About 7% of US adults report having or having had symptoms of long COVID such as fatigue, heart palpitations and/or dizziness. These are three of the 12 symptoms identified as part of the National Institute of Health’s RECOVER initiative that can be reliably used to classify someone as having long COVID. While there is no...
Category: <span>Editorial</span>
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Vitamin D Supplements May Be a Double-Edged Sword
F. Perry Wilson, MD, MSCE This transcript has been edited for clarity. Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I’m Dr F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine. Imagine, if you will, the great Cathedral of Our Lady of Correlation. You walk through the majestic oak...
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Do you really want to find out if you’ll get Alzheimer’s?
by F.D. Flam, Bloomberg Opinion Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public DomainA few years ago, researchers made the unnerving discovery that in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease, disordered clumps of abnormal proteins had been growing for 15 or even 20 years before their diagnosis. That means these pathological-looking deposits are silently accumulating in the brains of...
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Primary Care Physician’s Next Frontier: Palliative Care
Larry Beresford Jason Black, MD, trained in family medicine, worked for Kaiser Permanente, and subsequently completed a fellowship in geriatrics. Today, he treats frail elderly patients, mostly residents of nursing homes and assisted living facilities or living in their own homes, for Gilchrist, a hospice and palliative care organization serving Baltimore and central Maryland. photo...
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A Better Way to Control Blood Pressure
My Bing AI engine, when prompted, tells me that there are about 87 journals, 45 conferences, and 53 workshops presently dedicated exclusively to hypertension. All of that attention, and yet… What is going on? George D. Lundberg, MD The top killers of Americans remain coronary artery heart disease (26%), cancer (22%), and stroke (6%). The...
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What’s Changed in Asthma Treatment? Quite a Bit
Neil Skolnik, MD I’m Dr Neil Skolnik, and today I am going to talk about the 2023 update to the Global Strategy for Asthma Management and Prevention. We treat a lot of asthma, and there are some important changes, particularly around the use of albuterol. There are two main guidelines when it comes to asthma,...
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Raising the Bar for Medical AI
Thought leaders, patient advocates develop guidelines for ethical use of AI in medicine. Medical research – artistic interpretation. From the invention of the wheel to the advent of the printing press to the splitting of the atom, history is replete with cautionary tales of new technologies emerging before humanity was ready to cope with them....
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Do ‘Forever Chemicals’ Affect Bone Health in Youth?
Madhusmita Misra, MBBS, MD, MPHDISCLOSURES Bone health begins in childhood, particularly during the rapid bone accrual phase of puberty, which is essential for attaining optimal peak bone mass. Peak bone mass is achieved in early adult life and affects both immediate and future fracture risk. Genetic, nutritional, exercise-related, and hormonal factors, and certain diseases and...
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Climate change fueled a rise in rare disease outbreaks last year
By Zoya Teirstein Naegleria fowleri, a rare and deadly brain-eating amoeba. (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention)Editor’s note: This story was originally published by Grist. It appears here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A 16-month-old boy was playing in a splash pad at a country club in Little Rock, Arkansas, this summer when water...
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Older Americans Are About to Lose a Lot of Weight
People over 65 make up a sizable portion of Americans on GLP-1 drugs. That might be trouble. By Daniel Engber A scale overlaid with a silhouette of an older adultIllustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Sources: Peter Dazeley; JakeOlimb / Getty.Imagine an older man goes in to see his doctor. He’s 72 years old...