In 2022, 817 U.S. women died either while pregnant or soon after giving birth, down from 1,205 the previous year.

“If you look at 2021, we had such a sharp increase as we were really still in the pandemic and still dealing with disruptions of care, the fear of coming into the healthcare space and the inability to access care during that time,” said Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell, an OB-GYN at Ochsner Medical Center in Kenner, Louisiana. She was not involved in the new report, which was published Thursday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics.

The maternal mortality rate in 2022 was 22.3 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with 32.9 per 100,000 in 2021, according to the new report.

“It’s looking like it’s returning to a pre-pandemic level,” said Donna Hoyert, the report’s author and an NCHS health scientist. The same appears to be true for preliminary 2023 data, she said.

Decreases were noted across all age groups and races, though Black women continue to be disproportionately affected. Their maternal mortality rate was 49.5 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2022. In 2021, it was 69.9 deaths per 100,000.

“We still have a long way to go to create really meaningful prevention interventions and strategies to decrease mortality,” said Dr. Warner Huh, an OB-GYN and head of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, “particularly among Black women and women of color.” Huh was not involved with the NCHS report.

The accuracy of NCHS’s maternal mortality data, which comes from death certificates, has long been scrutinized. More than a decade ago, the research group noted that many deaths among pregnant women were not being counted because of a problem with medical coding.

In 2003, the NCHS tried to correct the issue by recommending that states add a standardized checkbox to the certificates to make it clear whether the death occurred in a pregnant or recently pregnant woman. It wasn’t unti

A study published last month suggested the checkbox rule grossly overestimated rates of maternal mortality because it wasn’t nuanced enough to determine whether the cause of death was truly related to pregnancy.

Gillispie-Bell, also the medical director of the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative at the state’s department of health, said she disagreed with those findings because they did not account for mental health conditions.

And according to CDC data, the most common cause of death during or just after pregnancy is related to mental health conditions, which include drug and alcohol use disorder.

Hoyert said her group continues to refine the quality of the data.

“If we didn’t use the checkbox, we would be right back where we were in the past, when we were getting roundly criticized for missing a substantial percent of maternal deaths,” she said.

While it appears that the numbers are “trending in the right direction,” Huh said, “they’re still too high.”

“No mother should come into pregnancy with a fear that she is going to die delivering her baby,” Gillispie-Bell said. “As long as mothers are dying, we still have work to do.”

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On TikTok, there are hundreds of videos from people claiming the practice can do even more: whiten teeth, reverse tooth decay, fight gum disease, and treat a number of oral health conditions.

The practice has evolved from taking a spoonful of coconut or sesame oil to using pricey single-use oil pulling packets that come in a variety of fancy flavors.

How does oil pulling work and is there any validity to these claims about its benefits?

How does oil pulling work?

“Oil polling has been around for thousands of years as a way to better oral hygiene,” Dr. Matt Messina, clinic director of Ohio State Upper Arlington Dentistry, tells TODAY.com.

The traditional remedy is rooted in the Ayurvedic medicine system and has been practiced widely in India and Southern Asia.

“It’s a tradition that’s now being adopted because it’s trendy … I think it’s become popular over the last couple of years with the idea of, how do I find something ‘natural’ to make my mouth healthier,” Dr. Suhail Mohiuddin, Chicago-based dentist and founder of Dentologie, tells TODAY.com.

Oil pulling starts with taking a tablespoon of an edible oil and placing it in the mouth. Coconut oil is commonly used for oil pulling, Dr. Mark Wolff, dean of Penn Dental Medicine, tells TODAY.com. Sesame oil, olive oil, and sunflower oil may also be used — as long as the oil is edible, the experts note.

Next, the oil is vigorously swished around in the mouth similar to mouthwash, the experts note. “The idea is you sort of chew the oil around and ‘pull,’ by creating your own suction to tug it between the teeth and the gums,” says Messina.

After swishing the oil around for some time — oil pulling techniques vary but the practice can last anywhere from two to 20 minutes — you spit the oil out, says Messina.

Oil pulling is thought to help clean the teeth and reduce bacteria in the mouth, which can lead to the buildup of plaque and tooth decay. “Gingivitis or gum disease is basically inflammation of your gums caused by plaque, which is a biofilm,” Mohiuddin adds.

Oil pulling benefits

Although people have been practicing oil pulling for centuries to boost oral health, the research is limited and mixed, at best, the experts note.

“It’s (going) around on social media as an alleged method for reducing tooth decay, bad breath, gum disease (gingivitis), and a whole litany of of untested health items,” says Wolff. Some influencers tout oil pulling for its systematic benefits, including improving skin health and “detoxing” the body.

Overall, there aren’t enough robust, large-scale clinical studies clinical trials demonstrating these benefits, says Wolff.

“There are no reliable scientific studies to show that oil pulling reduces cavities, whitens teeth or improves oral health and well-being,” according to the American Dental Association.

One way cavities form is when the pH of the mouth is too acidic (below 5.5), which can cause the demineralization or erosion of enamel, says Mohiuddin. “There is no data that suggests that oil pulling can change the pH of the mouth,” he adds.

A 2022 meta-analysis investigating the effects of oil pulling on oral health found that oil pulling may have potential benefit in reducing salivary bacteria colony counts, but had no significant effects on reducing plaque or gingivitis.

As for removing toxins from the body, there’s no evidence oil pulling can do this, and the body detoxes itself on its own just fine with help from the liver, kidneys, lungs, and digestive system, TODAY.com previously reported.

“The real hard science on it is not very strong,” says Woolf.

While many of the supposed benefits of oil pulling are “somewhat questionable,” says Messina, the practice may still have a place in dental hygiene.

“The oil pulling method can have some effectiveness in removing loose debris from around the gum tissues and the teeth,” says Messina. “Anything that we do to remove food debris, plaque, or bacteria from the teeth is certainly beneficial,” Messina adds.

However, other methods like toothbrushes and flossing will do a much better job, the experts note. Our oral hygiene tools and capabilities have changed drastically in just the last 100 years, Messina points out. Compared to newer methods, oil pulling has a minimal effect on reducing debris and bacteria in the mouth.

Once a biofilm or plaque forms, oil pulling will “have no impact, or no greater impact than rinsing with water,” says Mohiuddin. “The only way to properly remove plaque is with a mechanical interruption, such as brushing or flossing,” Mohiuddin adds.

“Now we even have water flossers and irrigators to power-pull or power-rinse to get between the teeth and below the gum line — it’s simply a case of we’ve gotten better,” Messina notes.

“Oil pulling is a historic method that has been supplanted by some better ways to clean our teeth,” says Messina. That’s why it’s important to use oil pulling as a supplementary dental hygiene practice in addition to brushing and flossing, not as a replacement for these methods.

Oil pulling side effects

“Oil pulling is not in any way dangerous. There’s nothing wrong with it, there’s nothing bad about it — there’s no scientific evidence to indicate benefit or harm,” says Messina.

Compared to other trendy oral hygiene hacks on social media, such as brushing the teeth with charcoal (which is abrasive and harmful to enamel, says Messina), oil pulling is “pretty benign,” he adds.

Edible oils are used for oil pulling, which are safe to put in the mouth and swallow, even though the oil is meant to be spit out at the end, the experts note. “We’re not talking about engine oil (or) any petroleum-based oils. That would not be safe,” says Wolff.

Swallowing too much of these edible oils may cause stomach upset or diarrhea, says Wolff. Otherwise, oil pulling is generally pretty safe.

“The only time I would argue that oil pulling could be considered dangerous is if someone it has, say an infection or periodontal disease, and you’re using oil pulling instead of a known beneficial treatment,” says Messina.

Should you brush your teeth after oil pulling?

It’s typically recommended to brush your teeth after oil pulling, the experts note.

“Depending on what oil you’re using, if your mouth tastes like a salad, you might brush a little longer with some more toothpaste,” says Messina.

How often to oil pull

Most of the recommendations around oil pulling suggest doing the practice one to two times per day, the experts note. “If oil pulling is being done as as an additional treatment, there’s nothing wrong with that,” says Messina.

Avoid swallowing the oil, and spit it into the trash can instead of the sink when you’re done, as the oil can clog pipes, TODAY.com previously reported.

Do dentists recommend oil pulling? 

Due to the lack of scientific evidence, the American Dental Association does not recommend oil pulling as a dental hygiene practice.

“I would personally not recommend it as I can’t find the science to support it,” says Wolff.

Adds Messina: “Dentists aren’t going to recommend it because there’s no scientific basis to say that it’s beneficial, but we’re certainly not going to discourage it unless people are going to do this instead of something that is beneficial.”

Mohiuddin agrees that while most dentists won’t recommend oil pulling, “as long as you’re also brushing with a fluoride toothpaste, flossing or using a water-flosser, I don’t think they’re going to care,”

What the ADA and dentists do recommend is brushing twice a day with a fluoride-containing toothpaste for at least two minutes and flossing once a day. It’s also important to avoid tobacco, visit your dentist for yearly examinations and get routine cleanings.

As with any claim about any remedy on social media, try to look for trusted sources and talk to your dentist if you have any questions or want to change your dental hygiene routine.

“Everybody’s oral health needs are different. … Your dentist can give recommendations for your individual situation,” says Messina.

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The U.S. Senate has launched an investigation into the high price of Novo Nordisk‘s popular weight loss and diabetes drugs Ozempic and Wegovy in the United States.

The investigation into the Danish drugmaker was announced by Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent who chairs the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

“The scientists at Novo Nordisk deserve great credit for developing these drugs that have the potential to be a game changer for millions of Americans struggling with type 2 diabetes and obesity,” Sanders said in a Wednesday letter to CEO Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen.

“As important as these drugs are, they will not do any good for the millions of patients who cannot afford them,” wrote Sanders.

Sanders also laid out in stark terms the dilemma facing American insurers, including the government, given how high the costs are for the potentially life-changing drugs. “If the prices for these products are not substantially reduced they also have the potential to bankrupt Medicare, Medicaid, and our entire health care system,” he wrote.

Sanders noted that Novo Nordisk charges far less for the same drugs in other countries. The company “charges $969 in the United States for one month of Ozempic but just $155 in Canada and just $59 in Germany.”

Wegovy, which is even more expensive than Ozempic, is subject to similarly disparate pricing overseas, wrote Sanders. A study last month said that Ozempic could be manufactured for less than $5 a month.

The powerful progressive senator also made a simple request of the drug company CEO: “Will Novo Nordisk substantially reduce both the list price and the net price of both Ozempic and Wegovy?”

Sanders asked Jørgensen in his letter how the price of the drugs is determined and to make clear the amount the pharmaceutical company spends on research and development. He gave Novo Nordisk until May 8 to answer a series of questions about the drug’s pricing.

Novo Nordisk declined to provide production costs to CNBC following the release of the study and noted that it spent $5 billion on research and development in 2023 and will spend more than $6 billion this year to boost manufacturing for GLP-1s.

In a statement to CNBC Wednesday in response to the letter, Novo Nordisk said the company agrees with Sanders that access to the drugs is important but highlighted the complexities of the healthcare industry.

“It’s easy to oversimplify the science that goes into understanding disease and developing and producing new treatments, as well as the intricacies of U.S. and global healthcare systems. However, the public debate doesn’t always take into account this extremely complex reality,” the company said.

