System can do both procedures on the same day, thanks to new cutting-edge robotic technology.

“This is a game changer in the way we treat early stage lung cancer,” said Dr. Michael Weyant, the chief of thoracic surgery at INOVA. “So in one day, from start to finish, it is all taken care of.”

Weyant says the approach leads to better outcomes and reduces the mental toll that comes after a cancer diagnosis.

Sheryl Bitsch’s successful biopsy and surgery took about eight hours, and she was back in her Northern Virginia home the next day. In January, she told us she’s back to her routine, taking her new puppy out for long walks and looking forward to more travel adventures, thanks to innovative technology.

“It was a process that was, despite the diagnosis, really painless,” she said. “I’m not sure if I had to go home and think about this for weeks on end, I would have been nearly as okay with everything as I was as a result of it.”

Doctors say to be eligible for the same-day diagnosis and surgery, patients need to have an identified lung nodule that has not spread anywhere else.

‘It’s unreal’: AI helping paralysis patients regain movement and communicate

Two cutting-edge clinical trials are using artificial intelligence to help patients with paralysis regain movement in their body and reclaim their voice.

For years, Keith Thomas has been unable to move his arms and hands after a diving accident left him paralyzed from the chest down.

Now, a simple gesture like shaking someone’s hand gives him tremendous hope.

“When I feel the sense of touch, it’s like, it’s unreal because I haven’t felt that in three years now,” Keith Thomas said.

Through a new procedure called a double neural bypass, doctors at Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York implanted five tiny computer chips in Thomas’ brain that can literally read his mind.

“This is the first time the brain has been linked directly to spinal cord stimulation and to the body to restore movement and the sense of touch where the user’s thoughts are actually driving that therapy,” said Professor Chad Bouton, the vice president of Advanced Engineering and director of the Neural Bypass and Brain-Computer Interface Laboratory at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research.

AI isn’t just helping patients regain movement.

In a separate study published in the journal Nature, researchers from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley are using artificial intelligence to help a paralyzed mother reclaim her voice.

Edited by Sophia Barnes

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“Even if you’re not clearing like a snow-covered driveway or digging out your car, cold weather can cause high blood pressure, and that’s a key risk factor for strokes and for heart attacks,” said Catherine Roberts with Consumer Reports.

Doctors say the best thing to do in the winter is to stay warm.

“Staying bundled up so your core temperature is higher is good. Most of it because if you’re cold and you’re shivering, that puts a lot of stress on the body, said Dr. Joshua Willey, a neurologist.

Willey said it’s especially important to keep in mind when exerting yourself outdoors. Dress in layers and keep your core, or torso, warm to help keep blood flowing to your extremities.

“If you have problems with the circulation to the legs, making sure that your legs are well bundled up so that there’s enough circulation getting to your feet,” he said.

While you can’t do anything about the weather, you can cut other risk factors. One study found that 80% of strokes are preventable.

Steps doctors recommend taking to prevent stroke:

• Keep health issues such as high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation, type 2 diabetes and high cholesterol under control.
• Get enough physical activity and eat a healthy diet.
• Limit alcohol to one drink per day for women and two drinks per day for men.

It’s also important to stay alert to the signs of a stroke. If someone is having balance or vision problems, their face is drooping, or they are experiencing arm weakness or slurred speech, get help immediately.

Ozempic, Wegovy and similar drugs have been in short supply over the past year as demand has grown.

For those who do manage to find them, the drugs aren’t cheap. They typically cost more than $1,000 a month without insurance.

Between high costs and and nationwide shortages, many have turned to knockoff versions.

Searches for “Ozempic dupe” have skyrocketed by 373% in the past year, according to Kaly.com, and #Ozempic has gained 1.3 billion views on social media platforms like TikTok.

Some compounding pharmacies, which mix and alter drug ingredients to create custom medications for patients, are offering copycat injections at a fraction of the cost. They’re about $100 to $200 for a month’s supply, but the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t approved the medications.

The FDA told News4 it’s monitoring the internet for fraudulent or unapproved products and has issued warning letters to pharmacies to stop the distribution of illegally marketed semaglutide – the active ingredient in both Wegovy and Ozempic.

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“No one knows exactly what it is and no one knows where it’s coming from So it’s actually pretty dangerous,” said Dr. Domenica Rubino with the Washington Center for Weight Management and Research in Arlington, Virginia.

Rubino said the copycat versions of semaglutide are often mixed with vitamins or other ingredients that haven’t been tested and might not be safe.

Regulators are also sounding the alarm. Four states, including West Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi and North Carolina, are threatening legal action over safety concerns, saying it’s almost impossible for compounding pharmacies to replicate weight loss drugs on the market.

That’s because there are no FDA-approved generic versions of Wegovy or Ozempic, and drug maker Novo Nordisk said it doesn’t supply its ingredients to others.

“You have to understand that there’s a desperateness,” Rubino said.

Despite the risk, News4 found dozens of companies selling semaglutide on social media platforms, some promising overnight delivery of vials with liquid that patients are told to inject weekly.

Several websites even offer telehealth visits in which people can get the medications without ever seeing a provider on video or in person.

“This is about health. It’s not about weight loss. It’s not about fitting into your designer dress — and I can’t stress that enough,” Rubinio said.

Patients who are considering taking weight loss medication should always consult with a doctor or health care provider.

Doctors said it’s also important for people to do their research before taking the medications and understand the potential side effects, which can include nausea and vomiting to changes in vision and kidney problems. In serious cases, Ozempic and Wegovy could cause intestinal blockages, according to the drug’s warning label.

Dr. Dean Ornish, who founded the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in California, is leading the clinical trial.

“For the last 45 years, I’ve directed research showing that simple lifestyle changes: what we eat, how we respond to stress, how much exercise we get and how much love and social support we have cannot only help prevent, but often reverse the progression of the most common and costly chronic diseases,” said Ornish, who is also a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

Through previous studies, Ornish found that lifestyle changes can reverse heart disease in some patients. Now, he’s seeing if it works in the fight against Alzheimer’s.

“What’s good for your heart is good for your brain. We know that Alzheimer’s and heart disease share many of these same underlying biological mechanisms,” Ornish said.

Healthy eating and exercise have been shown to reduce the risk of cognitive decline and dementia but this research takes it a step further to see if it can actually prevent or reverse the disease.

Participants of the study will follow a lifestyle medicine program that includes:

1. Eating a whole foods, plant-based diet: “Fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, soy products, ideally as close as they come in nature as possible, minimally processed, low in fat, low in sugar,” Ornish said.
2. Getting moderate exercise: Ornish said walking half-an-hour to an hour three times a week and incorporating some strength training qualifies as moderate exercise.
3. Reducing stress: Using meditation and other yoga-based stress management techniques.
4. Increasing social support: Joining support groups or spending quality time with friends and family.

“To reduce it to its essence: to eat well, move more, stress less and love more. That’s it,” Ornish said.

Ornish is teaming up with leading neurologists across the country, including at Harvard Medical School, to put the theory to the test.

“Our unique contribution has been to be using these very high tech, expensive state of the art scientific measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low tech and low cost interventions can be,” he said.

While the results of the trial aren’t expected until next year, others in the field are watching closely.

Dr. Jessica Caldwell, with the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement Prevention Center at Cleveland Clinic in Las Vegas, said she encourages her patients to get moving to keep their mind sharp.

“Physical exercise directly impacts the brain right away, as well as for months afterward,” Caldwell said. “It changes the levels of your neurochemistry that supports memory. When we exercise, it improves our mood, it can reduce our stress levels.”

More than 6 million Americans are living with Alzheimer’s. Doctors said the disease starts decades before a person develops memory loss and other symptoms.

For years, Keith Thomas has been unable to move his arms and hands after a diving accident left him paralyzed from the chest down.

“I went to dive into the pool aggressively, as usual, and then I just blacked out. And the next thing you know, there was a helicopter on the front lawn,” Thomas said.

Now, a simple gesture like shaking someone’s hand gives him tremendous hope.

“When I feel the sense of touch, it’s like, it’s unreal because I haven’t felt that in three years now,” Keith Thomas said.

Through a new procedure called a double neural bypass, doctors at Northwell Health’s Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York implanted five tiny computer chips in Thomas’ brain that can literally read his mind.

“This is the first time the brain has been linked directly to spinal cord stimulation and to the body to restore movement and the sense of touch where the user’s thoughts are actually driving that therapy,” said Professor Chad Bouton, the vice president of Advanced Engineering and director of the Neural Bypass and Brain-Computer Interface Laboratory at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research.

The 15-hour surgery was a delicate dance with Thomas awake for part of the procedure, giving surgeons feedback in real-time.

“I placed it right over one area and he said, ‘I feel my thumb.’ I said, ‘What part of your thumb?’ He said, ‘My thumb tip, the inside of my thumb tip.’ And I said, ‘Oh, we found it. We got it,'” said Dr. Ashesh Mehta, a neurosurgeon and professor.

Now, if Thomas thinks of grabbing a bottle, electrical signals are sent to a patch on his neck or arm, bypassing the injured sections of his spine to reconnect with his brain.

“Now I’m thinking and I’m seeing my thoughts like happen in real time onscreen,” Thomas said. “It just changed my life.”

AI isn’t just helping patients regain movement.

In a separate study published in the journal Nature, researchers from UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley are using artificial intelligence to help a paralyzed mother reclaim her voice.

Ann Johnson suffered a stroke almost 20 years ago and cannot move her body or her mouth.

Now, she’s able to have a conversation with her husband through a digital avatar.

The technology decodes Johnson’s brain signals, turning them into sentences and facial expressions through 250 electrodes that are implanted onto the surface of her brain that’s responsible for speech.

For weeks, Johnson helped train the AI algorithms to recognize her brain activity by repeating different words and phrases.

“A lot of my inspiration actually comes from seeing patients and feeling frustration that we yet don’t have treatments for helping them,” said Dr. Edward Chang, the chair of neurological surgery at UCSF.

UCSF researchers say the AI system is faster and more accurate than other devices that allow paralysis patients to communicate. Their next step is to create a wireless version of the device.

Both studies, though, have tremendous promise using AI technology that could one day help countless people with neurological and movement disorders.

The noise wasn’t a real threat — just a raccoon sifting through a garbage can. But your heart is beating out of your chest, you’re breathing heavier than you were mere moments before, and you suddenly feel hyperaware of every shadow.

Congratulations! You just got acquainted with your sympathetic nervous system. Here’s what it is, and what it has to do with feeling scared.

What is the nervous system?

Like your digestive system, your nervous system is just a part of your body, made up of a variety of organs, all working together to fulfill some purpose that keeps you alive.

Despite the name, your nervous system doesn’t just regulate whether you feel nervous — it has to do with nerves, and how your brain sends signals to your body.

“There are a lot of functions in our body that are automatic,” Gabriela Romo, a psychotherapist based in Chevy Chase, Maryland, told News4. “We never think about digesting food, we never think about breathing or our hearts beating.”

The nervous system controls what happens automatically and how. It’s divided into two modes, and only one mode can be active at a time — kind of like a light switch.

There’s the parasympathetic nervous system, which is active when you’re in safe situations that let you rest and go about daily life.

Then there’s the sympathetic nervous system, which is active during emergencies.

“It is more about the fight or flight response, when we have to respond to a threat or an attack,” Romo said.

What does your sympathetic nervous system do when you’re scared?

The sympathetic nervous system is set off when something happens to activate your amygdala. The amygdala is a small part of the brain, deep in the middle, that regulates instinctual responses and emotion — including fear.

When your amygdala is activated because you saw or heard something that could be a threat — like a racoon knocking over a trash can in the dark, or someone running toward you — your brain tells your body to release stress hormones.

Those stress hormones, like cortisol and adrenaline, cause a “near-instantaneous” response, according to Harvard University.

Then, Romo said, “we see body changes, like our heart pounds, we increase our breathing, our blood vessels get dilated.”

More blood gets pumped through your veins, and you breathe faster, sending more oxygen along with it. The extra oxygen to your brain lets you see and understand more of your environment.

The whole response essentially floods your body with extra energy, so you’re ready to deal with the perceived threat. And it often happens so quickly that your thinking brain doesn’t fully process what happened until after you’ve already jumped into action.

If getting spooked makes your brain step on the gas pedal that is the sympathetic nervous system, your parasympathetic nervous system acts like the brakes, according to Harvard.

Once the threat has passed, your parasympathetic nervous system jumps in to regulate your body and brain back down to normal levels.

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Fight, Flight, or Freeze?

You may have heard of the “fight or flight” response before. It’s a simple way of referring to the physiological response your body has when you’re threatened, Romo said. And both responses come down to survival.

Fight

“Fight, basically, is when your body says, ‘You know what? I can overpower this danger,'” Romo said.

Those quick instincts deep in your brain tell you that the best way to act is by, literally, fighting your way out. Your pupils dilate so you can see better, your muscles tense in preparation for use, and you might even feel the urge to punch. (This is why unlucky haunted house actors sometimes get hit.)

Flight

Flight, on the other hand, is when your body tells you to run away.

“[It’s] kind of like your body telling you, ‘You know what, I cannot overpower this danger,'” Romo said. “So, your body, the way that it responds is like, getting all the energy in our legs so that we can run very fast.”

Your hands might “feel very numb,” or you may feel trapped generally and get the urge to flee, she added.

Freeze

The freeze response usually comes either before the other two kick in, or after they’ve failed to work.

“It’s kind of like we basically said, OK, I cannot fight it, I cannot run away, I just freeze,” Romo said. “I just go into this state of, I cannot move, I just stay here.”

The general wisdom used to be that freeze was your body giving up. But more recent scientific studies show that’s not the case, Romo said.

“We kind of go into perceiving more about the environment, so that we can plan and we can move into action,” Romo said.

You may freeze so that your brain can stall for time, taking in more of your surroundings and deciding whether fight or flight will work better. You might also freeze after fight or flight stopped working, to buy time until the threat goes away, or there’s an opening to act again.

All three are involuntary, instinctual responses, and everyone is capable of each response. They’re also primal, and come from times when ancient humans faced more physical danger on a daily basis.

That’s part of why your brain and body react so quickly, before you can think too hard about it.

“This is about survival,” Romo said. “Without these responses, our species would have disappeared. So these are very very automatic responses. We cannot control how we feel in that sense.”

Anxiety is a ‘permanent state of fear’

Having chronic anxiety isn’t quite the same as watching a scary movie or getting jumpscared at a haunted house.

But on a physiological level, they’re pretty close, Romo said, with “our heart pounding, sweating, you know — fight or flight.”

But getting scared once by a loud noise or something jumping at you “is more immediate,” and biological, she said. “Whereas with anxiety, it is more reaction to our emotions.”

