|
EVERYTHING
Top Health Spokesman Quits HHS After Just Two Weeks of RFK
What: HHS Sec. Kennedy’s top public spokesman quit after just two weeks on the job. Politico reports that Thomas Corry’s departure was due to his disagreements with Kennedy and his chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, and unease over how Kennedy was handling a growing measles outbreak in Texas. Corry did not come from Kennedy’s universe of supporters, but served in a similar role at HHS in the previous Trump administration.
Key line: “The sudden departure was prompted by growing disagreement with Kennedy and his principal deputy chief of staff, Stefanie Spear, over their management of the health department, said the two people, who were granted anonymity to speak candidly. Corry had also grown uneasy with Kennedy’s muted response to the intensifying outbreak of measles in Texas, the people said. The outbreak has infected at least 146 people and resulted in the nation’s first death from the disease in a decade.”
Source: Politico
Trump Admin Takes Down Key Maternal Health Database
What: Stat reports that a CDC database on infant and maternal health has been down for weeks, with state health departments specifically told by CDC to “cease data collection.” CDC says it will eventually be back up after the data “complies” with Trump executive orders, but it’s not clear when. In the meantime, experts say without the data “we cannot develop public health strategies to improve our maternal morbidity and mortality in the United States.”
Key line: “The CDC told STAT on Friday that the interruption is temporary, and was the result of needing to make the survey compliant with some of President Trump’s executive orders. ‘PRAMS was not shut down,’ Paul Prince, a spokesperson for the CDC, said in an email. ‘There were some schedule adjustments to ensure compliance with the Trump Administration’s Executive Orders, but these changes do not affect the continuation of the program.’ Prince declined to answer questions about what is being done to make the survey compliant or to specify the executive orders involved — although CDC has temporarily pulled down and made changes to other datasets to comply with Trump’s orders on DEI and gender.”
Source: Stat
PREGNANCY+ POSTPARTUM
Study: Faster Glucose Test Actually Works Better
What: A study of over 300 women found that a one-hour glucose tolerance test given postpartum actually outperforms the typical two-hour test in predicting future risk of diabetes among women who had gestational diabetes.
Key line: “Gestational diabetes provides a unique opportunity to identify a very high risk of a major future illness at a young age…It is for this reason that, after having gestational diabetes, it is recommended that women do an oral glucose tolerance test within 6 months of delivery. But the reality is that many women don’t come back to do this test. The first six months postpartum are hectic, and finding time for a two-hour test is challenging,” [said Dr. Retnakaran, a Professor at the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine.]
Source: Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute
MENOPAUSE
Menopause Moments Have Happened Before
What: The New Yorker has its own menopause moment, with Rebecca Mead reviewing three books by celebrities on the topic. She also dives into the history of menopause’s other “moments” – which happened throughout the 20th century.
Key line: “Popular discussion has flared and receded during the past sixty-odd years like a series of cultural hot flashes, each time presented as if nobody had talked about menopause before. And perhaps that’s no wonder. As with the thrilling adolescent discovery of sex or the earth-shattering destabilization of childbirth, the experience of undergoing menopause can be so disorienting that it’s impossible to conceive of its creeping but relentless onslaught until it’s your own body that’s combusting and your own psyche that’s been scrambled. It’s not that there’s a conspiracy of silence around menopause; rather, it’s that, like death, menopause is a thing that happens to other people, until it happens to you.”
My take: It’s helpful to look at the history, but there still is the fact that menopause research and training is seriously lacking in comparison to how many lives it effects.
Source: New Yorker
ONCOLOGY
Helping Patients Understand ‘Dense’ Breasts
What: New federal regulations require that women who get a mammogram in the United States are informed about their breast density status. That means an estimated 40 million women will get that (potentially new) information every year. JAMA has a piece breaking down the answers to common questions patients might have, based on existing evidence.
Key line: “Understanding breast density is just one piece of the puzzle in breast cancer screening,” said [Joann Elmore, MD, MPH, a professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA]. “By combining this information with a woman’s overall risk profile, clinicians can better guide patients in making personalized, informed choices about their health.”
Source: UCLA // JAMA
|