Lisa Pisano’s combination of heart and kidney failure left her too sick to qualify for a traditional transplant, and out of options. Then doctors at NYU Langone Health devised a novel one-two punch: Implant a mechanical pump to keep her heart beating and days later transplant a kidney from a genetically modified pig.

Pisano is recovering well, the NYU team announced Wednesday. She’s only the second patient ever to receive a pig kidney — following a landmark transplant last month at Massachusetts General Hospital – and the latest in a string of attempts to make animal-to-human transplantation a reality.

This week, the 54-year-old grasped a walker and took her first few steps.

“I was at the end of my rope,” Pisano told The Associated Press. “I just took a chance. And you know, worst case scenario, if it didn’t work for me, it might have worked for someone else and it could have helped the next person.”

Dr. Robert Montgomery, director of NYU Langone Transplant Institute, recounted cheers in the operating room as the organ immediately started making urine.

“It’s been transformative,” Montgomery said of the experiment’s early results.

But “we’re not off the hook yet,” cautioned Dr. Nader Moazami, the NYU cardiac surgeon who implanted the heart pump.

“With this surgery I get to see my wife smile again,” Pisano’s husband Todd said Wednesday.

Other transplant experts are closely watching how the patient fares.

“I have to congratulate them,” said Dr. Tatsuo Kawai of Mass General, who noted that his own pig kidney patient was healthier overall going into his operation than NYU’s patient. “When the heart function is bad, it’s really difficult to do a kidney transplant.”

Massachusetts Apr 3

‘One of the happiest moments of my life': Recipient of pig kidney transplant released from hospital

Mar 21

Boston surgeons have transplanted a pig kidney into a patient

THE PIG ORGAN QUEST

More than 100,000 people are on the U.S. transplant waiting list, most who need a kidney, and thousands die waiting. In hopes of filling the shortage of donated organs, several biotech companies are genetically modifying pigs so their organs are more humanlike, less likely to be destroyed by people’s immune system.

NYU and other research teams have temporarily transplanted pig kidneys and hearts into brain-dead bodies, with promising results. Then the University of Maryland transplanted pig hearts into two men who were out of other options, and both died within months.

Mass General’s pig kidney transplant last month raised new hopes. Kawai said Richard “Rick” Slayman experienced an early rejection scare but bounced back enough to go home earlier this month and still is faring well five weeks post-transplant. A recent biopsy showed no further problems.

A COMPLEX CASE AT NYU

Pisano is the first woman to receive a pig organ — and unlike with prior xenotransplant experiments, both her heart and kidneys had failed. She went into cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated before the experimental surgeries. She’d gotten too weak to even play with her grandchildren. “I was miserable,” the Cookstown, New Jersey, woman said.

A failed heart made her ineligible for a traditional kidney transplant. But while on dialysis, she didn’t qualify for a heart pump, called a left ventricular assist device or LVAD, either.

“It’s like being in a maze and you can’t find a way out,” Montgomery explained — until the surgeons decided to pair a heart pump with a pig kidney.

TWO SURGERIES IN EIGHT DAYS

With emergency permission from the Food and Drug Administration, Montgomery chose an organ from a pig genetically engineered by United Therapeutics Corp. so its cells don’t produce a particular sugar that’s foreign to the human body and triggers immediate organ rejection.

Plus a tweak: The donor pig’s thymus gland, which trains the immune system, was attached to the donated kidney in hopes that it would help Pisano’s body tolerate the new organ.

Surgeons implanted the LVAD to power Pisano’s heart on April 4, and transplanted the pig kidney on April 12. There’s no way to predict her long-term outcome but she’s shown no sign of organ rejection so far, Montgomery said. And in adjusting the LVAD to work with her new kidney, Moazami said doctors already have learned lessons that could help future care of heart-and-kidney patients.

Special “compassionate use” experiments teach doctors a lot but it will take rigorous studies to prove if xenotransplants really work. What happens with Pisano and Mass General’s kidney recipient will undoubtedly influence FDA’s decision to allow such trials. United Therapeutics said it hopes to begin one next year.

IVF is a medical procedure in which an egg is fertilized by sperm in a lab or elsewhere outside of the body, and the fertilized eggs, or embryos, are then placed into the body, according to the Mayo Clinic.

In February 2024, IVF was at the center of much discussion when the Alabama Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos created through IVF were considered children under state law. This halted IVF procedures around the state until a law was passed to protect IVF providers in March. It shined a light on the legacy of this procedure and the women involved in its creation who have given families a pathway to having children when there was none.

Many women scientists played a role in the development of IVF, from Miriam Menkin in the 30s to Georgeanna Seegar Jones in the late 70s and 80s, Margaret Marsh, a historian of reproductive medicine and reproductive sexuality at Rutgers University, and Dr. Wanda Ronner, a professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania, tell TODAY.com.

“They were all pioneers in in this area, along with the people they worked with,” Marsh says. As research partners to the men developing IVF at the time, the women involved in the formation of IVF were instrumental to the treatment so many people rely on today. “These men could not have been successful without these women,” Ronner notes.

Jones’ work, for example, led to the birth of the first baby born in the U.S. from IVF, Elizabeth Carr. Carr tells TODAY.com she considers Jones to be “the brains” behind the Jones Institute, the IVF clinic in Norfolk, Virginia, where she was born.

“She’s really the one (who) figured out all the hormone protocols that we all know so well now that are involved in IVF,” Carr says. “Throughout her career, she never gave up on this idea of trying to solve this problem of infertility. So, I’m forever eternally grateful to her for that.”

In honor of Women’s History Month, read on to learn about some of the women who helped make IVF possible.

Miriam Menkin

Menkin started working with Harvard gynecologist Dr. John Rock from the late 1930s to 1950s. Together they determined exactly how fertilization occurs in women — something unknown at the time, Marsh and Ronner, who have co-authored several books about the history of reproductive health, said.

Rock, along with embryologist Arthur Hertig, conducted two pioneering studies focused on IVF, Marsh said, the first of which determined exactly when the human embryo forms during conception. (Rock also played a major role in the development of the birth control pill.)

The second part of Rock’s research agenda “could not have been done without the assistance of Miriam Menkin, who was his lab tech,” Marsh said. Menkin’s role in the experiment was to retrieve eggs from women who were undergoing surgical procedures, Marsh said.

“She would be the one standing outside of the operating room, waiting to receive this egg,” Marsh said. Then, using sperm donated from fellows or medical students, Menkin would go to a nearby lab and try to fertilize the egg — “an egg you can’t even see,” Marsh points out.

Menkin began her attempts to fertilize an egg in 1938, using 138 eggs that resulted in 47 inseminations over the course of six years, Marsh said. Menkin and Rock eventually became the first people to fertilize an egg in vitro, or outside of the body, in 1944.

“Menkin was absolutely imperative to Rock’s success. Without her, Rock would not have been able to achieve this. He was the surgeon, he was taking out the tissue, but she was the person in the lab, trying to get these eggs fertilized,” Marsh said.

“Menkin was one of probably hundreds of unsung women scientists,” Marsh points out. Some had doctorate degrees and others, like Menkin, didn’t. But, she stands out in history because she was recognized early-on. Rock made it a point to recognize her work, something which wasn’t common at the time.

Because of her ground-breaking work, Menkin was listed as first author on their research article.

Jean Purdy

After Rock and Menkin’s article was published in Science, a medical journal, in 1944, showcasing the results of their IVF experiment, British researchers Robert Edwards, a biologist, and Patrick Steptoe, a gynecologist, began working on using IVF to conceive a baby.

Edwards’ research assistant and technician, Jean Purdy, would go on to play a vital role in this work in 1968. Purdy, who was trained as a nurse, began teaching herself embryology as she worked with the pair, Marsh says, and the three combined their research in 1973.

Purdy was responsible for combining the egg with the sperm and fertilizing the embryo, which was a tough task. “(Purdy and the team) tried many different mechanisms to get a pregnancy through IVF, but they were not succeeding,” Marsh said.

But, by 1978, Louise Brown became the first baby in the world who was born through IVF on July 25, thanks to Edwards, Steptoe and Purdy’s work.

“In England, there was a lot of skepticism about (IVF). They said they weren’t sure that it could be done,” Marsh explained. The public feared those born via IVF would somehow be different than those who weren’t.

Steptoe, Edwards and Purdy went on to found an IVF clinic in 1980, when Purdy was about 35 years old. But she died shortly thereafter from melanoma, just before she turned 40.

“She was very young and extremely talented,” Marsh notes.

Edwards, one of Purdy’s two research partners, was later awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine for his work developing IVF in 2010, by then both Purdy and Steptoe had died.

“I think that the situation is that today there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes folks in medicine and science that really don’t get recognition at all,” Marsh said. “I think that was the case then, and that was the case now.”

“She made an incredibly important contribution,” Marsh said of Purdy. “Edwards and Steptoe always told everybody that she was an equal partner.”

Georgeanna Jones

Georgeanna Jones had her first major discovery in medical school and became a distinguished reproductive endocrinologist who would play a vital role in the development of IVF in the U.S., Marsh said.

Jones worked alongside her husband Howard Jones at Johns Hopkins University, where they shared an office and even a desk at times, until they were forced into mandatory retirement by the university when they turned 65.

According to Marsh’s research, the pair were not ready to retire and were offered positions at a brand new medical school, Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia. The day the couple drove down to Virginia for their new jobs was the same day the first IVF baby, Louise Brown, was born.

Coincidentally, Marsh said, the couple had mentored Robert Edwards, the British biologist who worked with Purdy and Steptoe in the U.K., when he was trying to learn how to fertilize eggs.

When a reporter asked Howard Jones if a baby could be born from IVF in the U.S., he and his wife began working on accomplishing an IVF birth in 1978, though they did have opposition from the anti-abortion movement concerned with the morality of IVF.

The pair had the backing from their medical school and opened an IVF clinic, which resulted in the first baby born in the U.S. from IVF on Dec. 28, 1981 — Elizabeth Carr.

“There were very few women in reproductive endocrinology in this time — very few women who were IVF pioneers — and she was one,” Marsh said of Georgeanna Jones.

During this time was a number of other women IVF pioneers working throughout the 1980s like Jones, Marsh says. There was Anne Colston Wentz, whose team at Vanderbilt University was the fourth program in the U.S. that had a successful IVF birth in 1983.

PonJola Coney was a fellow at Pennsylvania Hospital, which had its first IVF birth in 1984. Coney was one of the only Black American IVF pioneers at the time, according to Marsh’s research, and she went on to direct the first IVF program in Oklahoma at the University of Oklahoma.

Elizabeth Carr

Carr was the first baby born via IVF in the U.S.

Now, 42-year-old patient advocate living in Massachusetts, she tells TODAY.com that she’s known about IVF for as long as she can remember — and even before then, as she notes she attended her first press conference when she was just three days old.

Carr’s mother experienced three ectopic pregnancies while trying to have children, and after going to a check up, her OBGYN slipped her a copy of a paper talking about IVF and said, while it had only been done in England, it could be something for her to consider, Carr says.

“Both of my parents figured, what did they have to lose? They didn’t have a child as it was, so they figured this could be another shot,” Carr says. “So they figured it was worth taking a step.”