Someone with anxiety, in a situation that isn’t dangerous, might be hyperaware to “the possibility of danger,” looking out for factors that remind them of previous threats or problems, Romo said.

If that sympathetic nervous system response is active a lot over a long period of time, “we see that amygdala, for example, gets bigger, and that the stress hormones are kind of released all the time,” leading to chronic anxiety and “this state of alertness.”

“And so now [the anxious person is] in a permanent state of fear,” Romo said, instead of a temporary switch into the sympathetic nervous system, before the switch is flipped back to the relaxed parasympathetic nervous system.

(Treatments for anxiety can help manage your body and brain’s fear response.)

So if it’s all a threat response, why do we like getting scared?

You probably have at least one friend that’s a horror movie junkie, ready to play all the creepy video games and drag the group into every haunted house that opens before Halloween. You might even be that friend.

But if getting scared is the body’s emergency response, and in the moment it feels terrifying — why do some people find it fun?

A big part of the fun is that haunted houses, scary movies and the like put fear into a controlled environment, Romo said. You still react to the stress with adrenaline, but you’re never in real danger, so there’s comfort in staying safe.

And after it’s over, you may feel better than before.

“We have seen that … after it finishes, there is an elevated mood,” Romo said. “We feel this excitement. It can be cathartic, and it kind of like purges like bad feelings and anxieties. And so it relieves tension.”

So, next time you’re so stressed you feel like screaming — that might be exactly the response your brain and body need to feel like the threat has passed.

The preventative procedure can be uncomfortable, even painful — and you usually have to hold your breath while one of the most sensitive parts of your body is smushed in a machine that takes images.

“The anxiety was getting to me, and the fear,” said patient Stephanie Batistas.

VHC Health, a Northern Virginia Hospital, wants to change all that. Think warm robes, mood lighting and new technology that allows you to control the pressure during a mammogram.

They hope the changes will make women less hesitant to get their regular check-ups.

“I would go every few years because I would dread it so much,” Batistas said. “But with COVID, I hadn’t been here in four years.” 

The new technology aims to make the experience a lot more comfortable.

“We wanted this spa-like feel,” said Dr. Sarah Mezban. “Not going for a mammogram, sitting in a room and you’re worried about the outcome of your mammogram. We wanted the patient to have a relaxed experience.”

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Patients are given heated robes when they visit VHC Health, and mood lighting emits from the new Siemens mammography machine.

“As a patient, you want your mind to go somewhere else,” Mezban said. “And I think the calming lights that you see with the machine is very nice feature.”

She calls the machines a game changer. They’re equipped with a wider angle that creates more detailed 3D images.

They also use AI technology.

“The artificial intelligence [is] basically a machine that was fed a lot of the mammograms with the accurate findings in them. And [they] learn to pick up the morphology or the shape, so it will pick up anything that is round, anything that is a star shape, or if there are any calcifications,” Mezban explained. “It will highlight those at the end of the exam, and it will draw attention to kind of look back and compare.”

Studies show routine mammograms save lives, reducing breast cancer deaths in the U.S. by nearly 40% since 1990.

With the new machines VHC Health is using, patients no longer need to hold their breath, and can even control the amount of compression on their own, adjusting it to their comfort level.

“I thought I would be a lot more nervous than I really was,” Batistas said. “I wasn’t nervous at all. The light was changing. The tech was wonderful.”

“I’m not putting it off anymore,” Batistas said. “I’m coming every year.”

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that women get regular mammograms starting at age 40. Those with high risk or a family history of breast cancer may need to be screened sooner, and should have a conversation with their doctor.

The new study, published Wednesday in Neurology, found that having either high or low levels of high-density lipoprotein, or HDL, cholesterol, may increase the risk of dementia in older adults. It’s more evidence showing that keeping HDL cholesterol within a certain range is important for cardiovascular and brain health.  

“The relationship between HDL cholesterol and dementia is more complex than we previously thought,” said the study’s lead author, Erin Ferguson, a doctoral student studying epidemiology at the University of California San Francisco. “While the magnitude of this relationship is relatively small, it’s important,”

The results show a correlation between HDL cholesterol and dementia, but do not prove that low or high levels of the lipid directly caused dementia. The study, which was supported by the National Institute on Aging and the National Institutes of Health, included more than 184,000 adults with an average age of 70. None had dementia when the study began. Researchers used a combination of surveys and electronic records from the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health plan to track cholesterol levels, health behaviors and whether someone developed dementia over about 13 years. During that time, just more than 25,000 people developed dementia. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends people keep their total cholesterol at about 150 mg/dL, or milligrams per deciliter of blood, with LDL at or below 100 mg/dL. Low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, cholesterol, has long been recognized for its often deadly impact on the cardiovascular system. 

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Developed by Japanese drugmaker Eisai Co. and U.S. biotechnology firm Biogen Inc., the drug’s approval in Japan comes two months after it was endorsed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Leqembi is for patients with mild dementia and other symptoms in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and the first medicine that can modestly slow their cognitive decline.

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, who announced Japan’s approval of Leqembi on Monday, called it “a breakthrough” and said that the “treatment of dementia has now entered a new era.”

Kishida has pledged to step up support for the growing number of dementia patients and their families and is due to launch a panel this week to discuss measures for a dementia-friendly society.

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According to the health ministry, Japan’s number of dementia patients who are 65 years of age or older will rise to 7 million in 2025, from the current 6 million.

The drug, however, does not work for everyone and — as with other Alzheimer’s drugs that target plaques in the brain — can cause dangerous side effects such as brain swelling and bleeding in rare cases.

Eisai said it will conduct a post-marketing special use survey in all patients administered the drug until enough data is collected from unspecified number of patients under Japanese health ministry procedures.

The drug will be partially covered by health insurance and is expected to be ready for clinical use by the end of the year. The price is yet to be decided but is expected to be expensive, Kyodo News agency reported.

Eisai is committed to delivering Leqembi to people who need it and their families “as a new treatment,” said Haruo Naito, the company’s CEO.

“We aim to create impact on issues surrounding dementia in Japanese society,” he said.

The well-being of Finnish people has sparked great interest in the country and its practices. And Finland is offering guidance on how to be happier, free of charge.

Back in March, the country’s tourism department, Visit Finland, announced an offer for 10 people to visit the country and embark on their take of a masterclass on happiness.

Visit Finland reports that they received over 150,000 applications from all around the world for the unique opportunity. In an attempt to reach as many people as possible, they decided to also offer the masterclass for free in a virtual format.

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“This masterclass will take you a step closer with insights from five coaches under four core themes: Nature & Lifestyle, Health & Balance, Design & Everyday and Food & Wellbeing,” the course, which became available online on September 14, states.

In hopes of “finding my inner Finn,” I watched all five lessons of the course, and these are my biggest takeaways.

Here’s what I learned from Finland’s happiness masterclass

1. Connecting with nature is important for your mental health, no matter where you live

As someone who lives in a city, I thought reaping nature’s benefits would be virtually impossible for me without traveling far. However, the course taught me that having a relationship with nature doesn’t have to look like being in the forest or sailing on a river; it’s more about being in tune with our five senses as we walk outside to do the simple things like grabbing a coffee or commuting to work.

Without pausing and intentionally paying attention to the beauty around me, I was denying myself the easiest way to boost my happiness: connecting with nature.

Finland is ahead of the game because they have a law called “Everyman’s Rights” which grants people the right to roam and stay overnight in nature, regardless of land ownership. Many Finnish people camp frequently, walk and bike in nature and simply embrace all that nature has to offer.

“It’s true that even a small amount of time spent in nature reduces your stress, clears your mind, gives you experiences and lets you connect with yourself in ways that only nature can do,” Mikaela Creutz, a hiker and nature lover, says during the masterclass.

2. It’s better to have enough than to want for more

I’ll be the first to admit that I view myself as a go-getter, and it’s something that I’ve taken much pride in. But there is a downside to always aiming higher and wanting more, according to April Rinne, an author and speaker who teaches about the importance of embracing change and uncertainty.

“When we’re focused on more, we’re actually never able to find enough,” says Rinne during the course. “The goalpost keeps changing.”

Rinne defines “enough” as balance, harmony and sufficiency. Embracing “enough” means “having all that you need to thrive, but not carrying around excess,” she adds.

“That includes knowing that you are enough just as you are, and you always have been — rather than ‘I will only be happy when I achieve this goal or make this amount of money or can get this particular product.'”

My goal moving forward is to honor where I am in life. Instead of focusing too much on everything else I want, I’ll aim to simply be open to the possibilities that are on the horizon. Not only can this take a huge weight off of my shoulders, but it’ll likely also allow me to feel happier about what I have now.

3. The way you design your space can impact your mental health

Initially, I wasn’t sure what I’d gain from the lesson about design because it didn’t seem to me that it would be essential to happiness. Yet, hearing design professional, Taina Snellman-Langenskiöld, talk about how much our homes and the spaces we visit frequently affect our well-being was fascinating.

“In Finnish, we have an old saying that a poor man cannot afford bad quality,” Snellman-Langenskiöld says in the course.

And you may be surprised to hear that “good” quality for her doesn’t mean the most expensive things. Sometimes, things can have more value to us because we made them with our own hands or the materials used to make them were sustainable and better for our planet.

Snellman-Langenskiöld suggests using design to improve your lifestyle by:

• Only buying meaningful objects that will stand the test of time and always be appealing to you
• Making beautiful things and surrounding yourself with them
• “Taking nature in” by having plants and buying yourself flowers
• Thinking about how you can design your space to make your life easier and more functional

She leaves viewers with this last piece of advice to consider: “Meaningfulness in design is one of the keys to happiness.”

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• Treat your happiness like an investment portfolio and focus on these 4 areas, says Harvard professor
• 7 daily practices that lead to sustained happiness and good health, from 85-year Harvard study

The 58-year-old Navy veteran was facing near-certain death from heart failure but other health problems meant he wasn’t eligible for a traditional heart transplant, according to doctors at University of Maryland Medicine.

“Nobody knows from this point forward. At least now I have hope and I have a chance,” Lawrence Faucette, from Frederick, Maryland, said in a video recorded by the hospital before Wednesday’s operation. “I will fight tooth and nail for every breath I can take.”

While the next few weeks will be critical, doctors were thrilled at Faucette’s early response to the pig organ.

“You know, I just keep shaking my head – how am I talking to someone who has a pig heart?” Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the transplant, told The Associated Press. He said doctors are feeling “a great privilege but, you know, a lot of pressure.”

The same Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into another dying man, David Bennett, who survived just two months.

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There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant. Last year, there were just over 4,100 heart transplants in the U.S., a record number but the supply is so tight that only patients with the best chance of long-term survival get offered one.

Attempts at animal-to-human organ transplants have failed for decades, as people’s immune systems immediately destroyed the foreign tissue. Now scientists are trying again using pigs genetically modified to make their organs more humanlike.

Recently, scientists at other hospitals have tested pig kidneys and hearts in donated human bodies, hoping to learn enough to begin formal studies of what are called xenotransplants.

To make this new attempt in a living patient outside of a rigorous trial, the Maryland researchers required special permission from the Food and Drug Administration, under a process reserved for certain emergency cases with no other options.

It took over 300 pages of documents filed with FDA, but the Maryland researchers made their case that they’d learned enough from their first attempt last year – even though that patient died for reasons that aren’t fully understood – that it made sense to try again.

And Faucette, who retired as a lab technician at the National Institutes of Health, had to agree that he understood the procedure’s risks.

In a statement his wife, Ann Faucette, said: “We have no expectations other than hoping for more time together. That could be as simple as sitting on the front porch and having coffee together.”

What’s different this time: Only after last year’s transplant did scientists discover signs of a pig virus lurking inside the heart – and they now have better tests to look for hidden viruses. They also made some medication changes.

Possibly more important, while Faucette has end-stage heart failure and was out of other options, he wasn’t as near death as the prior patient.

By Friday, his new heart was functioning well without any supportive machinery, the hospital said.

“It’s just an amazing feeling to see this pig heart work in a human,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, the Maryland team’s xenotransplantation expert. But, he cautioned, “we don’t want to predict anything. We will take every day as a victory and move forward.”

This kind of single-patient “compassionate use” can provide some information about how the pig organ works but not nearly as much as more formal testing, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for xenotransplant clinical trials. That FDA allowed this second case “suggests that the agency is not ready to permit a pig heart clinical trial to start,” Mashke added.

The pig heart, provided by Blacksburg, Virginia-based Revivicor, has 10 genetic modifications – knocking out some pig genes and adding some human ones to make it more acceptable to the human immune system.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The dramatic experiment came to an end Wednesday as surgeons at NYU Langone Health removed the pig kidney and returned the donated body of Maurice “Mo” Miller to his family for cremation.

It marked the longest a genetically modified pig kidney has ever functioned inside a human, albeit a deceased one. And by pushing the boundaries of research with the dead, the scientists learned critical lessons they’re preparing to share with the Food and Drug Administration -– in hopes of eventually testing pig kidneys in the living.

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“It’s a combination of excitement and relief,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, the transplant surgeon who led the experiment, told The Associated Press. “Two months is a lot to have a pig kidney in this good a condition. That gives you a lot of confidence” for next attempts.

Montgomery, himself a recipient of a heart transplant, sees animal-to-human transplants as crucial to ease the nation’s organ shortage. More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list, most who need a kidney, and thousands will die waiting.

So-called xenotransplantation attempts have failed for decades — the human immune system immediately destroyed foreign animal tissue. What’s new: Trying pigs genetically modified so their organs are more humanlike.

Some short experiments in deceased bodies avoided an immediate immune attack but shed no light on a more common form of rejection that can take a month to form. Last year, University of Maryland surgeons tried to save a dying man with a pig heart –- but he survived only two months as the organ failed for reasons that aren’t completely clear. And the FDA gave Montgomery’s team a list of questions about how pig organs really perform their jobs compared to human ones.

Montgomery gambled that maintaining Miller’s body on a ventilator for two months to see how the pig kidney worked could answer some of those questions.

“I’m so proud of you,” Miller’s sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, said in a tearful farewell at her brother’s bedside this week.

Miller had collapsed and was declared brain-dead, unable to donate his organs because of cancer. After wrestling with the choice, Miller-Duffy donated the Newburgh, New York, man’s body for the pig experiment. She recently got a card from a stranger in California who’s awaiting a kidney transplant, thanking her for helping to move forward desperately needed research.

“This has been quite the journey,” Miller-Duffy said as she and her wife Sue Duffy hugged Montgomery’s team.

On July 14, shortly before his 58th birthday, surgeons replaced Miller’s own kidneys with one pig kidney plus the animal’s thymus, a gland that trains immune cells. For the first month, the kidney worked with no signs of trouble.

