Dementia Predicted 10 Years Before Diagnosis
Blood protein profiles predicted future dementia in healthy adults, a large longitudinal study showed. Blood samples from over 50,000 people in the U.K. Biobank showed that four proteins — glial fibrillary acidic protein (GFAP), neurofilament light (NfL), growth differentiation factor-15 (GDF-15), and latent-transforming growth factor beta-binding protein 2 (LTBP2) — consistently were associated with subsequent […]
The Wild West of Online Testosterone Prescribing
Online testosterone peddlers are facing uncertainty as federal officials map the future of telemedicine. At stake is whether they’ll be able to continue prescribing testosterone therapy to patients without ever seeing them in person, a pandemic-era freedom that allows men to avoid being seen strolling into “low T” clinics — but one that has also […]
Opinion | Fostering a New and Diverse Generation of Clinicians
As a medical student, I never saw myself as a future CEO or anything close. I was often the only Black person in the room in classes and rotations. After I became an attending, I spent a great deal of time and mental energy fitting in. Speaking up and having opinions were luxuries I couldn’t […]
Reclaiming the Health Misinformation Spiral on Social Media
As medical students and future pediatricians, we recognize that childhood vaccines are one of the single greatest public health achievements of the 20th and 21st centuries. Yet, for one of us, a pregnant cousin announced over the Thanksgiving dinner table that she wasn’t going to vaccinate her unborn child. No matter the facts, research, or […]
Newly identified neuromarker reveals clues about drug and food craving
Craving is known to be a key factor in substance use disorders and can increase the likelihood of future drug use or relapse. Yet its neural basis — or, how the brain gives rise to craving — is not well understood. In a new study, researchers from Yale, Dartmouth, and the French National Centre for […]
Dementia Risk Score Touts ‘Nearly 100%’ Predictive Accuracy
A novel clinical risk score predicted the chance of future dementia with high accuracy, but raised questions from dementia experts. Using data from nearly 450,000 people in the U.K. Biobank cohort, Xi-jian Dai, PhD, of The Second Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University in China, and colleagues developed a practical tool to predict individual risk of […]
Fast, efficient COVID-19 biosensor under development: Researchers are improving technology to test for the coronavirus at a ‘population scale’ in order to stay on top of shifting variants
As the BA.5 omicron variant continues to spread, health experts are increasingly preparing for a future in which such COVID-19 variants emerge, surge and recede similar to seasonal flu. An important part of staying on top of these changes will be the ability to quickly monitor the virus at a “population scale,” an effort that […]
Opinion | Are Omicron-Targeted Boosters Worth It?
The FDA, following the advice of its advisory committee, is advising COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers to reformulate future booster shots to include protection against the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2. While this decision was not surprising and may have seemed perfunctory to many people, it is worth thinking about the wider context that undergirds […]
FDA Panel Gives Thumbs Up to Omicron-Containing COVID Boosters
An FDA advisory committee voted 19-2 on Tuesday to recommend use of an Omicron-specific component in a future COVID-19 vaccine booster. “We really do need vaccines that provide broader protection against variants that have not yet emerged,” said Melinda Wharton, MD, MPH, associate director of vaccine policy at the CDC, at a remote meeting of […]
New Fermi arcs could provide a new path for electronics
Newly discovered Fermi arcs that can be controlled through magnetism could be the future of electronics based on electron spins. These new Fermi arcs were discovered by a team of researchers from Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University, as well as collaborators from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. During their investigation of […]