Carr was born in December 1981 with armed guards outside of her hospital room and nursery due to the controversy of her birth, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“I truly don’t remember when I first heard somebody speak out against IVF. Obviously, I feel like that’s always been there as well, and my parents had me under pretty tight security because of the controversy back then,” Carr says. “I guess there’s always been the naysayers, but I just don’t put too much stock into their argument because I think there’s probably nothing more natural than people wanting to build the family of their dreams.”

For the first few years of Carr’s life, she says she attended IVF baby reunions in Norfolk, Virginia, at the clinic where she was born.

“For a while it was just the first, you know, handful of IVF babies,” she says. “I think the last one we had was when I was maybe 10 or 11. And I just remember holding babies 1000 and 1001 that were twins from our specific clinic. And at that point, the reunions had to stop because there was too many of us.”

And by 2021, 86, 146 infants born, or 2.3% of all infants born in the U.S., were conceived through the use of assisted reproductive technology, which includes procedures like IVF, according to the Department of Health and Human Services.

Carr attended President Joe Biden’s state of the union address in March 2024 following the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, which she says was “really, really tough.”

“I read the ruling and immediately was just devastated and heartbroken, not just for how it made me feel personally, which was kind of like a personal attack, but also for all of those people who wanted to be able to access this treatment,” she says.

“IVF is currently the single most effective treatment for infertility, and it has a lot of implications outside of infertility,” she continues. “If you’re a same sex couple looking to build a family, or you’re going through cancer treatments and you want to preserve your fertility, or if you want to have genetic testing to screen out for really terrible diseases in your family history. Things like that.”

Carr, a mother of a 13-year-old son, says she would love to see IVF protected nationally, greater insurance coverage and greater care coverage and access in the U.S. in her lifetime.

“The thing about infertility in particular is that it doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or Republican,” she says. “It does not discriminate. So, there are people clearly on both sides of the aisle, with one in six people impacted by infertility, that probably need to access IVF.”

“I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll we’ll get it done,” she adds.

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The test, called AvertD, was approved by the FDA in December. It detects a handful of genetic markers that the manufacturer, California-based SOLVD Health, claims are associated with opioid use disorder. It’s meant to be used before a person is prescribed an opioid for the first time; for example, ahead of a surgery that a doctor may prescribe a short course of opioids for recovery.  

It’s a promising test, in theory: An opioid prescription, even short-term, can be a path to addiction for some people.

The opioid crisis in the United States has been responsible for almost 645,000 deaths over the last two decades. In 2022, about 6.1 million people in the U.S. were reported to have an opioid use disorder, according to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. 

The agency’s clearance of AvertD, however, went against the advice of its own independent advisory committee, which overwhelmingly voted against approval in 2022 because of concerns that the test may fail to identify people at risk for opioid use disorder, potentially leading to overprescribing.

In a letter addressed to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf dated Thursday, a group of doctors and researchers called on the agency to revoke its approval, saying the test doesn’t predict opioid use disorder “any better than chance.”

“This test will make the opioid crisis worse,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, medical director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and one of the those who signed the letter. “It will contribute to overprescribing, it will contribute to an increased incidence of opioid use disorder. In other words, more people becoming newly addicted to opioids.”

The risks of getting it wrong

The authors of the letter take particular issue with SOLVD Health’s claim that its test can accurately predict a person’s risk for opioid addiction using 15 genetic markers.

Getting it wrong has consequences: A test that fails to identify a person at risk may give both the patient and the doctor a false sense of security about opioid use, the authors wrote. On the other hand, mislabeling a patient as at risk could lead a doctor to refrain from prescribing opioids that the patient needs, while also burdening them with a highly stigmatized medical condition. 

The FDA and SOLVD Health did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the FDA’s approval statement in December, the agency said it cleared the test because the opioid crisis calls for “innovative measures to prevent, diagnose and treat opioid use disorder,” adding that it worked with SOLVD Health to address the advisory committee’s concerns.

Many in the scientific community, however, are deeply skeptical that a person’s risk of opioid use disorder can be predicted based on only a handful of genetic markers, said Dr. Katherine Keyes, a professor of epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York. 

Addiction is a “complex trait,” she said, and involves a number of other factors besides genetics, including socioeconomic status and a person’s exposure to a substance.

“We know the risk of OUD increases with the dose and duration of an opioid prescription,” Keyes said, using an acronym for opioid use disorders. “Receiving an opioid prescription remains one of the strongest risk factors for the development of opioid use disorder.”

“You’re not going to find a genetics professor in the United States or anywhere that would say using these 15 genetic markers will tell you anything,” Kolodny said.

Dr. Adam Gordon, a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University of Utah School of Medicine, voted against AvertD’s approval on the FDA’s advisory panel in 2022. He said that even the agency has acknowledged the risk of using such a test.

In briefing documents published ahead of the advisory committee meeting, FDA staff wrote that genetic risk “may not be the biggest factor” for opioid use disorder. 

And in a release for AvertD’s approval, the FDA said the main risk associated with the test is false positives and false negatives.

In its application for approval, SOLVD Health gauged how effective its test was based on how well it could weed out false negatives and false positives, using measures known as sensitivity and specificity.

A highly sensitive test accurately identifies people with the condition, minimizing false negatives, while a highly specific test accurately rules out people without the condition, minimizing false positives, said Dr. Andrew Saxon, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“If your specificity were 75%, it would mean a quarter of the people who you identify in the test as possibly having this disorder did not have this disorder,” he said.

SOLVD Health said in its application that AvertD had demonstrated a sensitivity of about 82% and a specificity of about 79%. 

Those numbers suggest that roughly 1 in 5 results would be false negatives and roughly 1 in 5 would be false positives.

“I think the product has the potential to do harm,” Gordon said. 

As part of AvertD’s approval, SOLVD Health is required to provide training to health care workers to ensure that the test is being appropriately used. The company will also need to run a large-scale study further assessing the test’s effectiveness.

The FDA has a history of approving products that its advisory committees say lack sufficient evidence on their safety or effectiveness.

In 2021, for example, the agency approved Biogen’s Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm despite its advisory committee rejecting the drug, saying that there wasn’t enough evidence that it worked.

The company took the drug off the market earlier this year.

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A study, published Thursday in Science, reveals why this happens. Scientists have found that the brains of humans and other mammals have a system for choosing which life experiences are important enough to be cemented into long-term memory — and which will be allowed to fade away.

Experiments in mice revealed that during waking hours, cells in the brain’s hippocampus spark in a specific pattern called “sharp-wave ripples,” which tag important experiences for movement into long-term memory storage during sleep. 

Although the research was performed in mice, certain brain processes have remained almost the same as mammals have evolved, so the findings can tell us a lot about ourselves, said the study’s senior author, Dr. György Buzsáki, Biggs Professor of Neuroscience at NYU Langone Health.

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As part of the research, Buzsáki and his colleagues put mice through a maze that had a sugary reward at the end for those that successfully reached it. Meanwhile, the researchers were monitoring the activity of nerve cells through electrodes implanted in the rodent brains that fed data into computer programs.  

They observed that as the mice paused to eat their treats, their brains sparked sharp-wave ripples that were repeated as many as 20 times. The daytime pattern of sharp-wave ripples was replayed during the night, a process that moved the experience into long-term memory.

It’s during sleep when experiences from waking hours deemed to be important are converted into enduring memories. 

Events that were followed by very few or no sharp-wave ripples failed to form lasting memories, the researchers noted.

This tagging process during waking hours is totally unconscious, Buzsáki said. “The brain decides on its own, rather than us deciding voluntarily,” he added. 

Relaxation needed for long-term memory

Still, the research suggests there are things we can do to increase the likelihood of a memory being stored permanently.

If, like the mice, we pause after an experience, it may help cement the events into long-term memory, Buzsáki said. We need that period of relaxation, when we’re not paying close attention to anything, to allow sharp-wave ripples to spark. That wakeful process is an essential part of creating a permanent memory.

Practically speaking, this means if you like to binge TV series, you’re not likely to remember much of any episode except the last one you watched, Buzsáki said.

“If you watch a movie and would like to remember it, it’s better to go for a walk afterwards,” Buzsáki said. “No double features.”

An intriguing finding of the new research is the discovery that there could be bursts of activity — the sharp-wave ripples — when the mouse is standing still and its brain is essentially idling, said Daniela Schiller, a professor of neuroscience and psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

What’s amazing, Schiller said, is the pattern recorded close to the event was the same as what was seen during sleep. And both patterns mimicked the mouse’s real-life experience.

The study showed that events followed by a pause and electrical bursts in the brain are the ones that we will find in long-term memory, said Daphna Shohamy, director of Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute. If you observe animals, you can see them pausing during the day after a novel or rewarding experience, she said.

“We did a study a few years ago in which we had humans navigate a maze with random objects along the way, looking for a treasure,” Shohamy said. “If they got the treasure, they were more likely to remember the random object they passed along the way.”

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“I never had any medical problems before in my life,” Campione tells TODAY.com. Last winter, the 36-year-old teacher and mother of two from New Jersey started experiencing tingling and numbness on the right side of her face and body. “Over a course of time, it kept getting worse and worse,” she said.

After visiting multiple neurologists, getting different blood tests and MRIs, Campione still didn’t have a diagnosis. While doctors did find a slight abnormality in the white matter of her brain, says Campione, it was “nothing they were too concerned about.”

Over the next few months, Campione would continue seeing specialists and get nine MRIs in total. She was put on countless medications for everything from seizures to multiple sclerosis, but nothing was helping, she says. “I was being led down different paths and different treatments, with lots of unknowns,” says Campione.

As time went on, her symptoms progressed. “My face would get so swollen it would get stuck and I wouldn’t be able to speak … then I couldn’t feel anything on the right side of my body so I wasn’t able to walk sometimes or use my right arm,” Campione says.

The formerly healthy mom of two experienced episodes of dangerously high blood pressure and a high heart rate, which landed her in the hospital several times, she adds.

Finally, a friend referred Campione to Dr. Nitesh Patel, a neurosurgical oncologist at Hackensack Meridian Neuroscience Institute at Jersey Shore University Medical Center.

“She’s young, only 36 and having these very unusual symptoms, she felt like she was going crazy,” Patel, who is also an associate professor at Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, tells TODAY.com. Patel says he suspected Campione’s symptoms were caused by a mass in the left side of her brain, which controls the right side of the body.

“After looking at my case, he phoned me and he mentioned a couple different brain tumor types that he thought were causing my symptoms,” says Campione.

What came next was a total shock, she says. Patel advised her to undergo an awake craniotomy, or awake brain surgery.

In Camopione’s case, the location of the tumor was close to the areas that control speech and movement of her right arm and leg, says Patel. “The real estate, so to speak, of the brain around the tumor is really critical,” Patel adds.

An awake brain surgery allows surgeons to “carefully map out is safe and what’s not safe to do,” Patel explains. “Before I make any irreversible steps, I can stimulate that part of the brain with a small electronic electric probe and get immediate feedback,” says Patel.

Using a technology called Quicktome Connectomics, Patel could monitor Campione’s speech and other parts of her brain to ensure he wasn’t harming these areas while removing as much of the tumor as possible.

In order to do so, Campione would need to be alert and talking during the surgery. Typically, the patient may answer questions or count, but Patel prefers singing.