But soon after, doctors measured a slight decrease in the amount of urine produced. A biopsy confirmed a subtle sign that rejection was beginning –- giving doctors an opportunity to tell if it was treatable. Sure enough, the kidney’s performance bounced back with a change in standard immune-suppressing medicines that patients use today.

“We are learning that this is actually doable,” said NYU transplant immunologist Massimo Mangiola.

The researchers checked off other FDA questions, including seeing no differences in how the pig kidney reacted to human hormones, excreted antibiotics or experienced medicine-related side effects.

“It looks beautiful, it’s exactly the way normal kidneys look,” Dr. Jeffrey Stern said Wednesday after removing the pig kidney at the 61-day mark for closer examination.

The next steps: Researchers took about 180 different tissue samples –- from every major organ, lymph nodes, the digestive tract –- to scour for any hints of problems due to the xenotransplant.

Experiments in the deceased cannot predict that the organs will work the same in the living, cautioned Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for xenotransplant clinical trials.

But they can provide other valuable information, she said. That includes helping to tease out differences between pigs with up to 10 genetics changes that some research teams prefer — and those like Montgomery uses that have just a single change, removal of a gene that triggers an immediate immune attack.

“Why we’re doing this is because there are a lot of people that unfortunately die before having the opportunity of a second chance at life,” said Mangiola, the immunologist. “And we need to do something about it.”

Regional increases have usually predicted the beginning of RSV season nationally, the CDC wrote in its advisory, “with increased RSV activity spreading north and west over the following 2–3 months.”

The late-summer increase appears to suggest that RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, is once again falling into a typical seasonal pattern after several years of unusually early viral activity due to the pandemic. 

From Aug. 5 through Aug. 19, the rate of RSV-related hospitalizations increased from 2 in 100,000 kids ages 4 and younger, to 7 per 100,000, the CDC reported. The majority of those hospitalizations were in babies less than a year old. 

Every year, RSV infections cause about 2 million doctor visits, 80,000 hospitalizations and up to 300 deaths in children under five, according to the CDC.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

Patient Jenni Davis from Lisbon, Ohio, is the first person in the country to be given the experimental vaccine, aimed at fighting cancer and keeping it from returning.

In February 2018, Davis found a lump on her breast. Tests soon led to a final diagnosis of triple negative breast cancer, a type of the disease which is notoriously hard to treat.

“When I was diagnosed, a lot of fear, a lot of questions,” she said. “What if? What’s going to happen?”

The mother of three was treated at the Cleveland Clinic and underwent a double mastectomy and several rounds of chemo and radiation.

After her treatment was over, she heard about the hospital’s breast cancer vaccine trial and immediately enrolled.

“I was just so fearful of recurrence that I wanted something so badly. So, to me, it wasn’t something I had to go back and forth with,” Davis said.

“The vaccine has been under research for over 20 years,” Dr. Amit Kumar, CEO of Anixa Biosciences, said.

Kumar added that the shot has been successfully studied in lab animals for decades, but this is the very first human trial.

The vaccine works by training the immune system to target and destroy cells that produce a milk protein that appears in breast cancer cells, stopping those cells from growing.

“The immune system should be able to destroy those early cancer cells as they arise, so those cancer cells never have a chance to become a large tumor mass,” Kumar said. “We expect that within five years, the vaccine will be available for people who have had breast cancer and are in danger of recurrence.”

After three rounds of the vaccine with no serious complications, Davis is hopeful. The patient remains cancer-free and excited about the possibility this new development could hold for others.

“Down the road, you know, to potentially wipe out triple negative breast cancer all together is amazing, and I’m so thankful I get to be a part of it,” Davis said.

The early results of the trial are encouraging, and while doctors are currently focused on triple negative breast cancer, they believe this vaccine could prevent other types of breast cancer in the future.

After Buffett’s death, his website revealed that the singer and businessman had died from Merkel cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer that is considered three to five times more deadly than melanoma.

Here is everything you need to know about Merkel cell carcinoma:

How rare is Merkel cell carcinoma?

According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, around 3,000 people in the United State are diagnosed with Merkel cell carcinoma every year. That equals around one case for every 130,000 people.

Merkel cell carcinoma is also 40 times more rare than melanoma, a more common deadly form of skin cancer.

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Who is at risk of Merkel cell carcinoma?

Like most skin cancers, Merkel cell carcinoma usually forms as a lump on sun-exposed skin. Areas such as the head and neck, as well as the arms, legs and trunk are the most impacted, according to the National Cancer Institute.

Risk factors include sun exposure and a weakened immune system. People over the age of 50 are also more likely to contract Merkel cell carcinoma as well.

What does Merkel cell carcinoma look like?

Merkel cell carcinoma is a lump that is usually painless, fast-growing, firm or dome-shaped and violet or red in color. The cancer is usually detected during a skin exam, which you can do on your own or with a doctor.

If you think you have an unusual lump growing on your skin, seek a dermatologist as soon as possible.

How is Merkel cell carcinoma treated?

Merkel cell carcinoma is treated like most cancers. First, the cancer is diagnosed and determined to be in a stage between 0 to IV, depending on how large the tumor has grown and how much the cancer has spread throughout the body, if at all.

The tumor will have to be surgically removed, and nearby tissue and lymph nodes may be removed as well.

Cancer can spread through cells in tissue and lymph nodes. Cancer can also spread through the body if it gets into the bloodstream.

After surgery, patients may receive chemotherapy, radiation and/or immunotherapy to completely rid the body of cancer.

What is the outlook for Merkel cell carcinoma?

Merkel cell carcinoma is a rare and aggressive form of skin cancer that has a high likelihood of spreading and recurrence.

According to the American Cancer Society, people diagnosed with Merkel cell carcinoma at any stage are “about 70% as likely as people who don’t have that cancer to live for at least 5 years after being diagnosed.”

However, survival rate is highly variable. The earlier the cancer is detected, the better.

How can Merkel cell carcinoma be prevented?

The best way to prevent Merkel cell carcinoma is to protect skin from the sun and its ultraviolet (UV) rays.

To limit sun exposure, always seek shade and follow what the American Cancer Society calls “Slip! Slop! Slap! … and Wrap!” Meaning:

• Slip on a shirt.
• Slop on sunscreen.
• Slap on a hat.
• Wrap on sunglasses to protect your eyes and the sensitive skin around them.

It is also advised not to use tanning beds or sun lamps.

Surgeon Hari Priya Bandi was performing a biopsy through a hole in the 64-year-old patient’s skull at Canberra Hospital last year when she used forceps to pull out the parasite, which measured 8 centimeters, or 3 inches.

“I just thought: ‘What is that? It doesn’t make any sense. But it’s alive and moving,’” Bandi was quoted Tuesday in The Canberra Times newspaper.

“It continued to move with vigor. We all felt a bit sick,” Bandi added of her operating team.

The creature was the larva of an Australian native roundworm not previously known to be a human parasite, named Ophidascaris robertsi. The worms are commonly found in carpet pythons.

Bandi and Canberra infectious diseases physician Sanjaya Senanayake are authors of an article about the extraordinary medical case published in the latest edition of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Senanayake said he was on duty at the hospital in June last year when the worm was found.

“I got a call saying: ‘We’ve got a patient with an infection problem. We’ve just removed a live worm from this patient’s brain,’” Senanayake told Australian Broadcasting Corp.

The woman had been admitted to the hospital after experiencing forgetfulness and worsening depression over three months. Scans showed changes in her brain.

A year earlier, she had been admitted to her local hospital in southeast New South Wales state with symptoms including abdominal pain, diarrhea, a dry cough and night sweats.

Senanayake said the brain biopsy was expected to reveal a cancer or an abscess.

“This patient had been treated … for what was a mystery illness that we thought ultimately was a immunological condition because we hadn’t been able to find a parasite before and then out of nowhere, this big lump appeared in the frontal part of her brain,” Senanayake said.

“Suddenly, with her (Bandi’s) forceps, she’s picking up this thing that’s wriggling. She and everyone in that operating theater were absolutely stunned,” Senanayake added.

Six months after the worm was removed, the patient’s neuropsychiatric symptoms had improved but persisted, the journal article said.

She had returned home but remains under medical observation. Details of her current condition have not been made public.

The worms’ eggs are commonly shed in snake droppings which contaminate grass eaten by small mammals. The life cycle continues as other snakes eat the mammals.

The woman lives near a carpet python habitat and forages for native vegetation called warrigal greens to cook.

While she had no direct contact with snakes, scientists hypothesize that she consumed the eggs from the vegetation or her contaminated hands.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention expects updated Covid vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax to be available to the public in mid-September, an agency official told reporters Thursday. 

That amounts to the most specific timeline to date. Federal officials have said the new shots could arrive around September. CDC Director Mandy Cohen had previously provided a later timeline, telling NPR that the vaccines could be available by the “early October time frame.”

Those shots still need approvals from the Food and Drug Administration and the CDC, which will set eligibility guidelines for the jabs. An independent panel of advisors to the CDC is meeting on Sept. 12 to vote on a recommendation for those guidelines. 

Officials from the CDC and FDA said the agencies will encourage Americans to receive an updated Covid shot and other key vaccines ahead of the fall, when respiratory viruses typically begin to spread more widely. That includes the annual flu shot and recently approved jabs that protect older adults and infants from respiratory syncytial virus.

“Our goal, our imperative, our task is to make sure we’re using those tools,” the CDC official said. “Vaccination is going to continue to be key this year because immunity wanes and because the Covid-19 virus continues to change.”

The arrival of updated vaccines offers some reassurance to Americans as the U.S. sees a slight uptick in Covid cases and hospitalizations. But those metrics remain below the summer peak that strained hospitals last year, the CDC official noted. 

The current surge appears to be fueled by newer strains of the virus like EG.5, or Eris, an omicron subvariant that accounted for 17.3% of all cases as of last week, according to the CDC. 

Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax designed their updated vaccines to target the omicron subvariant XBB.1.5, which is slowly declining in prevalence nationwide. But initial trial data from all three drugmakers suggest the new shots will still protect against EG.5. 

“One of the manufacturers have already made it clear that when testing their vaccine against the EG.5 that it looks like the neutralization is robust,” an FDA official told reporters Thursday. 

But it’s unclear how well the new shots will protect against another new omicron strain of the virus called BA.2.86, which has been identified in a very small number of cases in the U.S., U.K., Denmark and Israel.

“I think it’s too early to know for sure about BA.2.86 in terms of exact data,” the FDA official said, adding that more information will be available in the coming weeks. 

However, the official noted that the new vaccines will likely protect against any severe outcomes from catching the Covid virus.

Last week, the World Health Organization and the CDC said they are tracking BA.2.86 because it has 36 mutations that distinguish it from XBB.1.5. So far, there is no evidence that BA.2.86 spreads faster or causes more serious infections than previous versions. 

That’s how the body of Maurice “Mo” Miller started its journey to a sunny corner of NYU Langone Health’s intensive care unit — and became part of the quest to one day ease the nation’s transplant shortage with organs from animals.

“He always wanted to help people,” said Miller-Duffy, who struggled with the choice but is proud of her brother’s last act. “This tragic death, this fast short death — something good has come out of it.”

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Surgeons replaced Miller’s kidneys with one from a genetically modified pig on July 14. Then doctors and nurses cared for the deceased man like they would a living patient while anxiously ticking off the days.

Remarkably, over a month later the new organ is performing all the bodily functions of a healthy kidney — the longest a pig kidney has ever worked in a person. Now the countdown is on to see if the kidney can last into September, a second month.

The Associated Press got an inside look at the challenges of experiments with the dead that may help bring animal-to-human transplants closer to reality.

___

Getting an organ transplant today is a long shot. More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list, most who need a kidney. Thousands die waiting. Thousands more who could benefit aren’t even added to the list.

“I had seven cardiac arrests before I even was sick enough” to qualify for a new heart, said Dr. Robert Montgomery, chief of NYU Langone’s transplant institute. He’s a kidney transplant surgeon — and was lucky enough to get his own heart transplant in 2018.

Filling the gap, he’s convinced, will require using animal organs.

After decades of failed attempts, now pigs genetically modified so their organs are more humanlike are renewing interest in so-called xenotransplantation. Last year, University of Maryland surgeons tried to save a dying man with a pig heart — and he survived for two months.

Montgomery is getting more practice on the dead before taking a chance with a living patient. A handful of prior experiments at NYU and the University of Alabama at Birmingham have kept pig kidneys and hearts working in donated bodies for a few days to a week, avoiding the immediate rejection that doomed many earlier attempts.

But the most common kind of organ rejection develops over a month. That pig heart in Maryland worked great for nearly 50 days until abruptly faltering. Watching how pig kidneys reach those timepoints in donated bodies could offer vital lessons — but how long could Montgomery expect a family to turn over their loved one?

“I’m in awe of someone who can make a decision like that at, you know, one of the worst moments in their lives and really think about … humanity,” he said.

____

In Newburgh, New York, an ambulance had raced Miller to the hospital after he collapsed, a mass in his brain. He never woke up from the biopsy, brain-dead at just 57. Next steps were up to his sister, his closest relative.

Miller-Duffy asked about donating his organs but he didn’t qualify. That biopsy had found cancer.

Only then did the organ agency broach whole-body donation. Miller-Duffy wasn’t familiar with that, but the goal of improving kidney transplants, “that kind of struck a chord.” Another brother had died of kidney disease as a toddler. Other relatives have kidney-damaging illnesses or even died on dialysis.

Flipping through family photos, Miller-Duffy recalled how her brother would adopt animals and once took care of a terminally ill friend. Still, she had questions.

In a video call, Montgomery explained the pig transplant to Miller-Duffy and her wife, Sue Duffy — and why it could make a difference. Montgomery’s compassion won them over.

“His body is not being hurt, you know,” Duffy said. “It’s just an incubation for the study to be done.”

____

The experiment served as a rehearsal for one day operating on a living patient. Montgomery finished removing Miller’s own kidneys as a helicopter headed for the hospital’s riverside landing pad. Drs. Jeffrey Stern and Adam Griesemer, fellow NYU surgeons, raced in kidneys they’d removed from a pig bred by Blacksburg, Virginia-based Revivicor.

Sewing a pig kidney into a donated body isn’t much different than a regular transplant, Stern said. Post-surgery immune-suppressing drugs are standard, too.

One twist: Tacked onto the pig’s kidney was its thymus, a gland that trains immune cells — and thus might help protect the organ.

Lots of extra steps come before and after surgery.

First, what pig to use: Some have up to 10 genetic changes but Montgomery is betting one is enough — removal of a single porcine gene that triggers an immediate immune attack.

While the pigs are housed in a germ-free facility, researchers performed extra testing for any hidden infection. Everyone in the operating room must have certain vaccinations and undergo blood tests of their own.

