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good morning. Before we get into the big news of the day, I’d like to take a page out of my colleague Ed Silverman’s playbook and share some coffee news.
There’s a better way to grind coffee, researchers (chemists and volcanologists!) have concluded — details from Washington Post science reporter (and my former colleague) Carolyn Johnson. you’re welcome.
Mexican abortion activist ‘friend network’ secretly moving to US
In Mexico, volunteer groups of activists have formed “friend networks” to provide advice, psychological support and free medicine to those seeking abortions. Many of the people they support now live in U.S. states where abortion has been severely restricted since Roe was overturned, just as Mexico decriminalized abortion. These networks secretly send abortion pills across borders to vulnerable people who lack funds or immigration documents, or train volunteers in the United States to establish their own companion networks. ing.
Crystal Perez Lira (above) founded one of the groups two years after moving from Tijuana to San Diego 10 years ago to seek an abortion. Today, her group helps 60 of her patients access medication abortions and provides support throughout the procedure. “We are transitioning the way we work,” she said. “We’re transferring that mission to the United States,” STAT’s Olivia Goldhill details the covert operation.
White House expresses support for controversial method to lower drug prices
Big news from the pharmaceutical industry: The Biden administration supports expanded use of the “right to march,” sources told STAT’s Sarah Owermoor and Rachel Coles on Thursday. The policy allows the National Institutes of Health to seize patents from drug companies whose products rely on federally funded research. Until now, the U.S. government has avoided exercising this kind of broad authority.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a brief interview with STAT that “the White House is leveraging every tool we can to lower the cost of prescription drugs.” “Certainly Congress could do more, but Republican control of the House of Representatives prevents it from doing so. So President Biden is stepping up and ensuring that even when markets fail, the consequences don’t reach consumers.” Read more.
‘Bound to slavery’: NEJM reflects on racist past
Yesterday, the New England Journal of Medicine, the world’s oldest continuously published medical journal, confronted its history and complicity with slavery and racism. The first essay in the series by an independent historian describes the magazine’s role in perpetuating racist thinking in medicine that continues to this day. Historians have described the magazine, which was founded in 1812, as “bound in slavery.” One of the magazine’s founders owned enslaved people, and another’s family gained wealth from a trade closely connected to slavery.
Throughout the 19th century, authors routinely and casually used racist and dehumanizing language about Black Americans in their magazines, but the South was filled with racist ideologies about Black Americans’ intelligence and health. There was little pushback from editors who reprinted articles from medical journals. “History matters,” said Evelyn Hammonds of Harvard University, one of the essay’s authors. “Not everyone has access to the same health care in America. How did we get such a system? It didn’t suddenly come out of nowhere.” STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling said. It says a lot more.
Proposal to protect abortion patient records faces backlash
As with many other implications of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, it also raises patient privacy concerns. Abortion access and laws vary widely by location, raising concerns about what happens when patients’ electronic health records are shared across institutions and state lines. The Biden administration wants to introduce new patient privacy regulations to protect patients and health care providers from prosecution, but health care giants UnitedHealth Group and Epic are pushing back.
After years of pressure to increase data sharing within health systems, new initiatives will make it easier for health care providers to segment and protect specific information from disclosure at patient requests. Software manufacturers will be required to take new initiatives to achieve this goal. “EHRs have been working very hard to automatically share data,” family medicine physician Michelle Gomez told STAT contributor Paul Webster. “We’re slow to think about how not to share that data when it could be used to criminalize patients.” read more.
Proof-of-principle Pap test offers hope in case of ovarian cancer
Diagnosing ovarian cancer can be particularly devastating because it is often too late for treatments that are effective in the early stages of the disease and help patients in later stages. That is why early detection is so urgent. Writing yesterday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, researchers offered some hope with a small retrospective study of pap smears, stressing that they were only a proof of principle. They report that tests found genetic changes predictive of ovarian cancer up to nine years before diagnosis.
Although the corresponding author and two external experts noted some important caveats (for example, the healthy group was younger than the cancer group), hope for progress was clear. “I think this is conceptually very interesting and also very exciting,” said Naoko Sasamoto, a gynecologist at Harvard Medical School and a clinical oncologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “I will,” he said. “But I have to say we’re not there yet.” There’s more here.
AI-guided blood tests predict organ aging and risk
Did you know that the body’s organs age at different rates? For most people, the kidneys, heart, and liver have different clocks that tick by until they stop working due to illness or injury. A number of studies have been concluded. The challenge, embraced by the researchers whose work was published yesterday in Nature, is to figure out which organs are headed for trouble before it’s too late. Their method analyzed individual proteins that are shed into the blood by organs and leveraged AI to understand why this occurs.
This study suggests that it may be possible to use blood tests to warn people at high risk of various organ-specific diseases. In a study cohort of more than 5,000 adults aged 50 and older, about one in five organs were aging significantly faster than others. For example, people whose hearts age faster have a 250% increased risk of developing heart failure later in life. STAT’s Megan Molteni has the details.