Singing allows the surgeon to continuously monitor the patient’s speech, rhythm, cadence, and ability to recall words without the pauses or interruptions which happen in a normal conversation, Patel explains. “The nice thing about singing is it covers all of that and in kind of a fun way,” he adds.

When Campione was told she would have to sing, she immediately knew what to put on her surgery set list. “My daughters who are six and eight are huge Taylor Swift fans and it’s playing all the time in my house, in the car,” says Campione, adding that she is a fan (aka, a “Swiftie”) as well.

Campione says she was initially “extremely frightened” about the surgery, but she knew singing Taylor Swift’s songs would bring her some comfort. “It made me think of my children and my family. It made me feel like they’re with me in the room and everything is going to be OK,” says Campione.

On Jan. 31, Patel and his team carefully removed the tumor from Campione’s brain while she sang along to Taylor Swift’s “22”, “Style” and “Shake It Off,” among other hits. “The nurses were holding my hand and singing along with me, I think a couple were kind of dancing around on the side,” says Campione, adding that she thinks she may have turned some doctors into Swifties as well.

“Knowing my daughters would (have been) singing right along with me got me through the surgery,” Campione said.

During an awake craniotomy, a medication is injected to numb everything above the eyebrows and behind the ears before opening the skull, Patel explains. Fortunately, the brain does not have any pain receptors, he adds.

“I still can’t believe that I didn’t feel anything … I think falling down and cutting your leg hurts more than this, believe it or not,” says Campione.

The surgery was a success and doctors were able to safely remove the benign (non-cancerous) tumor, called a low-grade glioma, from Campione’s brain, says Patel.

Parts of the procedure were filmed, which allowed Campione to share her operating room concert with her daughters afterwards. “My older one thinks that I could have sang a little better, and my little one likes to tell her teacher and all her friends that Taylor Swift was in the operating room with me,” says Campione.

“They were very scared at first, we all were, but now when they look at the videos they think it’s pretty cool,” she adds.

Today, seven weeks after surgery, Campione is symptom-free and off nearly all of the medications she was taking before. “I am 100% better than I was, which is amazing, and I can’t be more grateful for my doctors and the rest of the care team,” she says.

Aside from routine checkups and monitoring, Campoine will be able to return to her normal life and hopes to return to work soon.

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The blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic could be manufactured for less than $5 a month, even as Novo Nordisk charges close to $1,000 per month for the injection in the U.S. before insurance, a study released Wednesday suggests.

The study, from researchers at Yale University, King’s College Hospital in London and the nonprofit Doctors Without Borders, raises more questions about the hefty price tag of the top-selling diabetes treatment and similar drugs for weight loss, which are all part of a new class of treatments called GLP-1s.

Demand for those medicines has soared over the last year, even as more insurers drop them from their plans due to cost, leaving some patients unable to afford the drugs. 

The study also comes after years of political pressure on Novo Nordisk and other drugmakers to slash high costs of diabetes care, especially insulin. 

Ozempic can generally be produced for less than various forms of insulin, according to the study published in JAMA Network Open. 

Researchers found that a month’s supply of the treatment could be manufactured for an estimated 89 cents to $4.73. They evaluated manufacturing costs for the weekly injection along with a profit margin with an allowance for tax to produce those estimates, which they call “cost-based prices.” 

Novo Nordisk’s list price for a monthly package of Ozempic is $935.77 before insurance and other rebates. The findings suggest that GLP-1s “can likely be manufactured for prices far below current prices, enabling wider access,” the researchers concluded. 

In a statement on Wednesday, Novo Nordisk declined to provide production costs for Ozempic and its weight loss drug counterpart Wegovy. But the Danish drugmaker noted that it spent almost $5 billion on research and development last year, and will spend more than $6 billion on a recent deal to boost manufacturing to meet demand for GLP-1s.

It also said 75% of its gross earnings go to rebates and discounts to ensure patients have access to its products. 

The company also said out-of-pocket costs for Ozempic depend on a patient’s insurance coverage. Patients with private or commercial coverage for Ozempic can access a savings card and pay as little as $25 for a one-month, two-month or three-month supply of the treatment for up to 24 months. 

Separate research from the University of Liverpool and other researchers has found that Wegovy could be produced for $40 a month.

A survey released this month from Evercore ISI found that more than half of people currently taking a GLP-1 said they are paying a monthly price of $50 or less out of pocket. Nearly 75% of respondents who used to take one of the drugs said they spent the same amount.

The U.S. territory of 3.2 million people has reported at least 549 cases so far this year, compared with a total of 1,293 cases for all of last year. The majority of cases have been reported in the capital of San Juan.

More than 340 people have been hospitalized for the mosquito-borne virus, according to the island’s health department.

Puerto Rico last declared a dengue epidemic in 2012.

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More than 5 million dengue cases were reported worldwide last year, with nearly 80% of them occurring in the Western Hemisphere, according to the World Health Organization. The region has reported some 3 million cases so far this year, with health officials noting that higher rainfall along with humidity and heat linked to climate change have contributed to a rise in cases.

The virus can cause crushing headaches, fever, vomiting, a rash and other symptoms. While most infected people don’t get symptoms, severe cases can lead to plasma leakage and death.

Their ears, noses and mouths were stretched back, and there were deep grooves in their foreheads, cheeks and chins, according to NBC News.

“My first thought was I woke up in a demon world,” said Sharrah, 59, of Clarksville, Tennessee. “You can’t imagine how scary it was.”

Someone he knew taught visually impaired people and suggested he might have prosopometamorphopsia, or PMO. The extremely rare neurological disorder of perception causes faces to appear distorted in shape, size, texture or color. Sharrah felt the symptoms were a match, and he was formally diagnosed last year.

The distortions appear only when he sees people in person — not in photographs or through computer screens.

That gave scientists an opportunity to visualize what the warped faces look like for a person with PMO, something they had never been able to do before. Researchers at Dartmouth College created a digital representation of what Sharrah has been experiencing. The resulting images were published Thursday in The Lancet. 

To create the visuals, the researchers asked Sharrah to describe the differences between photographs of people’s faces and the real-life people standing in front of him. The researchers then used image-editing software to modify the pictures to match Sharrah’s description.

PMO symptoms often resolve after a few days or weeks, though in some cases they can linger for years. Sharrah said he still sees demonic faces.

There are fewer than 100 published case reports of PMO. Researchers suspect it is caused by dysfunction in the brain network that handles facial processing, though they don’t fully understand what triggers the condition. Some cases have been linked to head trauma, stroke, epilepsy or migraines, but other people have PMO without obvious structural changes in their brains.

The researchers offered two possible triggers for Sharrah’s case. First, he had carbon monoxide poisoning four months before his PMO symptoms started. Second, he endured a significant head injury at age 43: While he was trying to unjam the handle on his trailer, Sharrah fell backward and hit his head on concrete. According to the study, MRI scans showed a lesion on the left side of his brain. 

The study’s lead author, Antônio Mello, a Ph.D. student who works in Dartmouth’s Social Perception Lab, said other people have reached out the lab with PMO symptoms that differ significantly from Sharrah’s.

Some people “have seen face distortions since they remember, since they were a child,” Mello said. “For them at least, it’s impossible to find a single event that was responsible.”

Researchers even suspect the condition may be underreported.

“We’re hearing from somebody new every week or two” who describes symptoms consistent with PMO, said Brad Duchaine, a co-author of the study and principal investigator of the Social Perception Lab.

He added that some patients he’s worked with in the lab “don’t tell anybody or tell very few people about it, because they’re afraid of what others are going to think.”

In addition, Mello said, many doctors aren’t aware of PMO and may misdiagnose people with mental health disorders, instead. As a result, some PMO patients have been prescribed medications for schizophrenia or psychosis, which aren’t appropriate for their condition, he said.

A key difference between PMO and psychological disorders, Mello said, is that people with PMO “don’t think that the world is really distorted — they just realize that there is something different with their vision.”

While there is some overlap in the symptoms that various PMO patients describe, there is also a good deal of variation, Duchaine said. So the images in the case study may be unique to Sharrah’s experience.

Duchaine said he has spoken to people who see drooping faces, as well as a woman who sees two faces when she looks at someone — one in front of the other. Another woman he spoke to recently sees “witch-like” faces with long noses and pointy ears, Duchaine said.

“The first time it happened, she was on a beach in Jamaica and was looking at two women who were standing in the water. They had this witch-like appearance at one moment, and then they didn’t a while later,” he said.

A case study published in 2018 described a 68-year-old woman who developed PMO after a stroke. Although her neurological and eye exams were normal, she reported that people’s left eyes moved upward and to the side when she saw them in person or watched them on television. Her own face looked normal to her in a mirror, though.

“On TV, she saw people having half of their face distorted, and it was the left half. Her stroke was on the left, as well,” said a co-author of that case study, Dr. Nada El Husseini, an associate professor of neurology at Duke University School of Medicine.

Husseini said it’s possible that PMO symptoms are worse when people look at moving faces, which could explain why some people don’t notice facial distortion in photographs.

Sharrah said that’s consistent with his experience.

“When I’m looking at a person, that face is moving, it’s talking, it’s gesturing. So it really increases the effect of it,” he said.

Sharrah said he has found a few ways to cope with his condition. He lives with a roommate and her two kids, which he said has been helpful, because he’s used to having people around, so he isn’t as spooked when he sees new faces in public. For reasons that aren’t clear to researchers, Sharrah also finds that green light alleviates his symptoms, so he sometimes wears glasses with green-tinted lenses when he’s in crowds.

He wants others to know they can manage the condition, as well.

“I came so close to having myself institutionalized,” Sharrah said. “If I can help anybody from the trauma that I experienced with it and keep people from being institutionalized and put on drugs because of it, that’s my No. 1 goal.”

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The particular bacterium, which appears to shield tumor cells from cancer-fighting drugs, was found in 50% of the tumors tested in the study, according to NBC News. The discovery, experts say, could pave the way for new treatments and possibly new methods of screening.

Colon cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the United States and is expected to kill more than 53,000 people in the nation in 2024, according to the American Cancer Society. 

Rates are rising sharply among younger people: The percentage of people younger than 55 diagnosed with colon cancer almost doubled between 1995 and 2019, leaping from 11% to 20% of cases. What’s more, these cases are often diagnosed at later, more aggressive stages.

Experts are still struggling to explain the shift.

“Colorectal cancer is very treatable when caught early, but the cases in younger people are increasing and we don’t know why,” said Dr. Flavio Rocha, a surgical oncologist and physician in chief at the Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute, who was not involved in the study. 

The new research doesn’t answer that question; it’s far too early to implicate this bacteria in the rise in cases in younger people. What’s more, most of the patients in the study were over the age of 50.

But the findings raise “the question as to whether there are elevated levels of this bacterium in young onset colorectal cancer which is on the rise globally for unknown reasons,” said co-lead study author Susan Bullman, an assistant professor of human biology at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle.

Bacteria with a secret

Scientists have suspected a link between the bacteria, called Fusobacterium nucleatum, and colorectal cancer growth for almost a decade. The bacteria is usually only found in the mouth, far from the colon. 

In the mouth, it’s one of the most common types of disease-causing bacteria, linked to gum disease and plaque buildup. But it was unclear how it could withstand the journey through the gut and eventually invade tumor cells in places in the body where these types of bacteria usually don’t survive.