Surgery over, doctors wheeled Miller’s body into the same ICU room where five years earlier Montgomery had recovered from his heart transplant.

Next came more intense testing than living patients could tolerate. Every week doctors biopsy the kidney, putting samples under the microscope to spot any hints of rejection. Blood is continually monitored, the spleen got a peek, and nurses keep close watch that the body is being properly maintained on the ventilator.

The first few weeks, Griesemer checked lab test results and vital signs multiple times a day: “You’re like, OK, hopefully things are still good — but is this the day it starts to turn?”

And they’re shipping biopsy samples to research partners across the country and as far away as France.

“Our staff doesn’t sleep that much,” said Elaina Weldon, a nurse practitioner who oversees the transplant research. But with each passing week, “everybody is really now at the point of, what more can we do? How far can we push?”

She knows firsthand the huge interest: NYU quizzed community groups and religious leaders before embarking on research with donated bodies that might have sounded “a little bit more on the sci-fi side of things.”

Instead, many people wanted to know how soon studies in the living could start, something the Food and Drug Administration will have to decide. Dozens have written Montgomery, eager to participate.

___

Montgomery regularly calls Miller-Duffy and her wife with updates, and invited them to NYU to meet the team. And as the study’s initial one-month deadline approached, he had another ask: It was going so well, could they keep her brother’s body for a second month?

It meant further postponing plans for a memorial service but Miller-Duffy agreed. Her request: That she gets to be there when her brother is finally disconnected from the ventilator.

Whatever happens next, the experiment has changed Sue Duffy’s outlook on organ donation.

“Maybe I don’t need all my organs when I go to heaven,” she said. “Before I was a hard no. … Now I’m a hard yes.”

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

“We’re in a different place,” said Dr. Mandy Cohen, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Widespread immunity from either Covid infection or vaccination, as well as updated booster shots, is reassuring public health officials ahead of the typical cold and flu season.

“I think we’re the most prepared that we’ve ever been,” Cohen said.

Anecdotes about family members, friends and neighbors who test positive for Covid are picking up steam, and Covid-related hospitalizations have been trending upward in recent weeks, according to NBC News data.

Still, the U.S. is nowhere near the level of severe Covid cases it has seen since the beginning of the pandemic.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

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The FDA and DEA are now calling on drugmakers to boost manufacturing to help with the issue, but some patients are turning to alternative medications, or lowering doses, to avoid going without.

Christy Moran was diagnosed with ADHD about a year and a half ago, and in recent months, she has had trouble refilling her prescriptions at pharmacies near her home in Hudson, Massachusetts.

“A lot of the times, they’ve told me that it’s either out of stock, they don’t know when they’re going to be getting it back in, or that they only have a certain amount available, and if they’ve only had a certain amount of available, they’ve told me they can fill that, but then I can’t get a refill for the rest of the month,” said Moran. “So there’s been many days when I haven’t had my medication.”

Once, she was able to find her medication from a Facebook page where people crowdsource tips on supply.

“The biggest thing that I see are posts from parents saying, ‘Hey, can someone let me know where they’ve been able to get a prescription?’ Very often, it’s like day by day, a pharmacy might have availability,” Moran said.

Her daughter has also been diagnosed with ADHD, but she takes a different medication that has not been as hard to find.

“She has a lot of challenges, just functionally getting through the day. So I can’t even imagine not having that medication for more than a day or for weeks, especially with school starting up,” Moran said.

The medication shortage started almost a year ago, due in part to manufacturing delays with a major drugmaker.

“It seems that the shortages are becoming wider, deeper and now affecting pretty much all stimulant classes and medicines that are used for ADHD,” said Dr. Timothy Wilens, chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

He said some patients have had to change medications as a result of the shortage.

“It’s a burden to families, because sometimes we’ve had to use smaller amounts of the medication, but at an increased frequency that may cost more than a copay, or we’ve had to go from a generic, less expensive one to a branded medication that may have a higher copay,” Wilens said.

In addition to manufacturing and supply chain issues, he said other companies weren’t able to increase supply because there are quotas for controlled substances.

“Remember, there were a number of issues with overprescribing and overuse of opioids, and new legislation and litigation that followed that, that now we’re seeing unintended consequences on stimulants,” said Wilens. “At the pharmacy level, the amount of stimulants that they get are often predetermined two to three months in advance with ordering. And if all you need is a few families to go from one pharmacy to another, and it uses that supply the pharmacy may have, that then wouldn’t be available to the regular families that go to this pharmacy.”

He shared some recommendations for patients impacted by these shortages:

• Renew prescriptions early
• Contact pharmacies to see if they have the medication in stock and let prescribers know to send it to that pharmacy
• Talk with your provider about exploring options for other substitute medications
• Have patience

“Try to have some patience with the pharmacy. They’re doing the best job they can. They’re caught in the middle of this. Practices like myself are up 50%, or half of our requests for stimulant prescriptions are actually resending stimulant prescriptions to different pharmacies because of shortages,” said Wilens. “And then finally for your child, or yourself, if you’re missing doses, etc. You know, it’s going to be hard. It’s going to be tough because you’re off your medicines for ADHD. But cut your child or yourself some slack, knowing that it’s not your fault. It’s an issue with the availability of these medicines.”

Scientists around the country are racing to learn how to use animal organs to save human lives, and bodies donated for research offer a remarkable rehearsal.

The latest experiment announced Wednesday by NYU Langone Health marks the longest a pig kidney has functioned in a person, albeit a deceased one -– and it’s not over. Researchers are set to track the kidney’s performance for a second month.

“Is this organ really going to work like a human organ? So far it’s looking like it is,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone’s transplant institute, told The Associated Press.

“It looks even better than a human kidney,” Montgomery said on July 14 as he replaced a deceased man’s own kidneys with a single kidney from a genetically modified pig — and watched it immediately start producing urine.

The possibility that pig kidneys might one day help ease a dire shortage of transplantable organs persuaded the family of Maurice “Mo” Miller from upstate New York to donate his body for the experiment. He’d died suddenly at 57 with a previously undiagnosed brain cancer, ruling out routine organ donation.

“I struggled with it,” his sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, told the AP about her decision. But he liked helping others and “I think this is what my brother would want. So I offered my brother to them.”

“He’s going to be in the medical books, and he will live on forever,” she added.

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Attempts at animal-to-human transplants, or xenotransplantation, have failed for decades as people’s immune systems attacked the foreign tissue. Now researchers are using pigs genetically modified so their organs better match human bodies.

Last year with special permission from regulators, University of Maryland surgeons transplanted a gene-edited pig heart into a dying man who was out of other options. He survived only two months before the organ failed for reasons that aren’t fully understood but that offer lessons for future attempts.

Next, rather than last-ditch efforts, the Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to allow some small but rigorous studies of pig heart or kidney transplants in volunteer patients.

The NYU experiment is one of a string of developments aimed at speeding the start of such clinical trials. Also Wednesday, the University of Alabama at Birmingham reported another important success — a pair of pig kidneys worked normally inside another donated body for seven days.

Kidneys don’t just make urine — they provide a wide range of jobs in the body. In the journal JAMA Surgery, UAB transplant surgeon Dr. Jayme Locke reported lab tests documenting the gene-modified pig organs’ performance. She said the weeklong experiment demonstrates they can “provide life-sustaining kidney function.”

These kinds of experiments are critical to answer remaining questions “in a setting where we’re not putting someone’s life in jeopardy,” said Montgomery, the NYU kidney transplant surgeon who also received his own heart transplant — and is acutely aware of the need for a new source of organs.

More than 100,000 patients are on the nation’s transplant list and thousands die each year waiting.

Maryland’s Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin cautions that it’s not clear how closely a deceased body will mimic a live patient’s reactions to a pig organ. But he said the research educates the public about xenotransplantation so “people will not be shocked” when it’s time to try again in the living.

Previously, NYU and a team at the University of Alabama at Birmingham had tested pig kidney transplants in deceased recipients for just two or three days. An NYU team also had transplanted pig hearts into donated bodies for three days of intense testing.

But how do pig organs react to a more common human immune attack that takes about a month to form? Only longer testing might tell.

The surgery itself isn’t that different from thousands he’s performed “but somewhere in the back of your mind is the enormity of what you’re doing … recognizing that this could have a huge impact on the future of transplantation,” Montgomery said.

The operation took careful timing. Early that morning Drs. Adam Griesemer and Jeffrey Stern flew hundreds of miles to a facility where Virginia-based Revivicor Inc. houses genetically modified pigs — and retrieved kidneys lacking a gene that would trigger immediate destruction by the human immune system.

As they raced back to NYU, Montgomery was removing both kidneys from the donated body so there’d be no doubt if the soon-to-arrive pig version was working. One pig kidney was transplanted, the other stored for comparison when the experiment ends.

One other trick: Surgeons attached the pig’s thymus to the transplanted kidney in hopes that the gland, which helps train immune cells, would increase human tolerance of the organ. Otherwise, the team is relying on standard immune-suppressing drugs used by today’s transplant patients.

“You’re always nervous,” Griesemer said. To see it so rapidly kickstart, “there was a lot of thrill and lot of sense of relief.”

How long should these experiments last? Alabama’s Locke said that’s not clear -– and among the ethical questions are how long a family is comfortable or whether it’s adding to their grief. Because maintaining a brain-dead person on a ventilator is difficult, it’s also dependent on how stable the donated body is.

In her own experiment, the donated body was stable enough that if the study wasn’t required to end after a week, “I think we could have gone much longer, which I think offers great hope,” she said.

AP video journalist Shelby Lum contributed to this report.

Some anesthesiologists in the U.S. and Canada say they’ve seen growing numbers of patients on the weight-loss drugs who inhaled food and liquid into their lungs while sedated because their stomachs were still full — even after following standard instructions to stop eating for six to eight hours in advance.

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The drugs can slow digestion so much that it puts patients at increased risk for the problem, called pulmonary aspiration, which can cause dangerous lung damage, infections and even death, said Dr. Ion Hobai, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“This is such a serious sort of potential complication that everybody who takes this drug should know about it,” said Hobai, who was among the first to flag the issue.

Nearly 6 million prescriptions for the class of drugs that include Wegovy and Ozempic were written between January and May in the U.S. for people who don’t have diabetes, according to Komodo Health, a health care technology company. The drugs induce weight loss by mimicking the actions of hormones, found primarily in the gut, that kick in after people eat. They also target signals between the gut and the brain that control appetite and feelings of fullness, and by slowing how fast the stomach empties.

In June, the American Society of Anesthesiologists issued guidance advising patients to skip daily weight-loss medications on the day of surgery and hold off on weekly injections for a week before any sedation procedures. Dr. Michael Champeau, the group’s president, said the action was based on anecdotal reports of problems — including aspiration — from around the country.

It’s not clear how many patients taking the anti-obesity drugs may be affected by the issue. But because the consequences can be so dire, Hobai and a group of colleagues decided to speak out. Writing in the Canadian Journal of Anesthesia, they called for the drug to be stopped for even longer — about three weeks before sedation.

That accounts for how long semaglutide, the active medication in Wegovy, remains in the body, said Dr. Philip Jones, a Mayo Clinic anesthesiologist who is also deputy editor-in-chief of the journal.

“When 90% of it is gone, which is after three weeks, hopefully everything should go back to normal,” Jones said.

Champeau and Jones both acknowledged there’s not enough evidence to say for certain how long semaglutide should be held to make anesthesia safe. Many patients won’t see providers far enough in advance to stop the drug three weeks before procedures, Champeau noted.

Aspiration occurs in one of every 2,000 to 3,000 operations that require sedation, and almost half of patients who aspirate during surgery develop a related lung injury. But case reports show recent patients on semaglutide had problems even when they stopped food as long as 20 hours before their procedures.

“There’s nothing that says if you fast twice as long, it will be OK,” Champeau said.

Among the several reports detailing potentially serious problems was one of Hobai’s patients, a 42-year-old man in Boston who recently began taking Wegovy, had to be intubated and suffered respiratory failure that put him in intensive care. He aspirated food that remained in his stomach despite fasting for 18 hours.

In Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a 31-year-old-woman on a low dose of Ozempic had fasted for 10 hours before a routine endoscopy prior to bariatric surgery last fall. The procedure had to be stopped because solid food remained in her stomach and she was at high risk for aspiration, the report said.

Since then, doctors have seen dozens of similar cases as use of the weight-loss medication has grown, said Dr. Elisa Lund, an anesthesiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Medicine. “It has exponentially increased,” she said.

Hobai is completing a retrospective study of almost 200 patients taking semaglutide. While it’ll be published later this year, the work so far appears to confirm a small study from Brazil, he said. In that study, about a quarter of patients taking semaglutide had residual food in their stomachs during procedures requiring sedation — even after stopping the drug for 10 days.

The American Society of Anesthesiologists advises doctors who are in doubt to treat patients who haven’t paused the drug as if they have full stomachs, which can mean using different types of sedation protocols or delaying procedures, if possible. Jones added that research is urgently needed to update guidelines for doctors and patients.

Novo Nordisk, which makes Ozempic, Wegovy and similar drugs, said the firm’s clinical trial and post-marketing safety data did not show that the medications led to aspiration. But the drugmaker noted that the medications are known to cause delayed emptying of the stomach and that the labels warn of possible gastrointestinal side effects.

Stopping the medications for three weeks can cause problems, too. Patients with diabetes will need another way to control their blood sugar and those seeking to lose weight may regain some, Hobai said.

Hobai suggests that people using Wegovy and similar drugs tell their doctors before sedation and discuss the risks and benefits.

“If you’re taking this drug and you need an operation, you will need to have some extra precautions,” he said.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks told CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday his top priority was to meet demand for the company’s drug, Mounjaro, which is currently only approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat diabetes but is expected to soon be cleared to treat obesity, along with other health conditions.

“It’s my top priority, is expanding the capacity of our ability to make not just Mounjaro but other drugs like it in our pipeline to meet the challenge here,” Ricks said. “People are frustrated when they can’t get their medicine. We understand that, and we’re going to fix that problem.”

Eli Lilly stock surged 15% Tuesday after its better-than-expected earnings report. The drug’s stock — which hit an all-time high of $538 in early trading, according to FactSet — was also bolstered by news that a peer company’s similar diabetes and weight-loss drug could be used to treat cardiovascular issues.

Ricks said the company’s recently opened factory in North Carolina would help increase output, adding that Eli Lilly said last year it planned to double its monthly output by December. He also said the company would soon be launching Mounjaro in a vial as well as in a multiuse pen, which will help increase global supply.

Ricks said he thinks Eli Lilly’s products will help people realize that obesity needs to be treated as an illness, not a just a problem that can be fixed with diet and exercise alone. He likened obesity to depression, noting Eli Lilly’s role in manufacturing Prozac, the depression drug.

