"With rare exceptions, all 40-year-olds are alike. ... When you have seen one 85-year-old, you have seen one 85-year-old," writes one STAT reader. | Continue reading
A federal judge has suspended the FDA's approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. | Continue reading
AI-based diagnostic tools could be especially helpful for individuals living with uncommon conditions or who lack easy access to care. For physicians, they could help reduce misdiagnosis, which remains much too common. | Continue reading
While scientists who have been studying H5N1 bird flu for a couple of decades have a very healthy respect for it, a number are hedging their bets about what the virus's future path will look like. | Continue reading
ChatGPT's potential for deception is particularly worrisome, given that a recent pre-print showed that scientists have difficulty differentiating between real research and fake abstracts generated by ChatGPT. | Continue reading
Tobacco companies generally don’t donate to many Democratic candidates for political office, but this election cycle, they're showering Black Democrats in particular with campaign cash. | Continue reading
Research at Boston University that involved testing a lab-made hybrid version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus is garnering heated headlines alleging the scientists involved could have unleashed a new pathogen. | Continue reading
“This study provides clear data that it’s not as simple as saying, ‘Colonoscopy is the most sensitive test, and therefore it is the best.’ It still prevented cancers.” | Continue reading
No more long delays. No more fax machines. No more exorbitant charges for printed pages. Under a new federal law, you can now get your health information digitally. | Continue reading
An investigational Alzheimer’s disease treatment from Biogen and Eisai slowed the rate of cognitive decline by 27% in a clinical trial, the companies said Tuesday, meeting the goals of a closely tracked study. | Continue reading
Many researchers in the field of longevity science say there’s one project they wish billionaires could find a little pocket change to fund. | Continue reading
A STAT investigation found that in many cases, lawyers for Consulate Health Care affiliates leveraged the threat of bankruptcy in seeking to lower settlements. | Continue reading
The advance opens new avenues for studying how stem cells form organs and better understanding how certain mutations drive developmental diseases. | Continue reading
Genetic analysis of the virus responsible for the first case of polio in the United States in nearly a decade shows it is linked to vaccine-derived viruses recently detected in Jerusalem and London. | Continue reading
There is a new theory about what may be causing puzzling cases of pediatric hepatitis of unknown origin. | Continue reading
There has been little innovation in efforts to prevent suicide. But a small startup has quietly been building technology to reduce rates among those at highest risk. | Continue reading
“When the Boeing 737 MAX crashed, it made the news because 300 people died all at once. With the EHR, it’s spread out all over the country." | Continue reading
It felt like an interrogation, as if she were being accused of doing something wrong, of causing the loss of a pregnancy she hadn’t even known about when she arrived at urgent care. She wished she hadn’t come to see the doctor at all. | Continue reading
The AIDO modeling tool can give a heads up before a potential pandemic springs to life, provide actionable information about an unfolding outbreak, and offer a quick estimate of an outbreak's trajectory. | Continue reading
A tracking tool installed on many hospital websites is collecting patients’ sensitive health information and sending it to Facebook, an investigation by @TheMarkup co-published with @statnews has found. | Continue reading
Moderna said Wednesday that using a new version of its Covid-19 vaccine as a booster led to a superior antibody response against the Omicron variant compared to its current shot. | Continue reading
We can no longer pretend that politics doesn't permeate American health care and policy. While the separation of medicine and politics is aspirational, particularly in the U.S., that ship has sailed. | Continue reading
Genetic data indicate at least two separate monkeypox outbreaks underway, suggesting wider spread. | Continue reading
Bud Rose turned a basement business into the most widely used and universally respected resource for accurate and up-to-date information for clinicians in the U.S. and around the world. | Continue reading
For nearly two years, as the Covid pandemic disrupted life around the globe, other infectious diseases were in retreat. Now the viral and bacterial nuisances are returning — and behaving in unexpected ways. | Continue reading
Stanford researchers discovered that if you transfuse brain fluid from a young mouse into an old one, it will recover its former powers of recall. | Continue reading
Dr. Oz has made a career of peddling misinformation — but he’s also given sound advice on vaccines and masks. Could his political rise have a silver lining for science? | Continue reading
STAT analyzes the data to show how five key factors worked to drive U.S. Covid deaths since the start of the pandemic, yielding "five pandemics." | Continue reading
In this week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast," computer scientist Matthew Might talks about his son Bertrand, who died of a rare disease at age 12, and why a new DARPA-like research agency should focus on rare diseases. | Continue reading
The story of Paxlovid is a reminder that the path from a biological idea to a useable medicine depends on thousands of decisions, any of which can result in the medicine not making it. | Continue reading
The human body carefully regulates its pH. Tumors, however, may not, creating a new target for fine-tuning cancer therapy with nanoparticles. | Continue reading
Moderna announced it will ask the FDA to authorize its Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use in children aged 6 months to 6 years, a group for which there are currently no authorized Covid vaccines. | Continue reading
Google Translate has become a ubiquitous — and largely under-examined — part of patient care. Researchers are trying to change that. | Continue reading
STAT and MIT launched an experiment that — unlike most studies of AI in health care — tried not to prove the strength of health care algorithms, but root out their weaknesses. | Continue reading
The most powerful forms of deception rely more on emotional manipulation and misdirection than outright lies. | Continue reading
The pandemic has been catastrophic. But consider something that may have escaped you: You have witnessed — and you are a beneficiary of — a freaking miracle. | Continue reading
Plans to attempt to authorize the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine for children under 5 before full data are available appear to have run aground. | Continue reading
When Doug Olson received an experimental CAR-T therapy in 2010, there were no guarantees it could help his incurable cancer. Researchers reported this week he's still cancer-free. | Continue reading
We know that the best-spreading coronavirus variant will outcompete any slowpokes. But something curious happened with Omicron: The more transmissible variant didn’t take off first. | Continue reading
To most Americans, the name MarketScan means nothing. But most Americans mean everything to MarketScan. | Continue reading
"Fund people not projects" is easier said than done. A better way to fund science is to bend over backward to fund a truly diverse range of people and ideas, even including those perceived as unpopular, unworkable, and obscure. | Continue reading
IBM said Friday it will sell core assets of its Watson Health division to a private equity firm. | Continue reading
Elizabeth Holmes, the former Theranos CEO who promised to revolutionize medicine but whose company collapsed under the weight of its many misrepresentations, was found guilty of fraud. | Continue reading
If we want vaccines that protect our upper respiratory tracts, we’re probably going to need products that are administered in the nose — intranasal vaccines. | Continue reading
The finding "suggests much increased potential for aerosol generation during breathing,” said an expert on respiratory-virus dynamics. | Continue reading
Sequencing itself can be as fast as a 24- to 48-hour turnaround. It’s the logistics of moving samples around that’s the real bottleneck. | Continue reading
The theory goes that some type of animal, potentially rodents, was infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus sometime in mid-2020. | Continue reading
Overdose deaths have been rising for more than two decades, accelerated in the past two years, and jumped nearly 30% in the latest year. | Continue reading