In the study, Bullman and her colleagues looked at the bacterial makeup of almost 200 colorectal tumors, as well as stool samples from more than 1,200 people, half of whom did not have cancer. 

What they learned was that the bacteria was a bit more complicated than once thought. Namely, it has two distinct subspecies, one of which appears to shield colorectal tumors from cancer-fighting drugs. 

“It acts like a cloak,” Bullman said. 

Normally, immune cells called T-cells recognize and attack tumor cells. But this bacteria recruits another type of immune cell into the cancer cells, one that lets them escape the T-cells.

The stealthy subspecies was present in 50% of the colorectal tumors collected in the study. The corresponding stool samples also had elevated amounts of the subspecies, compared to their healthy counterparts. 

“Patients who have high levels of this bacteria in their colorectal tumors have a far worse prognosis,” Bullman said. “They don’t respond as well to chemotherapy and they have an increased risk of recurrence.” 

The subspecies may also cause cancer to form in the first place. 

When Bullman and her team transplanted the subspecies to mice, they appeared to cause precancerous polyps to form, one of the first warning signs of colorectal cancer, though she added that this causation hasn’t yet been proven in humans.

The researchers also found clues that may answer the question as to how Fusobacterium nucleatum can get to the colon in the first place: The bacterium appears to be able to survive the journey through the stomach, withstanding what scientists previously thought would be a toxic dose of stomach acid. 

New targets for treatment

The discovery of the subspecies has huge consequences for targeted therapies that are already underway, said Dr. Michael White, an assistant professor of colorectal surgery at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

“There is evidence that if you clear these bacteria, there is more response during treatment,” said White, who was not involved with the new research. Clinical trials are slated to soon test whether treating a patient with antibiotics prior to chemotherapy will induce a better response, he said.

Knowing more about which bacterial subspecies, including Fusobacterium nucleatum, are dangerous will allow for a more targeted approach, he said. 

That could potentially include prevention.

It’s possible that scientists could identify the subspecies while it’s still in the mouth and give a person antibiotics at that point, wiping it out before it could  travel  to the colon, Bullman said. Even if antibiotics can’t successfully eliminate the bacteria from the mouth, its presence there could serve as an indication that someone is at higher risk for aggressive colon cancer, she added. 

Rocha agreed. In the future, part of colorectal cancer screening could be as simple as a mouth swab, he said. 

Understanding the newly identified subspecies could also lead to the development of new antibiotics that would specifically target this bacterial subtype, rather than wiping out both forms of the bacteria or all of the bacteria in the mouth.

There’s also the possibility of harnessing the bacteria to do the cancer-fighting work. 

The subtype has already proven that it can enter cancer cells quite easily, so it might be possible to genetically modify the bacteria to carry cancer-fighting drugs directly into the tumors, Bullman said.

Researchers are just beginning to scratch the surface of the ways a person’s microbiome plays a role in the individual’s cancer risk, Rocha said, but it’s one of the most important concepts being explored in cancer research today.

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About one in five children in the United States already has seasonal allergies, and 6.5% have asthma, most commonly triggered by pollen. If carbon pollution continues, asthma-driven emergency room visits are expected to rise. 

“We have to understand that this problem is going to get worse unless we get off of fossil fuels,” said Dr. Lisa Patel, clinical associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford Children’s Health in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Children typically spend more time outdoors than adults, so are more likely to be exposed to potential allergens, and their airways are also smaller, she said.

“So mechanically, just a little bit of irritation in a smaller airway can produce big problems,” she said.

The nonprofit organization Climate Central examined temperature trends in 197 U.S. cities to determine how the pollen season had changed from 1970 through 2023. Its findings, released Wednesday, show what's happening in a warming world:

• In 164 of those cities, the freeze-free season lengthened by 19 days on average. 
• The city where the freeze-free growing increased the most? Reno, Nevada.
• In 60 cities, the time between the last freeze and the first freeze was at least three weeks longer.
• All of the country’s climate regions — nine in total — saw an increase of at least 11 days on average in their freeze-free growing seasons. The greatest increase occurred in the Northwest, by 26 days. The Northeast and Southeast saw 15 more days for each. The Upper Midwest had an increase of 14 days. 

Pollen is traditionally produced from spring until early fall -- trees and grasses in the spring and summer, and ragweed in the late summer and early fall. But the season is getting longer thanks to the burning of fossil fuels — oil, natural gas and coal — which releases carbon dioxide and other emissions and traps heat in the atmosphere. An earlier and warmer spring brings a longer growing season and more time to release pollen, Climate Central notes.

"What climate change is doing is driving longer pollen seasons and more intense pollen seasons and so you might notice that your child is having symptoms at a time of year that isn’t usual for them and that’s because our external climate is different than it used to be," said Patel, who is also the executive director of the Medical Society Consortium on Climate and Health.

Higher levels of carbon dioxide also increases the the production of pollen, especially in grasses and ragweed. The United States could see a 200% increase in pollen production by the end of the century, according to a 2022 study published in Nature. 

"When there’s more carbon dioxide, plants produce more pollen and the more pollen there is, the more exposure there is," Patel said.

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And not only is the season getting longer, the pollen is becoming more potent, said Theresa MacPhail, author of "Allergic: Our Irritated Bodies in a Changing World." The protein in pollen is increasing in strength, meaning our immune systems are more likely to respond, she said. 

“So you’re not just changing quantifies or getting extended seasons of pollen, you’re actually getting qualitative different pollen,” she said.

For children also exposed to air pollution, there's a one-two punch, said MacPhail, an associate professor of science and technology studies at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. Pollen can attach to the fine particulates — diesel exhaust is an egregious culprit — and be delivered deeper in the lungs that they would otherwise would be, she said. 

“So it’s almost like they’re hailing a taxi cab and going a little bit further into your lungs, which is causing more irritation,” MacPhail said.

Children breathe more frequently than adults — infants can breathe about twice as often — so for them it is a bigger problem, she said.

Reducing young children's exposure to some airborne substances, dust mites or tobacco smoke, might delay or prevent allergy or asthma symptoms, according to the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. But exposure to pets or farm animals may be benefit your child. Children who grow up on a dairy farm are protected from allergy, hay fever, and asthma, studies have shown.

Asthma-related emergency room visits could soar

For children, seasonal allergies and asthma can disrupt school, alter their moods and interrupt their sleep. They will be wheezing and sneezing, with stuffy noses and coughing. 

“The symptoms tend to get worse at night, as they do with all of us, so you are not imaging that your allergies get worse at night, they do,” MacPhail said. “And it’s similar for children. So they’ll just simply have trouble sleeping because they’re having trouble breathing.”

An increase in temperature of 3.6 Fahrenheit could drive a 17% increase in asthma-related emergency room visits each year, the Environmental Protection Agency found. Oak pollen disproportionately affects Hispanic, Asian and Black children, the EPA says. Black and Puerto Rican children are two to three times more likely to have asthma than white children, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

Advice for parents of children with allergies or asthma

Many of the patients Patel treats as an emergency room doctor are children with asthma, who may be having symptoms earlier or later than expected.

She tells their parents, "Be mindful that what the burning of fossil fuels is doing in terms of climate change is just throwing predictability out the window."

What else can parents do? 

• When pollen counts are high, consider keeping children with allergies or asthma indoors. 
• Try to keep pollen out of children’s bedrooms by keeping the windows and doors closed.
• Invest in a portable air cleaner or consider making one yourself with a box fan and a MERV 13 air filter. The EPA provides information about research on DYI air cleaners on its website. The American Thoracic Society in 2018 noted: "A study evaluating air filtration in homes of children with asthma found that using central forced air system air filters to remove particles may be generally less effective than using portable air cleaners, which removed about 50% of fine particles."
• Encourage children to take a bath or shower before bed to get the pollen off.
• Make sure your home is free of other possible triggers, including tobacco smoke and gas stoves, Patel said. The federal Inflation Reduction Act offers rebates to replace gas stoves

"We have a lot of work to do for people to understand that climate change isn’t just something for the polar bears,” she said. “Climate change will actually be the greatest driver of a child’s health born today.”

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The 29-year-old Navy SEAL was convinced years of exposure to blasts had badly damaged his brain, despite doctors telling him otherwise. He had downloaded dozens of research papers on traumatic brain injury out of frustration that no one was taking him seriously, his father told NBC News.

“He knew,” Frank Larkin said. “I’ve grown to understand that he was out to prove that he was hurt, and he wasn’t crazy.”

In 2017, a post-mortem study found that Ryan Larkin, a combat medic and instructor who taught SEALs how to breach buildings with explosives, had a pattern of brain scarring unique to service members who’ve endured repeated explosions.

Seven years later, an Army reservist who carried out a high-profile mass shooting was also found to have brain damage, underscoring how much the research and technology needed to fully understand and treat traumatic brain injury is still lagging, experts and advocates said.

No scan can detect that level of brain trauma while a person is alive, according to Dr. Russell Gore, a medical director with the Shepherd Center’s SHARE Military Initiative, which treats veterans and service members with brain injuries. And while there is a tool that may be able to track some changes, it is mostly limited to research purposes.

“It’s a little bit of fringe medicine right now,” Gore said. “We’re really at an infant stage in terms of our clinical ability to assess traumatic brain injury.”

Earlier this month, the gunman behind Maine’s deadliest mass shooting put a national spotlight on the issue when doctors said they determined traumatic brain injury “likely played a role” in his behavioral changes.

Robert Card fatally shot 18 people in Lewiston, Maine, last October before dying by suicide at age 40, authorities said.

He enlisted in the Army Reserve in 2002 and had no combat deployments, officials said. But his family said he had been exposed to thousands of low-level blasts as a longtime instructor at an Army hand grenade training range.

Card’s post-mortem brain study found “significant degeneration” and inflammation in the white matter — the nerve fibers that allow for communication between different areas of the brain, according to Dr. Ann McKee, the neurologist at Boston University’s Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) Center who led the study.

In a brief statement, McKee said there was no evidence of CTE, a condition found in football players who suffer repeated blows to the head.

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The statement did not paint a full picture of Card’s health or trauma history, and the full analysis was not made public. McKee and the Boston University CTE Center declined to be interviewed, and Card’s family did not immediately comment.

But the findings, including the absence of CTE, mirror other post-mortem scans of service members’ brains, according to Dr. James Stone, who was enlisted by NATO in 2021 to help develop guidelines for preventing serious brain injuries in service members. He said those guidelines are expected to be released later this year.

Stone, an imaging expert who has studied low-level blasts in military personnel for nearly two decades, said Card’s injury “seemed pretty profound.”

“We need to, as soon as possible, answer the question of how much is too much when it comes to safe levels of exposures,” he said.

In a statement, the Army said Card’s findings were “concerning” and that it was currently updating guidance on how to mitigate risks from blast overpressure. A spokesperson said the Army’s goal is to require tracking of exposed personnel and documentation of training environments that exceed certain blast thresholds, beginning later this year.

The efforts come a year after the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General issued a report saying the Defense Department did not consistently identify and assess service members for traumatic brain injuries and did not implement a consistent process to manage the injuries.

Frank Larkin, 68, who was also a Navy SEAL, said while traumatic brain injury was a topic of discussion about a decade before his son died, there has been “very little movement.”