“And before we had Prozac, people thought, doctors would tell you, ‘Well, you’re just a little sad.’ We know that’s not true, there’s something called clinical depression,” Ricks said. “We now treat it like a disease. I think in five, 10 years we’ll look back and think about chronic weight management and obesity the same way.”

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An infection with RSV is a coldlike nuisance for most healthy people, but it can be life-threatening for the very young and the elderly. There are no vaccines for babies yet so the new drug, a lab-made antibody that helps the immune system fight off the virus, is expected to fill a critical need.

The drug, developed by AstraZeneca and Sanofi, is expected to be ready in the fall before the RSV season, typically November through March. In the U.S., about 58,000 children younger than 5 are hospitalized for RSV each year and several hundred die.

A panel of outside advisers to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended the one-time shot for infants born just before or during the RSV season and for those less than 8 months old before the season starts. They also recommended a dose for some 8- to 19-months-olds at higher risk of a serious illness from RSV.

The CDC director signed off on the panel’s recommendations later Thursday.

“We had a terribly bad RSV season last year and I’m thrilled that we have a new tool to protect our infants,” Dr. Mandy Cohen told The Associated Press earlier this week.

The drug, to be sold under the brand name Beyfortus, is expected to cost $495 per dose, and to be covered by insurance. Panelists acknowledged that it will be a challenge at first to give the shot and for providers to be reimbursed by insurers.

In May, the Food and Drug Administration approved two RSV vaccines for older adults from GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer. In August, the FDA is expected to make a decision on approving Pfizer’s vaccine for pregnant women, with the aim of passing along protection to their newborns.

Although the new drug is not a vaccine, the expert panel also supported including it in Vaccines for Children, a government program providing free immunizations. The American Academy of Pediatrics is urging hospitals to stock Beyfortus so that newborns can get it during RSV season before they go home.

Lupin, the New Jersey-based drugmaker, announced Saturday that it was recalling the batches after tests showed the pills had decreased levels of ascorbic acid, an inactive ingredient, and high levels of a “known impurity.” 

“This could potentially impact the effectiveness of the product which could potentially result in unexpected pregnancy,” the company’s announcement said.

The affected batches were distributed between June 3, 2022 and May 31 of this year and have expiration dates of January or September 2024.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for more information about the impurity in the pill and the role ascorbic acid plays in it. The company has also asked pharmacists and retailers to “discontinue distribution of the recalled product lots immediately.”

Read the full story at NBCNews.com 

When an infection is endemic in a certain region, it means that it’s constantly present at a steady and predictable level.

Florida is at the forefront of the outbreak, with nearly one-fifth of leprosy cases in the US originating from the state, the CDC says.

Central Florida accounted for 81% of cases within the state, the research letter said.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is an ancient disease that can cause damage to the skin and nervous system.

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The disease is caused by a bacteria called Mycobacterium leprae, which can attack the nerves, causing a loss of sensation in the affected areas.

When left untreated, leprosy can also cause blindness, ulcers, disfigurements, and more.

The disease dates back to 600 B.C. and was considered devastating for many years. Isolation treatments on remote islands off the coasts of Hawaii, Louisiana and Massachusetts were used to treat those who suffered from leprosy, and to limit exposure to others.

With the advancement of modern medicine came a cure for leprosy, and the disease is now treatable by antibiotics.

Early diagnosis is key, though, as antibiotics cannot reverse nerve damage.

Leprosy in the US is most common (80-90%) among immigrants, especially from Mexico, the Florida Department of Health says.

Infection is rare as 95% of people around the world are naturally immune to leprosy. However, as many as 2 million people are permanently disabled as a result of the disease, the CDC says.

The disease is spread by prolonged contact with someone who is infected, but experts have also placed the blame on armadillos.

The barrel-shaped mammals are found frequently across Florida – and they’re also the only animal in the world known to spread leprosy, the CDC says.

It’s not known exactly how leprosy spreads between people, but the best way to avoid the infection is to avoid prolonged contact with an infected person – or an armadillo.

New research, published Tuesday in the journal Pediatrics, confirms a phenomenon known as the “allergic march” — a pattern that describes the way allergies tend to develop and progress in children, beginning in infancy through age 3.

The study, which analyzed medical records data collected between 1999 and 2020 from more than 200,000 children, found that kids tended to be first diagnosed with eczema, also called atopic dermatitis, at 4 months, on average. Next came diagnoses of food allergies that cause symptoms that range from hives to anaphylaxis — a life-threatening allergic reaction that affects the whole body and can cause the airways to swell and close — and asthma, both around 13 months old. At 26 months, the study found, children developed allergic rhinitis, or hay fever. In rare cases, children may go on to develop a fifth allergy, called eosinophilic esophagitis, by 35 months old.

Dr. Stanislaw Gabryszewski, a fellow in the Division of Allergy and Immunology at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia who led the study, said the “allergic march” doesn’t mean every child who has eczema will develop every allergy described.

“Each child is different. Some may have one, others may have a couple, others may have all of them,” he said.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com

All the infected patients were older than 60, and each had a compromised immune system, the Washington Department of Health said in a statement Friday. They were all hospitalized, it said.

Four patients were treated in Pierce County, home of the state’s third-largest city, Tacoma, and one was treated in adjacent Thurston County, state health officials said.

Though genetic fingerprinting known as genome sequencing helped health professionals conclude the infections most likely had the same origin, the department had yet to trace the outbreak to a common food source, the department said.

The bacteria can be found on food preparation surfaces, fresh, unpasteurized cheese, leafy greens, and cold cuts, as well as in raw milk.

The bacteria is easily defeated by heating food to 165 degrees or higher.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Medics gave the 21-year-old tests for Covid-19, and at a hospital the Brazoria County resident was told he likely had a viral infection. In early June, after symptoms persisted, tests at a different hospital made it official: Shingler had malaria.

“I would wake up really early in the morning and I would start shaking,” Shingler said. A high fever would follow and lead to vomiting.

“It was a lot of just trying my best to make myself eat something, as small as I could, which usually I was unsuccessful, or trying to drink water, which, again, I was unsuccessful,” Shingler said.

The disease, transmitted by mosquitoes, sickens more than 200 million people annually around the world and kills hundreds of thousands. Shingler is one of handful of people in the U.S. recently diagnosed with malaria without having traveled recently.

Shingler does not know how he got malaria or from where. He said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been in contact with him as officials try and find the source.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

That’s a notion that has long fueled hope for many of the more than 40% of Americans who are considered obese — and fueled criticism by those who advocate for wider weight acceptance. Soon, it may be a reality.

High-dose oral versions of the medication in the weight-loss drug Wegovy may work as well as the popular injections when it comes to paring pounds and improving health, according to final results of two studies released Sunday night. The potent tablets also appear to work for people with diabetes, who notoriously struggle to lose weight.

Drugmaker Novo Nordisk plans to ask the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to approve the pills later this year.

“If you ask people a random question, ‘Would you rather take a pill or an injection?’ People overwhelmingly prefer a pill,” said Dr. Daniel Bessesen, chief of endocrinology at Denver Health, who treats patients with obesity but was not involved in the new research.

That’s assuming, Bessesen said, that both ways to take the medications are equally effective, available and affordable. “Those are the most important factors for people,” he said.

There have been other weight-loss pills on the market, but none that achieve the substantial reductions seen with injected drugs like Wegovy. People with obesity will be “thrilled” to have an oral option that’s as effective, said Dr. Katherine Saunders, clinical professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Health and co-founder of Intellihealth, a weight-loss center.

Novo Nordisk already sells Rybelsus, which is approved to treat diabetes and is an oral version of semaglutide, the same medication used in the diabetes drug Ozempic and Wegovy. It comes in doses up to 14 milligrams.

But results of two gold-standard trials released at the American Diabetes Association’s annual meeting looked at how doses of oral semaglutide as high as 25 milligrams and 50 milligrams worked to reduce weight and improve blood sugar and other health markers.

A 16-month study of about 1,600 people who were overweight or obese and already being treated for Type 2 diabetes found the high-dose daily pills lowered blood sugar significantly better than the standard dose of Rybelsus. From a baseline weight of 212 pounds, the higher doses also resulted in weight loss of between 15 and 20 pounds, compared to about 10 pounds on the lower dose.

Another 16-month study of more than 660 adults who had obesity or were overweight with at least one related disease — but not diabetes — found the 50-milligram daily pill helped people lose an average of about 15% of their body weight, or about 35 pounds, versus about 6 pounds with a dummy pill, or placebo.

That’s “notably consistent” with the weight loss spurred by weekly shots of the highest dose of Wegovy, the study authors said.

But there were side effects. About 80% of participants receiving any size dose of oral semaglutide experienced things like mild to moderate intestinal problems, such as nausea, constipation and diarrhea.

In the 50-milligram obesity trial, there was evidence of higher rates of benign tumors in people who took the drug versus a placebo. In addition, about 13% of those who took the drug had “altered skin sensation” such as tingling or extra sensitivity.

Medical experts predict the pills will be popular, especially among people who want to lose weight but are fearful of needles. Plus, tablets would be more portable than injection pens and they don’t have to be stored in the refrigerator.

But the pills aren’t necessarily a better option for the hundreds of thousands of people already taking injectable versions such as Ozempic or Wegovy, said Dr. Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity medicine expert at Massachusetts General Hospital.

“I don’t find significant hesitancy surrounding receiving an injection,” she said. “A lot of people like the ease of taking a medication once a week.”

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In addition, she said, some patients may actually prefer shots to the new pills, which have to be taken 30 minutes before eating or drinking in the morning.

Paul Morer, 56, who works for a New Jersey hospital system, lost 85 pounds using Wegovy and hopes to lose 30 more. He said he would probably stick with the weekly injections, even if pills were available.

“I do it on Saturday morning. It’s part of my routine,” he said. “I don’t even feel the needle. It’s a non-issue.”

Some critics also worry that a pill will also put pressure on people who are obese to use it, fueling social stigma against people who can’t — or don’t want to — lose weight, said Tigress Osborn, chair of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance.

“There is no escape from the narrative that your body is wrong and it should change,” Osborn said.

Still, Novo Nordisk is banking on the popularity of a higher-dose pill to treat both diabetes and obesity. Sales of Rybelsus reached about $1.63 billion last year, more than double the 2021 figure.

Other companies are working on oral versions of drugs that work as well as Eli Lilly and Co.’s Mounjaro — an injectable diabetes drug expected to be approved for weight-loss soon. Lilly researchers reported promising mid-stage trial results for an oral pill called orforglipron to treat patients who are obese or overweight with and without diabetes.

Pfizer, too, has released mid-stage results for dangulgipron, an oral drug for diabetes taken twice daily with food.

Novo Nordisk officials said it’s too early to say what the cost of the firm’s high-dose oral pills would be or how the company plans to guarantee adequate manufacturing capacity to meet demand. Despite surging popularity, injectable doses of Wegovy will be in short supply until at least September, company officials said.

For nearly a decade, scientists at the University of California, Irvine have been studying skin moles to understand why they produce such long hairs. Their new paper shows that such moles contain particular molecules that promote hair growth.

“Nature gave us clues in those hairy skin moles,” said Maksim Plikus, the study’s lead author and a professor of developmental and cell biology at UC, Irvine.

People normally shed between 50 and 100 hairs per day, then generate new hair from the stem cells in hair follicles. But in individuals with baldness or pattern baldness — what doctors call alopecia or androgenic alopecia — the stem cells lie dormant, so new hair can’t grow.

In experiments involving mice, Plikus and his research team demonstrated that a molecule called osteopontin, which is especially prominent in hairy skin moles, could activate hair follicle stem cells that were previously dormant.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration‘s independent panel of advisors on Thursday recommended that updated Covid shots for the fall and winter target one of the XBB variants, which are now the dominant strains of the virus nationwide. 

The committee unanimously voted that the new jabs should be monovalent — meaning they are designed to protect against one variant of Covid — and target a member of the XBB family.

Those strains of Covid are descendants of the omicron variant, which caused cases to surge to record levels early last year. They are some of the most immune-evasive strains to date.

Advisors also generally agreed that the new shots should specifically target a variant called XBB.1.5. The panel only discussed that specific strain selection and did not vote on the matter.

XBB.1.5 accounted for nearly 40% of all Covid cases in the U.S. as of early June, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That proportion is slowly declining, and cases of the related XBB.1.16 and XBB.2.3 variants are on the rise. 

Advisors noted that XBB.1.5 appears most ideal for the fall since vaccine manufacturers Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax have already started to develop jabs targeting the strain.

“The 1.5 looks good. It seems like it’s the most feasible to get across the finish line early without resulting in delays and availability,” said Dr. Melinda Wharton, a senior official at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases. “The vaccine we can use is the vaccine that we can get. And so it feels like this would be a good choice.”

The FDA typically follows the advice of its advisory committees, but is not required to do so. It’s unclear when the agency will make a final decision on strain selection.

There is also uncertainty about which age groups the FDA and CDC will advise to receive the updated shots this fall.

But the panel’s recommendation is already a win for Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax — all of which have been conducting early trials on their respective XBB.1.5 shots ahead of the meeting.

“Novavax expects to be ready for the commercial delivery of a protein-based monovalent XBB COVID vaccine this fall in line with today’s [advisory committee] recommendation,” said John Jacobs, the company’s president and CEO.

The U.S. is expected to shift vaccine distribution to the private sector this fall. That means the vaccine makers will start selling their new Covid products directly to health-care providers and vie for commercial market share. 

The panel’s recommendation coincides with a broader shift in how the pandemic impacts the country and the world at large. 

Covid cases and deaths have dropped to new lows, governments have rolled back stringent health mandates like masking and social distancing and many people believe the pandemic is over altogether.  

But Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s vaccine division, said the agency is concerned that the U.S. will have another Covid wave “during a time when the virus has further evolved, immunity of the population has waned further and we move indoors for wintertime.”

Updated Covid vaccines that are periodically updated to target a high circulating variant will restore protective immunity against the virus, said Dr. David Kaslow, a senior official in the FDA’s vaccine division. 

It’s a similar approach to how the strains are selected for the annual flu shot. Researchers assess strains of the virus in circulation and estimate which will be the most prevalent during the upcoming fall and winter.

But it’s unclear how many Americans will roll up their sleeves to take the updated shots later this year. 

Only about 17% of the U.S. population — around 56 million people —have received Pfizer and Moderna’s boosters since they were approved in September, according to the CDC.

More than 40% of adults 65 and older have been boosted with those shots, while the rate among younger adults and children ranges between 18% and 20%.

Those boosters were bivalent, meaning they targeted the original strain of Covid and the omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5. 

Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax shot data

During the meeting, Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax presented preliminary data on updated versions of their shots designed to target XBB variants. 

Moderna has been evaluating shots targeting XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16 — another transmissible omicron descendant, according to Rituparna Das, the company’s vice president of Covid vaccines. 

Preclinical trial data on mice suggests that a monovalent vaccine targeting XBB.1.5 produces a more robust immune response against the currently circulating XBB variants than the authorized bivalent shot targeting BA.4 and BA.5, according to Das. 

She added that clinical trial data on more than 100 people similarly demonstrates that the monovalent XBB.1.5 vaccine produces protective antibodies against all XBB variants. All trial participants had previously received four Covid vaccine doses.

Das said that comprehensive protection against XBB strains is likely due to the fewer unique mutations between the variants, which means their composition is similar.

There are only three unique mutations between the variants XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16, according to Darin Edwards, Moderna’s Covid vaccine program leader. By comparison, there are 28 mutations between omicron BA.4 and BA.5.

That means the immune response an updated shot produces against XBB variants will likely be similar, regardless of which specific variant it targets, Edwards said.

Pfizer also presented early trial data indicating that a monovalent vaccine targeting an XBB variant offers improved immune responses against the XBB family. 

The company provided specific timelines for delivering an updated vaccine, depending on the strain the FDA selects. 

Pfizer will be able to deliver a monovalent shot targeting XBB.1.5 by July and a jab targeting XBB.1.16 by August, according to Kena Swanson, the company’s senior principal scientist.

Pfizer won’t be able to distribute a new shot until October if the FDA chooses a completely different strain, Swanson said.

Novavax did not provide a specific timeline for delivering a shot targeting XBB.1.5, but noted that an XBB.1.16 shot would take eight weeks longer.

Novavax unveiled preclinical trial data indicating that monovalent vaccines targeting XBB.1.5 and XBB.1.16 induce higher immune responses to XBB subvariants than bivalent vaccines do. 

Data also demonstrates that an XBB.1.5 shot produces antibodies that block XBB.2.3 from binding to and infecting human cells, according to Dr. Filip Dubovsky, Novavax’s chief medical officer.

Dubovsky said the trial results support the use of a monovalent XBB.1.5 shot in the fall.

Novavax’s jab uses protein-based technology, a decades-old method for fighting viruses used in routine vaccinations against hepatitis B and shingles.

The vaccine works differently than Pfizer’s and Moderna’s messenger RNA vaccines but achieves the same outcome: teaching your body how to fight Covid.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report examined the homicide and suicide rates among 10- to 24-year-olds from 2001 to 2021.

The increase is alarming and “reflects a mental health crisis among young people and a need for a number of policy changes,” said Dr. Steven Woolf, a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher who studies U.S. death trends and wasn’t involved in the CDC report.

Experts cited several possible reasons for the increases, including higher rates of depression, limited availability of mental health services and the number of guns in U.S. homes.

Guns were used in 54% of suicides and 93% of homicides among the age group in 2021, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

“Picture a teenager sitting in their bedroom feeling desperate and making a decision, impulsively, to take their own life,” Woolf said. If they have access to a gun, “it’s game over.”

Suicide and homicide were the second and third leading causes of death for 10- to 24-year-olds, after a category of accidental deaths that includes motor vehicle crashes, falls, drownings and overdoses. Other researchers have grouped the data by the method of death, and concluded that guns are now the biggest killer of U.S. children.

Earlier this year, Woolf and other researchers looking at CDC data noted dramatic increases in child and adolescent death rates overall at the beginning of the pandemic, and found suicide and homicide were important factors.

The report also found:

—Suicide and homicide death rates remained far higher for older teenagers and young adults than they were for 10- to 14-year-olds.

—In 2021, there were about 2,900 suicides in youths ages 10 to 19, and 4,200 in 20- to 24-year-olds. About 3,000 homicide deaths were reported in the younger group, and nearly 3,900 in the adults in their early 20s.

—The homicide death rate jumped from 8.9 deaths per 100,000 teens aged 15 to 19 in 2019 to 12.3 in 2020. It rose to 12.8 deaths per 100,000 in 2021, the highest since 1997, according to CDC data.

—Homicide deaths became more common than suicide deaths among 15- to 19-year-olds, while suicide was more common in the younger and older age groups.

—While large increases were seen in homicide rates for young Black and Hispanic people in the U.S., there were not significant increases for their white counterparts, other CDC data shows.

—Among 20- to 24-year-olds, the homicide death rate jumped 34% from 2019 to 2020 — from 13.4 per 100,000 population to 18 per 100,000. It held stable in 2021, but the suicide rate rose enough in 2021 — to 19.4 per 100,000 — to surpass the homicide rate.

Suicide death rates in children and teens were rising before COVID-19, but they jumped up at the beginning of the pandemic. Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, a psychiatrist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, said the reasons may be hard to pinpoint, but that isolation during COVID-19 lockdowns could be a factor.

“There is a misperception that if you talk to young people about depression, they’ll get depressed. A don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy for depression is not effective,” Trivedi said. “The earlier we can identify the ones who need help, the better chance we’ll have at saving lives.”

If you or someone you know needs help, please contact the National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988, or reach out to the Crisis Text Line by texting ‘Home’ to 741741, anytime.

Even with the windows and doors closed and sealed, it’s still possible for some pollution to make its way into your home. And certain activities around the house, such as vacuuming or burning essential oils, can actually make indoor air quality worse. And turning on certain devices, like your kitchen vent, may even bring the outdoor air inside.

Here’s what to know about running your AC when air quality is bad and how to stay safe.

Should you run your AC when air quality is bad or when it’s smoky outside?

Yes, you can run your AC when air quality is bad, as it is currently in much of the United States due to the wildfire smoke from Canada — but only do so if it’s recirculating inside air, which means that it’s not pulling air in from the outdoors, Dr. Roshini Rajapaksa of NYU Langone said in a June 8 segment on TODAY.

When it’s smoky outside, air conditioners that pull air from outside can bring fine particulate matter, or tiny airborne particles, from the smoke into your home, which can have negative health effects.

Many window units pull in air from outside into the home and do not have strong filtration systems, whereas centralized AC and AC units attached to walls tend not to pull in air from the outside and usually filter well the little bit that might get inside, according to Good Housekeeping’s experts.

The most effective type of air filter for fine particulate matter, used in many air conditioners and HVAC systems, are HEPA filters, which “theoretically remove remove at least 99.97% of dust, pollen, mold, bacteria, and any airborne particles with a size of 0.3 microns,” according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

When running AC in poor air quality, it’s important that its filter is up to date, so consider replacing it.

You can also buy air purifiers with HEPA filters, which are not only safe to run when the air quality is poor — it’s recommended, if you have one, NBC News medical correspondent Dr. Natalie Azar said in a June 8 segment on TODAY.

Azar stressed the importance of air circulation when spending time indoors (which is highly recommended) when air quality is poor outside. Air conditioners that are not pulling air from outside are one way to circulate air indoors, but you can also use box fans.

If you’re going to use a built-in fan or vent in your home to circulate air, such as in the kitchen or bathroom, make sure it’s not pulling in air from outside, Azar added.

What happens if you go out in unhealthy air quality?

If you go outside in unhealthy air quality, especially from wildfire smoke, you inhale fine particulate matter, or small particles found in dust, smoke, vehicle exhaust, etc., which can cause airways to constrict.

“When we inhale, the particles (from smoke) stimulate our airways to become inflamed to not function normally,” Dr. Ronald Crystal, a pulmonologist and the chair of genetic medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, previously told TODAY.com.

For healthy individuals, i.e. people without respiratory conditions such as asthma, COPD or post-COVID breathing problems and people without underlying heart problems, the effects of breathing in poor quality air are likely to be short term, such as irritation, like a tickle in your throat, Crystal said.

Examples of short-term symptoms due to unhealthy air quality include light coughing, eye burning or irritation, headaches, fatigue and chest tightness. (If you’re concerned by any of your symptoms or you start to have trouble breathing, wheezing, heavy coughing or dizziness, seek medical attention.)

Inhaling fine particulate matter can also increase risk of infection and worsen allergies, Azar said.

How to keep indoor air safe when air quality is poor

When air quality is poor, it’s important to spend as much time inside as possible, especially for pets, children, pregnant people and those with underlying health conditions.

To keep your indoor air as safe as possible, experts recommend:

• Use an air purifier, or an air conditioner that pulls in inside air and has an up-to-date, effective air filter. If your air purifier is small, run it in a smaller room and say in there as much as possible.
• Keep doors and windows closed and sealed.
• Run a box fan.
• Avoid running any fans that pull in outside air, such as hood vents in the kitchen or vents in the bathroom.
• Avoid burning essential oils or candles.
• Avoid smoking or vaping inside.
• Avoid vacuuming.
• Avoid cooking foods indoors that will produce a lot of smoke or fumes, such as frying or grilling.

Crystal speculated that the unhealthy air quality will dissipate in the next few days. So it’s important to continue to check the air quality in your area before going outside and take appropriate precautions, such as wearing a N95 or KN95 mask, avoiding exercising or other strenuous activities outside and limiting time outdoors.

This story first appeared on TODAY.com. More from TODAY

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It’s called donation after circulatory death, a method long used to recover kidneys and other organs but not more fragile hearts. Duke Health researchers said Wednesday that using those long-shunned hearts could allow possibly thousands more patients a chance at a lifesaving transplant — expanding the number of donor hearts by 30%.

“Honestly if we could snap our fingers and just get people to use this, I think it probably would go up even more than that,” said transplant surgeon Dr. Jacob Schroder of Duke University School of Medicine, who led the research. “This really should be standard of care.”

The usual method of organ donation occurs when doctors, through careful testing, determine someone has no brain function after a catastrophic injury — meaning they’re brain-dead. The body is left on a ventilator that keeps the heart beating and organs oxygenated until they’re recovered and put on ice.

In contrast, donation after circulatory death occurs when someone has a nonsurvivable brain injury but, because all brain function hasn’t yet ceased, the family decides to withdraw life support and the heart stops. That means organs go without oxygen for a while before they can be recovered — and surgeons, worried the heart would be damaged, left it behind.

What’s changed: Now doctors can remove those hearts and put them in a machine that “reanimates” them, pumping through blood and nutrients as they’re transported –- and demonstrating if they work OK before the planned transplant.

Wednesday’s study, conducted at multiple hospitals around the country, involved 180 transplant recipients, half who received DCD hearts and half given hearts from brain-dead donors that were transported on ice.

Survival six months later was about the same –- 94% for the recipients of cardiac-death donations and 90% for those who got the usual hearts, the researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The findings are exciting and show “the potential to increase fairness and equity in heart transplantation, allowing more persons with heart failure to have access to this lifesaving therapy,” transplant cardiologist Dr. Nancy Sweitzer of Washington University in St. Louis, who wasn’t involved with the study, wrote in an accompanying editorial.

Last year, 4,111 heart transplants were performed in the U.S., a record number but not nearly enough to meet the need. Hundreds of thousands of people suffer from advanced heart failure but many never are offered a transplant and still others die waiting for one.

Researchers in Australia and the U.K. first began trying DCD heart transplants about seven years ago. Duke pioneered the U.S. experiments in late 2019, one of about 20 U.S. hospitals now offering this method. Last year, there were 345 such heart transplants in the U.S., and 227 so far this year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing.

In the Duke-led study, nearly 90% of the DCD hearts recovered wound up being transplanted, signaling that it’s worthwhile for more hospitals to start using the newer method.

Sweitzer noted that many would-be donors have severe brain injuries but don’t meet the criteria for brain death, meaning a lot of potentially usable hearts never get donated. But she also cautioned that there’s still more to learn, noting that the very sickest patients on the waiting list were less likely to receive DCD hearts in the study.

Schroder said most who received DCD hearts already had implanted heart pumps that made the transplant more difficult to perform, even if they weren’t ranked as high on the waiting list.

The study was funded by TransMedics, which makes the heart storage system.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The findings were presented Sunday at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting in Chicago and simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

The data is the first to show how a targeted treatment for early-stage lung cancer impacts survival, said Dr. Roy Herbst, the trial’s principal investigator and deputy director at Yale Cancer Center. The drug, called osimertinib and sold under the name Tagrisso, is directed at a specific receptor that helps cancer cells grow.

“I think we’re curing some patients,” Herbst said. “We’re really showing progress in lung cancer like never before.”

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In an international study of 682 lung cancer patients, roughly half of the participants were given the daily pill for three years, while the other half received a placebo. Five years after their diagnosis, 88% of those who took the pill were still alive, compared with 78% of the placebo group. The study was funded by AstraZeneca and included people from more than 20 countries across the U.S., Europe, South America, Asia and the Middle East. 

Read the full story at NBCNews.com 

Users say berberine, which is found in a number of plants, including barberry plants, helps curb appetite and improve blood sugar levels, resulting in weight loss. Google searches for “berberine” began to increase at the end of March before they spiked in late May.

Berberine is rising in popularity as demand increases for medications like Ozempic and Wegovy, known for their weight loss effects.

Ozempic and Wegovy are part of a class of drugs called GLP-1 agonists, which mimic a hormone that helps reduce food intake and appetite. They are highly effective, but they are in short supply in the U.S. They are also expensive — around $1,000 or more out of pocket — and need to be prescribed by a doctor.

By comparison, berberine appears to be widely available online, and it usually ranges in price from $15 to $40 for a month’s supply. 

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The experiment was part of a proof-of-concept study published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The patient, Gert-Jan Oskam, suffered a spinal cord injury from a motorbike accident 12 years ago.

“When we met him, he was completely paralyzed, unable to take a step by himself without assistance,” said Grégoire Courtine, the study’s author and a neuroscientist at EPFL, a research university in Switzerland.

In 2017, Oskam received an experimental implant in his spinal cord as part of a different clinical trial, which helped him regain his ability to walk. By lifting his heel slightly — which he could do on his own — Oskam would trigger an electrical current that stimulated nerves in his spinal cord to allow him to take steps. But those steps were clunky, and he couldn’t navigate around obstacles or walk on uneven surfaces.

And, after two years of this electrical nerve stimulation, as the approach is known, Oskam’s recovery plateaued. So he joined the proof-of-concept study in 2021.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The tickborne illness is responsible for at least one death in Maine so far this spring, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

Here’s what you should know:

What is Powassan virus and how do you get it?

Humans become infected with Powassan through the bite of an infected deer or woodchuck tick.

The rare disease is often severe and can lead to infections of the brain or spinal cord, according to the CDC.

How common is the virus?

Cases of the virus are rare in the United States, with about 25 cases reported each year since 2015.

So far this year, one death has already been reported.

The Maine CDC confirmed Thursday someone in Sagadahoc County had died of the virus.