“It’s unacceptable,” he said, “after 20-plus years of persistent conflict.”

‘The science isn’t there’

Symptoms of traumatic brain injury include persistent headaches or neck pain, fatigue, memory issues, trouble sleeping, concentration problems, chronic depression, anxiety and apathy, researchers say. 

It can also lead to aggression and violence, experts say, but cases like Card’s that result in mass violence are rare. “These high-profile cases, thankfully, are few and far between,” Stone said. “But they are a point along the overall spectrum — the different ways that the imbalance can manifest.”

Ryan Larkin exhibited many symptoms of traumatic brain injury, his father said. “The changes we saw were uncharacteristic,” Frank Larkin said, adding that his son grew anxious and became short-fused.

Ryan Larkin sought help through the Navy and the VA, but doctors spoke little of traumatic brain injury and focused more on behavioral and psychiatric diagnoses “because that was what they knew,” his father said.

“We are handicapped by the fact that we can only really qualify this post-mortem,” he said.

There is no imaging tool that can detect brain injuries like CTE, Gore said. While some researchers have detected structural white matter changes in the brain, Gore said the method is not yet legitimate or reliable in a clinical setting.

“Right now, the science isn’t there,” he said, “but there’s a lot more that could be done.”

Logging exposure to low-level blasts is a good start, advocates say.

Jon Retzer, who served in the infantry with the Army and then the Army National Guard in the 1990s, said exposure logs should be kept for service members in any role, even when they’re not deployed or engaged in combat.

Hand grenade instructors can cycle through hundreds of trainees in one day during annual or biannual qualifications that are mandatory for some units, according to Retzer, who now works for DAV, an advocacy group formerly known as Disabled American Veterans.

Retzer said the risk of being concussed is higher in certain training scenarios, particularly when trainees are taught to pull the safety pin and hold onto the grenade for a few moments instead of tossing it immediately.

When trainees hesitate for too long, instructors have to throw the grenade over the wall, which causes a close detonation, and then grab the trainee and lower them both to the ground.

“That one has a significant feel to it,” he said. “You can see the dirt actually go right up over, and you can see the wave of dust that was produced.”

There were more than 492,000 traumatic brain injuries, mostly mild concussions, in the military between 2000 and 2023, the most recent year with available data, Defense Department statistics show.

But the total number of cases is likely higher. The current tally, Gore said, does not account for service members who have brain injury from low-level blasts over time.

And if a service member has had more than one traumatic brain injury, only one is counted, according to the Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence, a congressionally mandated collaboration between the Defense Department and Veterans Affairs.

“This isn’t going away,” Frank Larkin said. “And my fear is that this is going to trail behind us for decades.”

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. You can also call the network, previously known as the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, at 800-273-8255, text HOME to 741741 or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional resources.

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The aggressive brain cancer, which took the lives of John McCain and Beau Biden, is only diagnosed at stage 4, and the five-year survival rate is around 10%. 

The disease has no cure and, according to Dr. Michael Vogelbaum, chief of neurosurgery and program leader of neuro-oncology at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida, there have been no new drug approvals in the past two decades that have extended the lives of patients with glioblastoma.

The two clinical trials published Wednesday were extremely small, conducted on just nine patients in total, and much more research is needed, with larger trials, to determine how effective the therapy might be in the long run. 

“All of these results are preliminary but encouraging,” said Vogelbaum, who wasn’t involved with either trial.

In the two unrelated trials, a novel take on an existing treatment for blood cancer was shown to be safe and it shrank tumors –– at least temporarily. 

Both studies looked at the effects of a personalized immunotherapy called chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy — CAR-T therapy for short — in patients whose glioblastoma had returned after their initial treatment. 

CAR-T therapy involves harvesting a person’s own immune cells and modifying them in a lab to seek out specific tumor proteins. The cells are then reintroduced into the body where they replicate, creating a surge of cancer-fighting immune cells. 

The treatment is highly effective for certain blood cancers, but scientists are still studying whether modified versions of CAR-T therapy can be used for solid tumors like glioblastoma. These tumors, which account for the majority of cancers, present challenges that blood cancers do not. 

Many blood cancers are homogeneous, meaning their cells are uniform. This gives CAR-T therapy a clear target to latch onto and attack. But solid tumors tend to have a variety of different cell types that can differ within individual tumors. This is particularly true for glioblastoma, which contains a large number of abnormal-looking cells. 

“We had previous experience using a regular CAR in brain tumors but it wasn’t enough,” said Dr. Marcela Maus, director of the Cellular Immunotherapy Program at the Massachusetts General Cancer Center in Boston. Maus led one of the new studies, the results of which were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The original studies testing CAR-T therapy for glioblastoma only had one target, which is how the therapy has worked in blood cancers. 

The cells targeted a protein with a specific mutation, but Maus said that not everyone with glioblastoma had the mutation. What’s more, even in patients who had the mutation, not every one of their tumor cells necessarily had it. “Even if we got the right cells, we didn’t get all of them because other tumors had other targets,” she said. 

Expanding an existing therapy

Both phase 1 clinical trials used CAR-T cells that were programmed to attack two targets instead of one, with the hope that multiple targets would better equip the cells to destroy solid tumors. 

“It gives you more shots on goal, at targeting the protein, because these are not completely overlapping targets on any given tumor,” said Dr. Vincent Lam, an assistant professor of oncology at the Johns Hopkins Cancer Center, who specializes in immunotherapies and wasn’t involved with either trial.

In Maus’ clinical trial, which included three patients, T-cells were engineered to seek out and attack a protein called EGRF that’s often found in abundance in glioblastoma tumors but is not present in healthy brain tissue. The second target was a variant of EGRF that’s also commonly found in the tumors.

When used to treat blood cancer, CAR-T cells are transferred back into the body intravenously. Maus’ team chose a more targeted approach for their experimental therapy: injecting the cells directly into the cerebrospinal fluid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. 

This prompted more of the cancer-fighting cells to stick around the site of the brain tumors and, the researchers hypothesized, would reduce the amount of the immunotherapy elsewhere in the body. 

Confining the therapy to the brain was important: While the target, EGFR, is not found in healthy brain tissue, it is found in healthy cells elsewhere in the body. If the CAR-T cells went beyond the brain, they could potentially attack these cells.

To further prevent the CAR-T cells from escaping, the researchers bulked them up by binding them to an antibody, which made it more difficult for the cells to cross the blood-brain barrier and enter the bloodstream. 

All three patients — two who were in their 70s and one in her late 50s — responded quickly to the treatment. Brain scans showed their tumors shrunk significantly within a day of receiving the therapy. In the 57-year-old woman, an MRI taken five days after her infusion of the modified cells showed her tumor was nearly gone.

The results, however, were temporary. 

“We’re still in the early phases of the study. Two patients had their disease recur in the first six months and we want to aim for something better,” Maus said. 

While some CAR-T cells did pass beyond the brain, they didn’t do so in large enough numbers to cause damage, the trial found.

Striking a balance

The other trial, published in Nature Medicine, included six patients with recurrent glioblastoma. Their CAR-T cells also sought out EGFR, but used another protein, called IL13Rα2, which is found in 75% of glioblastoma tumors, as their second target. 

All six patients underwent radiation to shrink their tumors before they started the immunotherapy, and each was given a single injection of the cells.  

The team also delivered the immunotherapy locally, injecting it directly into the cerebrospinal fluid. All of the patients saw a reduction in their tumor size within the first two days of treatment, and they also experienced a significant spike in active CAR-T cells in their spinal fluid for several weeks after injection, meaning the cells were successfully dividing as well as concentrating in the area surrounding tumors. 

“That was striking to us. We didn’t expect that kind of expansion, proliferation and maintenance in the spinal fluid,” said Dr. Donald O’Rourke, director of the Glioblastoma Translational Center of Excellence at the Abramson Cancer Center at Penn Medicine in Philadelphia, who co-led the trial. 

O’Rourke and his team also used two different doses to get closer to an understanding of what the ideal number of CAR-T cells is for an infusion. 

The ideal number would provide the most potent therapeutic effect without causing side effects so severe they negate the cancer-killing benefits, but striking a balance is tricky. 

CAR-T therapy is different from a regular drug; it’s considered a “living drug” because the modified cells keep dividing once they’re in the body, meaning the amount in the initial infusion isn’t the final amount a patient will have, O’Rourke said. 

All immunotherapies come with risk of neurological side effects, including confusion, language difficulties and sleepiness. The trial found that these side effects came on more quickly when CAR-T cells were injected into the cerebrospinal fluid, but that starting with a lower dose may be able to remedy this. The first three patients were given a lower dose of CAR-T. While they did experience signs of neurotoxicity, it was milder than the neurotoxicity in the three who received the higher dose.

Participants in both trials did experience at least some side effects of CAR-T therapy, which included fever and vomiting as well as neurological effects such as aphasia. 

The two trials come just a week after the results of another CAR-T therapy clinical trial for glioblastoma were published in Nature Medicine. That trial used a single target, IL-13Rα2 — also used in the Penn Medicine trial — in 65 patients and also determined that CAR-T therapy is safe and could be an effective treatment for glioblastoma. 

Lam, of Johns Hopkins, said that CAR-T has shown promise in glioblastoma in studies over the past five years. The biggest takeaway the two newest trials bring to the table, he said, is that CAR-T therapy appears to be able to safely target two proteins commonly found in glioblastoma tumors. 

The question now is whether the results are durable. The results of the early trials don’t necessarily mean the therapy will work long term. 

Both teams plan to continue with their ongoing phase 1 trials and modify their approach to home in on the best combination of treatments for glioblastoma. 

Maus said she believes CAR-T therapy may be more effective if a tumor is first weakened by radiation and chemotherapy. Other researchers are also exploring cancer-fighting vaccines, which may be able to be used in tandem with CAR-T therapy. 

“We’re learning from each other. I think that’s really a tremendous model, and what we are all seeing is that this sort of therapy has legs for brain tumor patients,” Maus said. “It may not be the final version yet, but we’re onto something.”

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There is one food in particular that Dr. Uma Naidoo, a Harvard nutritionist, and Lisa Genova, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, say is the key to a healthy brain: Green leafy vegetables.

DON’T MISS: 5 doctors and nutritionists share the foods they eat every day for brain health, longevity and overall wellness

The No. 1 food for a healthy brain: Green leafy vegetables

Across the board, experts agree that eating leafy greens is essential for overall health, especially for your brain.

Some of the green leafy vegetables that you can add to your meals are:

• Kale
• Spinach
• Lettuces
• Cabbage
• Swiss chard
• Bok choy
• Mustard greens

3 reasons experts say a diet rich in leafy greens is good for your brain

1. They’re rich in B vitamins

Often, conditions like depression and dementia are associated with a vitamin B deficiency, according to a study from the Wayne State University School of Medicine.

Green leafy vegetables are a wonderful source of vitamin B9, Naidoo told CNBC Make It in 2022. The vitamin, also known as folate, is “a key vitamin for supporting brain and neurological health, optimal neurotransmitter function, and balanced psychological health,” she added.

Leafy greens are the first type of food that Naidoo suggests for her patients who are looking to boost their mood.

2. They’re high in brain-boosting nutrients

Green leafy vegetables are also full of what Genova calls “brain-boosting nutrients” including folate, lutein and beta-carotene.