“The adult developed neurologic symptoms and died while in the hospital after becoming infected, likely in Maine,” the state reported. “This is the first case of the tickborne illness identified in the state this year.”

Where is the virus found?

Powassan virus infections have been reported in the United States, Canada, and Russia, according to the CDC.

In the U.S., cases are most often seen in the Northeast and the Great Lakes regions, particularly in the late spring, early summer and mid-fall time frames.

What are the symptoms of the Powassan virus?

Symptoms of Powassan virus infection usually start one week to one month after the tick bite. People who get sick may have fever, headache, vomiting, weakness, confusion, seizures, or memory loss, the center said.

Some people may experience serious neurologic problems, such as brain or spinal cord inflammation. Severe infection may result in death. Many people infected with Powassan virus do not get sick, however.

How can you prevent it and what else should you know about ticks?

Ticks live in and near wooded areas, tall grass and brush, experts say, and they can carry Lyme and other debilitating and sometimes fatal illnesses such as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Tularemia, Ehrlichiosis, and Babesiosis.

Here are some precautions officials advise to prevent tick bites:

• Walk in the center of trails. Avoid wooded, brushy areas with high grass and leaf litter.
• Wear light-colored clothing to make ticks easier to find. Tuck long pants into socks and boots.
• Apply an EPA-registered insect repellent containing 20% DEET, picaridin, IR3535, or Oil of Lemon Eucalyptus according to label directions.
• Treat clothing and gear with products containing 0.5% permethrin. Permethrin can be used to treat boots, clothing and camping gear and remain protective through several washings
• Conduct full-body tick checks on family members (underarms, ears, belly button, behind knees, between legs, waist, hair and scalp) every two to three hours. Also check any gear or pets taken on outings.
• Put your clothes in the dryer on high for 10 minutes (or one hour for damp clothes) to kill ticks.
• Shower within two hours after coming indoors.

If you are bitten by a tick, promptly and properly remove it:

• Using fine-tipped tweezers, grasp the tick near the skin and pull upward with slow, even pressure. Do NOT twist or jerk.
• Do NOT burn the tick or smother it with oils or petroleum jelly, as this may cause the tick to spit up infected saliva into your skin.
• Once the tick is removed, disinfect the bite area and wash hands with soap and water.
• Make a note of the date you were bitten in case you need medical care later.

The panel of FDA advisers voted unanimously in favor of drugmaker Perrigo’s request to sell its once-a-day medication over the counter. The recommendation came at the close of a two-day meeting focused on company research into whether women could safely and effectively take the pill without professional supervision. A final FDA decision is expected this summer.

If the FDA follows the nonbinding recommendation, Perrigo’s drug, Opill, would become the first contraceptive pill to be moved out from behind the pharmacy counter onto store shelves. Currently, a prescription is required in the U.S.

The outside experts said they were confident that women of all ages could use the drug appropriately without seeing a health provider first.

“I do believe this is a viable option to support access and will support the prevention of unintended and unwanted pregnancies,” said Jolie Haun, a researcher with the Department of Veterans Affairs, who voted in favor of the pill.

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The positive vote came despite numerous criticisms from FDA scientists about how Perrigo studied the drug, including whether study participants were able to understand and follow labeling instructions.

But the panel largely set those concerns aside, emphasizing the benefits of providing more effective birth control, particularly to young people and lower-income groups, than what’s available over the counter now, like condoms and diaphragms.

Most birth control pills used in the U.S. today contain a combination of progestin and estrogen. Opill is part of an older class of contraceptives that only contain progestin. They generally have fewer side effects and health risks but can be less effective if they’re not taken around the same time daily.

Nonprescription medicines are usually cheaper, but generally not covered by insurance. Requiring insurers to cover over-the-counter birth control would require a regulatory change by the federal government.

Birth control pills are available without a prescription across much of South America, Asia and Africa.

Tally Health created and administers a test that collects DNA samples from a cheek swab, and calculates what the company calls a “biological age.” The process involves identifying how your body ages on a cellular level based on epigenetics.

“We call it the credit score for the body that measures all aspects of your health,” Dr. David Sinclair, a Harvard scientist and longevity expert, tells CNBC Make It.

Sinclair co-founded Tally Health and, as its scientific advisor, had a hand in creating its test which partly relies on his years of research in the field of longevity.

“We have a new understanding of why we age, and how important it is to live a lifestyle that slows down that process. Because we’re aging every day,” he adds.

I was offered the opportunity to take the “TallyAge Test” and despite my generally healthy lifestyle, I was still a bit nervous to learn my biological age.

Here are my results, and how I was advised to interpret them.

My ‘biological age’ is just one month older than my actual age

Though the goal is to have a younger biological age than your actual age, only a drastically older biological age may be cause for concern, says Adiv Johnson, the director of research and innovation at Tally Health.

According to my results, my “TallyAge” is around 23 years and 7 months, just one month older than I was when I took the test in January.

And having the same biological age as your actual age is pretty great, says Johnson. But, “if I was 85, and I got told that it looks like a typical 95-year-old’s [DNA], there I might feel differently or respond differently,” he adds.

And as it turns out, my eating habits may be responsible for my positive results. I eat a mostly plant-based diet.

“What we found with our model is, on average, people that exercise tend to [test] younger than people that don’t exercise. People that eat lots of plant-based foods correlate with a younger TallyAge,” Johnson says.

The same correlation is seen for people who get enough good-quality sleep, are more socially fulfilled and drink less alcohol, he adds.

“There’s of course variability, because human beings are so complex,” Johnson says. Some people who smoke cigarettes often, have gotten younger biological ages, which he believes is likely due to their genetics.

‘More than 90% of how you age is up to lifestyle choices, environment’

While my biological age is pretty low, I was advised to strive for an even lower one to help reverse some of my aging.

“You can naturally lower your TallyAge by adopting the right lifestyle habits. More than 90% of how you age is up to your lifestyle choices and environment,” Tally Health advised in my results.

TallyAge test results come with a questionnaire about your behaviors like what you eat, how often you exercise and more. Using your responses, the company creates an action plan to improve your lifestyle, and hopefully reduce your biological age.

The company aims to help you track if, and how, your behaviors are affecting how you’re actually aging.

Users are encouraged to track their progress over time by taking a Tally test, and completing the lifestyle questionnaire, quarterly.

A Tally Health test will cost you $229, but the company also offers monthly and yearly subscriptions with prices that vary.

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In the 18-month trial, people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s who received infusions of donanemab showed 35% less decline in thinking skills compared to those given a dummy drug, Lilly announced in a press release.

The drug is designed to target and clear away a sticky protein called beta-amyloid that builds up into brain-clogging plaques that are one hallmark of Alzheimer’s.

A similar amyloid-targeting drug, Eisai and Biogen’s Leqembi, recently hit the market with similar evidence that it could modestly slow Alzheimer’s — and also some safety concerns, brain swelling or small brain bleeds.

Donanemab also comes with that risk. Lilly said in its study, the brain side effects caused the deaths of two participants and a third also died after a serious case.

The preliminary study results haven’t been vetted by outside experts. Indianapolis-based Lilly plans to release more details at an international Alzheimer’s meeting this summer and is seeking Food and Drug Administration approval of the drug.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

“She was feeling really bad,” Martinez tells TODAY.com. “They did a COVID test. It was negative.” But the urgent care providers noticed Fernanda’s blood-oxygen level was low, so they recommended the mom and daughter go to the emergency room.

The Martinez family didn’t know where to go, and they looked at the list of hospitals from the urgent care clinic and picked the first one: Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital at NYU Langone.

“By the time we got there, she was already crashing,” Martinez says. “They were trying to get her oxygen levels up.”

She was tested again for COVID-19 and tested positive — it the first time anyone in her family had had it. But doctors didn’t think it was the cause of Fernanda’s dramatic decline. They soon learned what was to blame: a rare, cancerous tumor on her trachea.

“They came back on Sunday and said, ‘It’s definitely something and it’s very big,’” Martinez says.

Cough quickly becomes worse

The summer camp told Martinez that her daughter had a “cold,” but her cough quickly worsened while sightseeing in New York City. After they arrived at the hospital, doctors rushed to stabilize her and gave her medicine to treat her COVID-19 after her positive test.

“She reacted positively to the medicine. They started to take her off the oxygen, and they told me probably by Sunday she can leave,” Martinez says. “She relapsed really badly. She started to crash again. She couldn’t breathe. She became super anxious because she felt like she was just not able to breathe at all, like she was asphyxiating.”

Doctors gave her stronger medications and increased the amount of oxygen she received. While she started to improve, doctors noticed she had a pneumothorax, air outside the lungs in the chest cavity.

“It’s very dangerous,” Martinez says.

Doctors performed a CT scan and noticed something.

“She has something in her trachea,” Martinez recalls them telling her. 

Doctors wanted to keep her in the hospital, and suddenly Martinez met a slew of specialists, including an adult cardiothoracic surgeon who explained what he was going to do to remove the mass. The surgery included putting Fernanda on ECMO, a form of life support, which scared Martinez.

“That’s when I understood that they were basically going to cut off part of the trachea … which is where the tumor was, and they would pull the trachea together,” she says. “The trachea would regenerate, which I didn’t know that was possible.”

A multidisciplinary approach for a complicated case

Dr. Eleanor Muise first encountered Fernanda in the pediatric intensive care unit soon after the girl was admitted.

“Her COVID infection was not very severe,” Muise tells TODAY.com. “There are many other symptoms that may go along with COVID that she did not necessarily have.”

When doctors realized Fernanda had a pneumothorax, they ordered more tests to understand why.

“It’s not terribly common, and we wanted to make sure we weren’t missing something underlying we did not yet know about,” Muise explains. “When her chest CT was performed, it revealed she had a large mass obstructing her trachea. This helped to put the pieces of a puzzle together.”

Finding the mass was “unexpected” because “this type of tumor is unusual in childhood,” Muise says. That meant they needed to consult with their colleagues who treat adults.

“Our adult colleagues in interventional pulmonary are more familiar with acting upon masses within the trachea because they are so rare in childhood,” she says. “It was a natural connection to work with them to biopsy and reduce the bulk (of the mass) tremendously.”

That’s when Dr. Robert Cerfolio joined the treatment team. Cerfolio has removed such masses in adults using minimally invasive robotic surgery. Otherwise, the surgery can require splitting the sternum open, breaking the ribs and sewing them back together, which can take six months or longer to recover. Using the robotic device creates much smaller incisions and takes less time.

“It’s a completely different experience,” Cerfolio, chief of clinical thoracic surgery, at NYU Langone Health, tells TODAY.com.

To perform the surgery, Cerfolio needed the assistance of the ECMO team so they could divert Fernanda’s breathing while he removed the mass and repaired her trachea. Dr. Jason Fisher oversaw the ECMO.

Doctors often use ECMO for patients who are struggling to get “enough blow flow or oxygen to their body, usually due to some severe but revisable illness,” Fisher explains, and ventilators alone can’t help because the patient’s lungs are so weak.

“That was not the case. Fernanda’s lungs were fine,” Fisher says. “We had an idea that maybe we could allow Dr. Cerfolio to work very freely without worrying that he was interrupting the air flow to the patient.”

Cerfolio removed the mass and reconnected the trachea during the surgery by going through small incisions in Fernanda’s back.

Fisher explains that disease that caused Fernanda’s mass, aka the pathology of it, was “somewhat unique, and it’s not a common tumor in children or quite frankly … adults. We are very familiar with airway issues and lesions in children … but at the end of the day, it was a tumor that we don’t see a lot.”

Going home

Throughout Fernanda’s health scare, Martinez was in New York City alone. While it was stressful at times, Martinez felt she had a lot of support from loved ones from afar. When Fernanda first woke after surgery, she was in pain. But that soon changed.

“After two days, she was like a different child. She was much better. It was still a bit painful,” Martinez says. “She was able to start walking around.”

Still, Fernanda’s left lung was not fully inflating, and doctors tried various therapies to help her. When she was discharged five weeks after first going to the hospital, she needed to do breathing therapy. While the family felt excited to return home to Mexico City, there was a catch. Fernanda’s pneumothorax meant she couldn’t fly, and they had to drive back, which took five days. Mexico City’s elevation also slowed her recovery.

“Because the city is so high up, she wasn’t able to do any exercise for three more weeks,” Martinez says. “The moment she started exercising, she recuperated her lung capacity very, very quickly.”

After about six weeks, Fernanda returned to the sports she loves, tennis, gymnastics and aerial acrobatics. To make sure the cancer hasn’t returned, she’ll need to undergo a bronchoscopy, where doctors use a scope to look at her airway. Martinez hopes their story encourages parents to be mindful of their children’s health.

“If something changes in your child, you have to pay attention even if it’s just a minimal thing,” she says.

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Read on to see how a dermatologist debunked some common myths when it comes to skincare.

MYTH 1: You don’t need sunscreen if your makeup has SPF.

FACT: According to Dr. Tola Oyesanya, a dermatologist with Kaiser Permanente, most makeup products only have SPF 15. That’s not enough protection to begin with, and you probably aren’t applying enough of it to get the full benefit.

“The way that we actually test these sunscreens, it’s actually applying a thick layer that probably would leave a white cast on you,” said Oyesanya. “So no one’s applying sunscreen that thick. And so if you’re already starting with SPF 15 in your makeup, you’re probably getting SPF 4, which is not enough to protect yourself.

MYTH 2: The sun isn’t harmful if you’re indoors or in a car.

FACT: When it comes to the sun’s damaging rays, you don’t have to be at the pool or beach to get skin damage.

One trucker posted a photo that helps debunk the myth, and you can see the damage he received after one side of his face was exposed to the sun through the windshield of his big rig.

“You’re getting UV rays that come through glass,” Oyesanya said. “The person sat next to a window for 50 years, and you could see significant aging.”

According to Oyesanya, UV-A rays are the kind of ultraviolet light rays that cause aging.

“UV-A rays age us,” she said. “They also can cause cancer.”

You can also get damage from the sun anytime, whether it’s cloudy or the dead of winter. That’s part of why you’re supposed to wear sunscreen year round, and not just during the summer.

MYTH 3: Skin cancer doesn’t impact people of color.

FACT: Dr. Oyesanya says people with fair skin do have a higher risk of skin cancer, but that doesn’t mean people of color are immune.

“Anyone can develop skin cancer,” she said. “People with darker skin have more protection, but it does not mean that they cannot develop skin cancer.”

“It’s important to check your palms, check your soles of the feet, [and] check your nails. So if you’re wearing polish, it’s important to remove the nail polish and look for streaks underneath your nails. And always bring these to a physician’s attention if you were to see those, because they can be signs of an early or evolving melanoma.”

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Gel manicures stay on for about two weeks and don’t chip as easily as regular manis. But they require ultraviolet (UV) light to dry, and researchers say that could potentially increase your risk of skin cancer.

The potential problem is that UV light, Missmar said.

Study Found UV Light Damages Cells

Every time you get a gel manicure, you have to put your hands inside a UV nail lamp to let the polish dry.

“You can kind of think of them as mini tanning beds for your hands,” Kaiser Permanente dermatologist Dr. Kristin Cam Missmar said.

One type of ultraviolet light, UV-A, is what causes premature aging, wrinkles, dark spots and thinning of the skin — but, importantly, it also can cause an increased risk of skin cancer, Missmar said.

A recent study by the University of California San Diego and published in the journal “Nature Communications” found that radiation emitted by UV nail dryers led to damage in cells.

In the study, researchers used cells from humans and mice and exposed them to UV light for about 20 minutes — which is longer than the one to three minutes a nail salon says it takes for a customer’s nails to dry.

The researchers say they found damage to the cells and the DNA.

“They found that after 20 minutes, 20% to 30% of the cells died. And then the rest of the cells that remained actually had mutations in the DNA that are similar to what we see in some skin cancers,” Missmar said.

Researchers caution that more data is needed to confirm the findings — or to even say how many gel manicures you would need to increase your risk.

The FDA says UV nail dryers are low risk when they’re used as directed.

Protecting Your Hands From UV Exposure

There are steps you can take to protect yourself at the salon.

First: sunscreen. You can apply broad-spectrum sunscreen SPF 30 or higher before the polish goes on, or before your hands go under the light, Missmar said.

“They do make gloves with UV protective factor built into them with the fingertips cut off. So, this way, you know you’re getting your manicure, you’re protecting the majority of your hand, not all of it, but you’re definitely decreasing your risk by taking these steps,” Missmar said.

“Maybe opt for a traditional nail polish instead or another type of manicure that doesn’t involve a UV light. Save those gel manicures for special occasions, a couple times a year,” Missmar said.

Signs and Symptoms to Watch Out For

When you take the polish off, Missmar says to look out for certain signs of trouble.

“Any changes, discoloration in the nail — so that could take the form of a dark line, a brown line, the black line, even a red line in the nail especially that extends back to the cuticle. Any bumps in the nail underneath the nail plate, a crack in the nail or even any color change around the nail and the skin,” Missmar said.

For those of us who love gel manicures, Missmar says it’s important to keep an eye on your nails. If you notice a spot or dark lines, don’t ignore it or wait until your next skin check. Talk to your dermatologist as soon as possible.

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Rates of the disease have soared in recent decades, spurred by the complex interaction of genes that make people more likely to store food as fat, a food system that provides easy and cheap access to processed treats explicitly designed to be overconsumed, and social settings that limit access to healthy options and exercise for many people.

Obesity is linked to scores of health problems that can lead to disability or even death, including high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, cancer and joint problems.

Researchers have long looked for medications that can help people lose weight, mostly with disappointing and, in some cases, dangerous results. In recent years, however, drugs designed to help people with type 2 diabetes control their blood sugar levels have had the added effect of paring pounds.

Ozempic, a Novo Nordisk drug approved to treat diabetes in 2017, skyrocketed in use after celebrities and ordinary people on TikTok reported that their doctors prescribed it “off label” for weight loss. Wegovy, a higher dose version of the same medication, called semaglutide, was approved for weight loss for adults in 2021 and for children aged 12 and older late last year.

Now, a new drug made by Eli Lilly and Co., called tirzepatide, is poised to become the most potent obesity drug on the market, promising users losses of more than 30 to 50 pounds over time. Already approved under the brand name Mounjaro to treat type 2 diabetes, tirzepatide is being considered for fast-track approval as a weight-loss drug based on the results of key trials, with the latest announced on Thursday.

The new study found that patients with diabetes — who find it notoriously difficult to lose weight — could shed about 16% of their body weight, or more than 34 pounds using tirzepatide. An earlier study found that people without diabetes lost up to 22% of their body weight, or more than 50 pounds on the highest dose of the drug.

Tirzepatide and other medications spur weight loss by targeting the metabolic conditions that lead to extra pounds. Here’s what to know about these new prescription drugs that promise weight loss. WHAT ARE THESE NEW WEIGHT LOSS DRUGS?

The drugs that have drawn the most attention have been a class of medications that activate a hormone known as GLP-1. They include Ozempic and Wegovy, which are two versions of the same medication, semaglutide.

Tirzepatide targets GLP-1, but also affects a second hormone, called GIP, which developers say contributes to its increased effectiveness. Mounjaro was approved to treat diabetes in May 2022.

The drugs are delivered through once-weekly injections. Users are advised to follow a healthful, reduced-calorie diet and to exercise regularly while using the drugs.

How Do Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro Work?

The drugs work by mimicking the actions of hormones, found primarily in the gut, that kick in after people eat. The hormones help regulate blood sugar by triggering the pancreas to release insulin, another hormone, and slowing the release of sugar from the liver. People who are overweight or have obesity can become insulin-resistant, which means the body doesn’t respond to insulin properly.

The obesity drugs lower blood sugar and slow down digestion, so people feel full longer. They also affect signals in the brain linked to feelings of fullness and satisfaction, tamping down appetite, food-related thoughts and cravings.

Because people feel full longer, they eat less and lose weight.

How Effective Are the Drugs?

In a trial, adults who took Wegovy saw a weight loss of nearly 35 pounds, or about 15% of their body weight. Adolescents lost about 16% of their body weight.

The latest study of tirzepatide studied the drug in more than 900 patients with diabetes who were overweight or had obesity over nearly 17 months. It showed weight loss of up to 16% of body weight, more than 34 pounds, when using the highest dose of the drug. Patients who received placebo, or dummy injections, lost about 3% of their body weight, or 7 pounds.

An earlier trial of tirzepatide showed weight loss of between about 15% and about 22% of body weight, or about 35 pounds to about 52 pounds, depending on the dose.

The drugs appear effective for chronic weight management over many months. In addition to weight loss, they also reduce health problems associated with obesity, such as high blood sugar and markers of heart and metabolic disease.

However, it appears that if people taking the drugs stop, they regain the weight they lost — and the health problems that came with it.

Why Not Just Diet and Exercise?

In a typical weight-loss program where participants rely only on diet and exercise, research shows only about a third of people will lose 5% or more of their body weight, said Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Many people find it difficult to lose weight because of the body’s biological reactions to eating less, he said. There are several hormones that respond to reduced calorie intake by ramping up hunger to maintain body mass.

What Are the Side Effects of the Drugs?

The most common side effects are short-lived gastrointestinal issues such as nausea, vomiting, constipation, diarrhea and stomach pain. Other possible effects include serious issues such as inflammation of the pancreas, kidney, gallbladder and eye problems. People with a history of certain thyroid cancers or a rare, genetic endocrine disorder should avoid the drugs, because it is not clear if tirzepatide causes thyroid problems, including cancer.

How Much Do These Drugs Cost?

The new anti-obesity medications are expensive. Wegovy costs about $1,300 a month and Mounjaro starts at about $1,000 a month. People with private insurance may be able to receive the drugs with only a small co-payment. However, many insurers don’t pay for the medications or they have restrictions regarding coverage. Medicare doesn’t cover most weight-loss drugs. Medicaid and the military insurer Tricare may cover them in some cases with prior approval.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The drug joins a growing list of medications facing supply shortages in the U.S. Liquid amoxicillin, another antibiotic used to treat strep, has been in short supply since October, according to the FDA. 

The form of penicillin affected, called penicillin G benzathine, is the preferred drug for syphilis, because it can be used in adults, children and pregnant people. It’s often administered in outpatient clinics or urgent care settings. Dosages for both children and adults are in short supply, according to the FDA.

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Syphilis cases in the U.S. reached a 70-year high in 2021, the last year for which data is available, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The sexually transmitted infection can result in organ damage or death if left untreated.

The FDA attributed the penicillin shortage to increased demand. Pfizer, the sole supplier of that form of penicillin in the U.S., pointed to the amoxicillin shortage as the main issue, because it prompted doctors to recommend penicillin instead. The rise in syphilis cases most likely further accelerated demand, the company said.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com 

It has been linked to a number of benefits including boosting heart health and preventing cognitive decline, TODAY reported previously.

Now, there’s even stronger evidence that following a Mediterranean diet is associated with a lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. The findings were published in the journal PLOS Medicine on Thursday, Apr. 27.

Previous studies have shown that people who adhere closely to a Mediterranean diet have a moderately lower risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, but these relied on subjective reporting, Dr. Nita Forouhi, study co-author and leader of the nutritional epidemiology program at the University of Cambridge, tells TODAY.com.

This means study participants self-report their diet habits in a questionnaire, for example. “Self-reports are prone to reporting errors, and these errors can give rise to biased estimates of associations between diet and future disease risk,” Forouhi says.

A team of researchers at University of Cambridge overcame this limitation by developing a new way to objectively measure how closely a person follows the Mediterranean diet using a blood test.

The blood test looked at levels of molecules like carotenoids and fatty acids, or “biomarkers” of the Mediterranean diet. A total of 23 nutritional biomarkers were combined into an overall score, says Forouhi, which measured a person’s level of adherence to the Mediterranean diet instead.

The biomarker score was applied in a study of over 22,000 people across eight countries in Europe, says Forouhi. Using this method, researchers found that people whose biomarker score indicated they stuck to a Mediterranean diet were less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, she adds.

“The 20% of participants with the highest biomarker score had a 62% lower risk of new-onset Type 2 diabetes relative to the 20% of participants with the lowest biomarker score values,” says Forouhi.

Based on these findings, the researchers argue that even a small improvement in people’s adherence to a Mediterranean diet could meaningfully reduce the incidence of Type 2 diabetes.

“Our research strengthens the case for recommending the Mediterranean diet for the prevention of Type 2 diabetes,” says Forouhi, adding that there were limitations to this study.

“The study does not allow us to draw conclusions as strong as to say that the Mediterranean diet is a causal factor in lowering the risk of type 2 diabetes,” Forouhi says.

However, the research underscores the importance of the diet as a part of one’s prevention strategy and supports the use of blood-based biomarkers to pick up associations that may be underestimated when using only self-reporting, Forouhi says.

“Type 2 diabetes can occur due to a combination and varying degrees of insulin resistance and defective insulin secretion,” Dr. Priya Jaisinghani, endocrinologist and obesity medicine specialist at NYU Langone Health, tells TODAY.com. There are many environmental factors (including inactivity, weight or medications) and genetic factors that can contribute to Type 2 diabetes, Jaisinghani adds.

“Along with medication therapy and lifestyle changes, nutrition is a cornerstone of treatment of Type 2 diabetes,” says Jaisinghani. If it is not managed, Type 2 diabetes can increase the risk of other problems such as stroke, kidney disease, nerve damage and vision problems, Jaisinghani adds.

“It’s important to see your doctor and nutritionist to create an individualized plan when treating Type 2 diabetes,” says Jaisinghani, adding that the Mediterranean diet might need to be tailored to other health conditions such as high blood pressure.

The Mediterranean diet is less about dieting and more about eating whole foods you already love, which makes it accessible and sustainable, TODAY previously reported. While there aren’t strict rules, the Med diet does minimize meat, dairy, and processed foods.

“It’s packed with fiber-rich plant foods and doesn’t include many processed sweets, which is helpful for reducing insulin resistance,” Frances Largeman-Roth, registered dietitian nutritionist, tells TODAY.com. “That is beneficial for blood sugar management and lowering A1C levels, which measures your average blood sugar levels over the last 3 months,” says Largeman-Roth.

Low levels of HDL, the good cholesterol, are associated with increased risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, Largeman-Roth notes. The MedDiet helps increase good cholesterol levels, she adds, which is why it’s a great choice for anyone.

In addition to plant-based whole foods, other mainstays of this diet include omega-3 rich fatty fish (salmon, tuna, sardines, black cod) and walnuts. “Those foods provide anti-inflammatory benefits, decrease blood pressure, and reduce the risk of heart disease,” Largeman-Roth.

In addition to following a Mediterranean diet, Largeman-Roth recommends trying to eat a wide variety of fruits and vegetables, getting enough fiber (25-35mg per day), and trying to stay physically active and move every day.

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Those experts aren’t worried about an apocalypse like the one seen in HBO’s “The Last of Us,” but there is cause for concern.

You may have seen some of the headlines, as the CDC warns of a deadly fungal infection spreading at an alarming rate.

“The reason this is worrisome is because this is a relatively new fungus,” said Dr. Arturo Casadevall, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He’s been studying fungal infections for three decades.

“And once it gets into a hospital, into a nursing home or into a health care facility, it is difficult to eradicate.”

The fungus is called Candida Auris, and it’s a drug-resistant fungus that’s been reported in more than half of states in the U.S. — including Maryland and Virginia.

Casadevall says C. Auris is typically not harmful to healthy people with strong immune systems. But it can be serious, even deadly, among those who are immunocompromised.

“This is a fungus that causes disease primarily in debilitated individuals who are hospitalized or institutionalized in some way,” said Casadevall. “The majority of healthy people with immune systems and no medical problems don’t really have to worry about Candida Auris.”

Despite outbreaks at some hospitals and healthcare facilities, scientists say the situation is not like the zombie apocalypse in “The Last of Us.”

“‘The Last of Us’ is fiction,” Casadevall said. “It’s fun to watch. But currently, an organism like that doesn’t exist. When reporters ask me, ‘Is this possible?’ My answer is always improbable, but not impossible.”

That’s because fungal infections continue to evolve and adapt, thanks to climate change.

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“With climate change and global warming, some of the fungi will adapt to higher temperatures,” Casadevall said. “And I and some of my colleagues have proposed that Candida Auris is the first example of that.”

He says scientists have long known about the impacts of this fungus on frogs and bats. But now that humans are affected, we need to be more aware.

That awareness involves educating people about symptoms, educating hospitals on infection control, and educating researchers so they can develop treatment options, Casadevall said.

“It’s not happening like COVID that burst into our consciousness all of a sudden,” he said. “It’s happening gradually. And this is why vigilance, research, and awareness is the way to protect yourself in the future.”

According to Casadevall, the fungus can live on surfaces and on a person’s skin, infecting the bloodstream, heart, or brain.

Symptoms can vary greatly depending on the type of infection, but fever and chills are the most common, CNBC reported in late March. People with weak immune systems, who have diabetes, who take a lot of antibiotics or who are on breathing tubes, feeding tubes and catheters are more likely to be affected.

By getting the word out, hospitals and nursing homes can have measures in place to disinfect contaminated areas and treat the sick. The CDC is also working to find better treatments.

There are already antifungal medications that work, Casadevall said, and once someone is treated and recovers, they’re cured.