Lutein has been linked to an improvement in brain function and brain structure for older adults. And a systematic review found that taking beta-carotene supplements can boost “verbal and cognitive memory.”

3. They’re full of fiber

Increasing intake of dietary fiber was associated with a lower chance of developing depression, a study published in “Complementary Therapies in Medicine” in 2021 found.

Naidoo prefers to recommend getting more fiber through your diet, specifically plant-based foods. And leafy greens just so happen to be fiber-dense.

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Plus, sign up for CNBC Make It’s newsletter to get tips and tricks for success at work, with money and in life.

Committees in the Alabama House of Representatives and the Alabama Senate on Tuesday will debate legislation to protect providers from lawsuits and criminal prosecution for the “damage or death of an embryo” during IVF services. Republican Sen. Tim Melson, the sponsor of the Senate bill, said Monday they are hoping to get the proposal approved and to Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday.

“We anticipate the IVF protections legislation to receive final passage this week and look forward to the governor signing it into law,” Ivey spokeswoman Gina Maiola said.

Three major IVF providers paused services in the wake of an Alabama Supreme Court ruling last month that three couples, who had frozen embryos destroyed in an accident at a storage facility, could pursue wrongful death lawsuits for their “extrauterine children.” The ruling, treating an embryo the same as a child or gestating fetus under the wrongful death statute, raised concerns about civil liabilities for clinics.

The court decision also caused an immediate backlash. Across the country, groups raised concerns about a court ruling recognizing embryos as children. Patients in Alabama shared stories of having upcoming embryo transfers abruptly canceled and their paths to parenthood put in doubt.

Alabama Feb 23

She needs a surrogate to have a baby. After Alabama's IVF ruling, her embryo transfer was canceled

Republicans in the GOP-dominated Alabama Legislature are looking to the immunity proposal as a solution to clinics’ concerns. But Republicans have shied away from proposals that would address the legal status of embryos created in IVF labs.

Alabama providers have supported the possible passage of the proposed immunity bill.

“Let’s get IVF restarted ASAP,” Fertility Alabama, one of the providers that had to pause services, wrote in a social media post urging support for the bill. A telephone message to the clinic was not immediately returned Monday.

However, The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, a group representing IVF providers across the country, said the legislation does not go far enough.

Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the organization, said Monday that the legislation does not correct the “fundamental problem” which he said is the court ruling “conflating fertilized eggs with children.”

House Democrats proposed legislation stating that a human embryo outside a uterus can not be considered an unborn child or human being under state law. Democrats last week argued that was the most direct way to deal with the issue. Republicans have not brought the proposal up for a vote.

The GOP proposals state that “no action, suit, or criminal prosecution for the damage to or death of an embryo shall be brought for “providing or receiving services related to in vitro fertilization.” The legislation would apply retroactively except in cases where litigation is already under way.

The House and Senate last week approved nearly identical versions of the bills. The House version includes lawsuit protections not just for IVF services, but also the “goods” or products used in IVF services.

The Senate sponsor of the bill, Melson, said last week that he was uncomfortable exempting products — which he said could include the nutrient-rich solutions used in IVF to help embryos develop. He noted there were accusations that a faulty batch of a storage solution caused embryos to be lost.

The inquiry is based on fewer than two dozen cases seen among more than 9.5 million vaccine recipients, health officials said Thursday. And the available information is too limited to establish whether the shots caused the illnesses, they added.

But the numbers are higher than expected and officials are gathering more information to determine if the vaccines are causing the problem. The data was presented at a meeting of an expert panel that provides vaccine policy advice to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Officials said they were investigating more than 20 cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome, an rare illness in which a person’s immune system damages nerve cells, causing muscle weakness and paralysis. An estimated 3,000 to 6,000 people develop GBS in the U.S. each year, and it’s more commonly seen in older people, according to the CDC.

Most people fully recover from the syndrome, but some have permanent nerve damage. Guillain-Barre can occur in people after they are infected with a virus, but in some instances cases have been linked to vaccinations.

RSV, or respiratory syncytial virus, is a common cause of cold-like symptoms but it can be dangerous for infants and the elderly.

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Last year, the CDC signed off on a recommendation made by the advisory panel, aimed at Americans age 60 and older. It was for a single dose of RSV vaccine. There were two options, one made by Pfizer and the other by GSK.

The CDC said that patients should talk to their doctors about the vaccines and then decide whether to get it.

Officials were aware that instances of Guillain-Barre had been identified in clinical trials done before the shots were approved for sale, and that different systems were watching for signs of problems.

At a meeting of the expert panel on Thursday, CDC officials presented an analysis of the reports taken in by those systems.

About two-thirds of the cases occurred in people who got a version of the vaccine made by Pfizer, called Abrysvo. But officials are also doing follow-up tracking in people who got Arexvy, made by GSK.

About two cases of Guillain-Barre might be seen in every 1 million people who receive a vaccine, health officials estimate. A CDC analysis found the the GSK rate was lower than that, but 4.6 cases per million were reported in recipients of the Pfizer shot.

Data from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration also showed an above-expected number of Guillain-Barre cases being reported in RSV vaccine recipients, with more among Pfizer shot recipients.

“Taken together, these data suggest a potential increased risk” in RSV vaccine recipients 60 and older that must be explored, said Dr. Tom Shimabukuro, a CDC vaccine safety monitoring official.

Officials from GSK and Pfizer made brief statements during the meeting, noting that sorting out a safety signal is complicated.

“Pfizer is committed to the continuous monitoring and evaluation of the safety of Abrysvo” and is conducting four safety studies to look into the possibility of vaccine-related GBS, said Reema Mehta, a Pfizer vice president.

CDC officials also presented estimates that the vaccines have prevented thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths from RSV, and that current data indicates the benefits of vaccination outweigh the possible risks.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The decision issued in wrongful death cases brought by couples who had frozen embryos destroyed in an accident could potentially leave clinics vulnerable to lawsuits and restrict access to treatment.

On Wednesday, the University of Alabama Birmingham hospital paused IVF treatments while it considers the ruling’s significance. On Thursday, a second IVF provider in Alabama said it is pausing parts of its program.

Alabama Fertility Services said in a statement that has “made the impossibly difficult decision to hold new IVF treatments due to the legal risk to our clinic and our embryologists.”

Here’s what to know about this increasingly common fertility treatment.

What is IVF?

In vitro fertilization offers a possible solution when a woman has trouble getting pregnant. It involves retrieving her eggs and combining them in a lab dish with a man’s sperm to create a fertilized embryo, which is then transferred into the woman’s uterus in an attempt to create a pregnancy.

IVF is done in cycles and may take more than one to create a successful pregnancy, according to The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The procedure can use a couple’s eggs and sperm or those from a donor.

How are embryos made?

The treatment often uses hormones to trigger ovulation so multiple eggs are produced and a needle is used to remove them from the ovaries, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said.

Eggs can be fertilized by adding the sperm to the eggs in a lab, or a single sperm can be injected into each egg.

“We culture that fertilized egg over a period of time — usually five to six days —- to create developmental stages called the blastocyst. And those are either transferred or stored for future use,” said Dr. Jason Griffith, a reproductive endocrinologist in Houston.

A blastocyst is the early stage of an embryo, which is defined as the state of development that starts at fertilization and lasts up to eight weeks.

Griffith said that on Day 3 after fertilization, an embryo is anywhere from six to 10 cells. By Day 6, it’s between 100 and 300 cells.

“So you’re talking about something that’s still microscopic,” he said, adding that a person contains more than a trillion cells.

How are embryos frozen and stored?

The freezing process involves replacing the water in embryo cells with a protectant fluid and flash freezing with liquid nitrogen, according to Johns Hopkins Medicine. Frozen embryos can be used for future pregnancies, and the vast majority survive the thawing process.

Frozen embryos are stored in tanks containing liquid nitrogen at hospital labs or reproductive medicine centers. Griffith said they can also be kept in storage facilities that health care facilities contract with, especially when they are stored for many years.

Griffith said conditions are monitored in these facilities and there are physical security mechanisms to safeguard the tanks and backup generators in case of power outages.

Frozen embryos can be safely preserved for a decade or more.

Dr. John Storment, a reproductive endocrinologist in Lafayette, Louisiana, said his state has a unique law that prohibits doctors from discarding any viable embryos that are still dividing — meaning they must be preserved and stored. So he and other doctors ship embryos out of state to a secure storage facility once a patient has finished using them for a particular IVF cycle.

“Whenever they’re ready for embryos again, they can just ship them back here,” he said. “But we don’t keep them stored here.”

In other states, he said, patients can choose to use them, discard them or donate them to other couples or for research.

Related:

Supreme Court Feb 20

Alabama Supreme Court rules frozen embryos are ‘children' under state law

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GOP legislatures in some states seek ways to undermine voters' ability to determine abortion rights

How could the Alabama ruling affect IVF?

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022 sparked speculation about how the ruling could lead to problems with fertility care, said Greer Donley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.

“This is one of the first places that is proving that,” she said.

Donley expects that IVF will remain available in Alabama but embryos will not be stored there. And moving them to other states for storage will increase the cost, logistical challenges and risk associated with the procedures.

“This opens up the possibility of using the child welfare laws more holistically for criminalizing doing anything that could harm the embryo,” Donley said.

Donley said that push could continue: “The future the anti-abortion movement wants to see is one in which fetuses have federal constitutional protections from the moment of conception.”

Since 2022, four states have amended their constitutions to protect access to abortion, and several others are considering ballot measures for this year. In many, the language goes beyond allowing abortion to give people rights to reproductive freedom more broadly, which could ensure access to IVF.

What are doctors’ concerns?

Doctors outside of Alabama are worried about the possible national implications of the recent court decision.

It could “substantially restrict access to a very vital fertility treatment that has helped countless folks today expand their families,” Griffith said. “When you look at the percentage of pregnancies in the United States that result from in vitro fertilization, it’s around 2%.”

It could also increase the cost of IVF for many families — although it’s unclear by how much — because of things like additional storage fees and liability costs, he said. One cycle of IVF, including all embryos transferred, now costs about $15,000 to $25,000, Griffith said.

Another possible ramification is that there will be fewer IVF providers, he said.

“We’ve got to safeguard access to this very valuable treatment,” Griffith said.

Storment agreed that the Alabama decision could have a ripple effect across the entire country.

“It’s one of the bigger things to happen in reproductive law in the last decade,” he said.

Ungar reported from Louisville, Kentucky. Reporter Geoff Mulvihill contributed to this report from Cherry Hill, New Jersey.

Microchimerism (pronounced “mike-ro-KY-mer-is-um”) is when “there are cells that aren’t yours that are existing in your body,” says Melissa Wilson, an associate professor of genetics at Arizona State University who co-authored a study on fetal microchimerism and maternal health.

Microchimerism can occur through organ transplants, blood donation, lactation — or pregnancy. The phenomenon gets its name from the mythological chimera, a fire-breathing beast that combines parts from three animals: a lion, a snake and a goat.

Simply put, moms carry in their bodies fetal cells from every pregnancy. Forever.

As soon as the placenta implants in the uterus (which can occur as early as six days after conception), cells from the fetus may enter the mother’s body, and vice versa. Even if the pregnancy doesn’t result in a live birth, those fetal cells remain.

This idea hits especially hard for women who have experienced miscarriage, pregnancy loss or stillbirth.

Lee Ann Townes, a mom of two who had a “missed miscarriage” at 10 weeks in 2022, found an enormous amount of peace in the concept of microchimerism. As that pregnancy’s due date approached, Townes says she was “a mess.” But after a friend told her that a bit of her “angel baby” would literally be with her forever, she says, “I was immediately overcome with a feeling of peace; I felt more connected to my body and to the baby we lost. It somehow made the pregnancy, though brief, feel more real.”

She’s not alone.

Erin Lettman experienced a miscarriage at 11 weeks in 2003 and a “vanishing twin” loss in 2007. “It’s very comforting to know that these children, who I loved deeply and never got to meet, are more than just a memory or a ghost,” she says. “I’ve always carried them in my mind and my heart, wondered who they would have looked like, what kind of person they would have been. Knowing they’ve been with me this whole time, and not just something that used to be a part of me, is a gift I had not imagined.”

Wilson, who has three children, is similarly affected by her own research. She says that “this concept that at some point you were swapping cells, and there’s a little bit that you’re carrying with you forever of this little tiny creature … it kind of gets to me every time I think about it.”

Because studies have based most research on animal testing rather than human, they do not conclusively state where the fetal cells may go in the body, but they do know that they move through the circulatory system. “They get lodged often in lungs and in the heart and places where blood is very common, and also in the skin. We’ve found them in most every tissue,” Wilson says.

Wilson used to tell her kids that they were “in her heart,” but once she learned about microchimerism, she now says, laughing, “I am literally with you every single day of your life.”

“It does seem kind of magical. Almost like science fiction, too,” says Athena Aktipis, associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University. She worked with Wilson on the microchimerism study.

A mother of three, Aktipis says that she has had “a few miscarriages, and the idea that I have in me all of these cells from all of these different individuals — and my mom, too, who I lost when I was younger — there is something strangely comforting about it.”

Elaine Healy had a miscarriage at six weeks in 2010. She went on to give birth to two healthy daughters, and she still thinks about her first due date.

“I love the idea that my girls’ DNA lives in me; they are a part of every fiber of my being — their joy, their pain,” she says. “This science supports something I already knew to be true. We become something new when we become mothers. We are forever changed.”

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Carly Kempler, a spokesperson for the FDA, said that, despite the warning, “the overall benefits of these products continue to outweigh their potential risks.”

The agency’s decision to update the labels was based on reports of rare blood cancers in patients who had previously gotten CAR-T therapy, Kempler said. As of Monday, the agency had received 25 reports of the blood cancers in CAR-T patients, she said.

Bruce Levine, a professor in cancer gene therapy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that in addition to the reports submitted to the FDA, two abstracts published late last year in the journal Blood also cited a potential cancer risk associated with CAR-T therapy, which likely “forced the FDA’s hand.”

CAR-T — or chimeric antigen receptor T cell — therapy uses a patient’s own immune cells to treat certain blood cancers, such as leukemia, multiple myeloma and lymphoma. It involves harvesting the immune cells — in this case, T cells — then genetically altering them in a lab to make them target cancer cells, and finally reinfusing them back into the patient.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Thanks to early detection and treatment, rates of cervical cancer have plummeted by more than half over the past 50 years. Rates are falling fastest among women in their early 20s, the first generation to benefit from HPV vaccines, which were approved in 2006. 

HPV, the human papillomavirus, causes six types of cancer, including cervical cancer. 

Among women aged 20 to 24, cervical cancer incidence dropped by 65% from 2012 to 2019, according to a report released Wednesday from the American Cancer Society.

“Cervical cancer is one of the best-understood cancers,” said Dr. Nicolas Wentzensen, a senior investigator in the National Cancer Institute’s clinical genetics branch, who was not involved in the new report. “We’ve made amazing progress and it remains a success story.”

Not all women are benefitting from that progress, however.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com here.

But if getting sick could put $1,900 in your bank account, many people would consider it.

To figure out how the flu is transmitted, researchers at UMD are conducting “a first-of-its-kind study” — and recruiting some brave, paid participants.

The University of Maryland School of Public Health in College Park and the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore are trying to learn more about how illness spreads. Their two-month study needs people willing to quarantine in a hotel with flu-infected people, likely getting infected themselves.

The goal is to better determine how the virus infects us every flu season.

“Nobody has successfully observed influenza transmission under controlled conditions,” said Dr. Donald Milton of UMD’s School of Public Health. “It has never been done.”

There could be a number of factors that play a role in the flu’s spread and infectiousness, and we need more information, the researchers say.

“There also might be the airborne component, and we just need to think about it when we get more of the data,” said Dr. Wilbur Chen of UMD’s School of Medicine.

Milton and Chen are leading the study, which will recruit both healthy patients and those who are in the early, onset days of the flu. The patients will mingle together in the same air-controlled environment, playing games, talking and watching TV to mimic a gathering.

“We just need to be able to capture it and monitor it very closely while on the quarantine unit,” Chen said.

“That then will tell us, if people get infected when the air quality is very poor, but not when the air quality is very good, that will tell us that they were getting it by breathing,” Milton explained.

What the study’s findings may show

If the researchers’ flu transmission hypothesis proves to be true, they say it could serve as the catalyst for a change in public health policy. Their goal is to spark improved air circulation in buildings.

“We can help make people healthier that way,” Milton said. “Colds are one of the main ways that people end up with severe asthma attacks, end up in the hospital.”

The multi-million dollar study uses money from the National Institutes of Health. It will include medical devices to measure the number of virus particles in exhaled air, and to test UV lights and air filters.

“I figured this will be a good opportunity to just kind of take a look and experience how studies are being conducted so that I can make my own judgment,” said Matthew Tan, one of the study participants.

Researchers have already recruited the healthy volunteers, but Friday is when they’re recruiting participants with the flu.

To qualify, adults between the age of 18 and 59 must have:

• A cough or sore throat
• A fever of at least 100.2 and
• A positive flu test

All volunteers will stay at the Lord Baltimore Hotel, with all expenses paid. They’ll also get up to $1,900.

The results of the study are expected in the spring.

A new study from researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign exploring the relationship between acetaminophen use during pregnancy and language outcomes in early childhood found a link between use of the over-the-counter drug and “modest but significant delays” in the child’s future language development.

The language analyses involved 298 2-year-old children who had been followed prenatally, 254 of whom returned for further study at age 3.  

The work was conducted as part of the Illinois Kids Development Study, by Development Study principal investigator Susan Schantz, a University of Illinois professor emerita of comparative biosciences and Megan Woodbury, who led the research as a graduate student of U. of I.

“The previous studies had only asked pregnant people at most once a trimester about their acetaminophen use,” Woodbury said. “But with IKIDS, we talked to our participants every four to six weeks during pregnancy and then within 24 hours of the kid’s birth, so we had six time points during pregnancy.” 

Acetaminophen is considered the safest over-the-counter pain reliever and fever reducer available during pregnancy, and studies show that 50% to 65% of women in North America and Europe have taken the analgesic during pregnancy.

“The new study links acetaminophen use in pregnancy to modest but significant delays in the language development of offspring,” said Schantz.

The most dramatic finding was that each use of acetaminophen in the third trimester of pregnancy was associated with an almost two-word reduction in vocabulary in the 2-year-olds. 

“This suggests that if a pregnant person took acetaminophen 13 times – or once per week – during the third trimester of that pregnancy, their child might express 26 fewer words at age 2 than other children that age,” Woodbury said. 

Schants says fetal brain development occurs throughout pregnancy, but the second and third trimesters are especially critical times.

“Hearing is developing in the second trimester, but language development is already starting in the third trimester before the baby is even born,” she said. 

Woodbury explains that acetaminophen exerts its analgesic effect through the endocannabinoid system, which is also very important for fetal development.

The findings need to be tested in larger studies, the researchers said. Until then, people should not be afraid to take acetaminophen for fever or serious pain and discomfort during pregnancy. Conditions like a very high fever can be dangerous and using a drug like acetaminophen will likely help. 

“There aren’t other options for people to take when they really need them,” Schantz said. “But perhaps people should use more caution when turning to the drug to treat minor aches and pains.” 

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Special needs children like these often take longer than most to become independently mobile, which can be a hardship for parents and others who care for them. Elijah is often carried because of his limb difference and clubfeet, meaning that instead of being straight, his feet are twisted inward and his toes point downward.

As a result, getting around on his own is a challenge.

That was until this past Spring. Elijah was one of the first recipients of a specially designed rolling chair built by a team of biomedical engineering students at Tulane University. Today, Elijah has mastered getting around on wheels – turning, stopping and steering all on his own.

“He loves his chair,” said Crystal Jack, Elijah’s mom. “So, I get a lot of things done because I know in his chair, he’s safe. He know how to go around the house with it and everything, so I get a lot of things done now.”

Before the chair, Jack said her son was able to scoot on the floor to get where he needed to go but the chair offers a whole new level of independence.

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“Like I said we come a long way, but I’m blessed to have him,” Jack said, smiling warmly as he moved back and forth around the living room of her mother’s home in Ventress, Louisiana.

The Tulane students partnered with the nonprofit MakeGood in 2022 to design and produce the chairs to help toddlers (roughly ages 1-4) build independence and strength, and for some, prepare for a real wheelchair. While it remains difficult to access precise numbers for total wheelchair use among children, there were about 2.8 million wheelchair users in the U.S. in 2002, of whom 121,000 were under 15 years of age, according to the US Census.

MakeGood is the New Orleans area coordinator for TOM Global, an Israeli nonprofit that combines modern design and digital manufacturing to fulfill neglected needs of people with disabilities and limitations. TOM stands for Tikkun Olam, which is Hebrew for “repairing the world.”

The students partnered with the nonprofits as part of a service-learning project — a graduation requirement at Tulane. But many say they had no idea when the project started the depth of impact their chairs would make in the lives of children in the community.

Dylan Lucia, a graduate student at Tulane from the San Diego, California area, said he chose the field of biomedical engineering to help people and this project has manifested that.

“Seeing that direct kind of patient feedback and seeing how much these (chairs) were improving their lives and helping them become a more independent person, even as a small toddler … like, it was really, really endearing to see something like that and to see the positive change,” Lucia said.

The chairs are particularly helpful for families whose children will eventually need wheelchairs. Noam Platt, director of MakeGood, said insurance companies typically don’t cover the cost of a wheelchair for a child unless there is sufficient evidence that the child can use it effectively.

“These devices are used to create that evidence that their quality of life will be improved so they can get maybe a more durable assistive technology,” Platt said.

Freya’s chair was one of five made throughout several weekends early this fall at Tulane’s Scot Ackerman MakerSpace, an enormous workshop with laser cutters, 3D printers and drilling and sewing equipment.

Students applied padding and safety straps to the chairs, and some required modifications to accommodate the needs of the children receiving them. For instance, Freya’s chair needed a wider strap to help secure her torso, and another patient needed a space behind the chair big enough to hold his breathing vent. Freya’s chair also had a bar added to the back, so that she could push it like a stroller. She took her first steps in early December after working with her physical therapist and her chair.

There’s no word on how long Freya will have to use the chair but her mother said it has been more than a blessing.

“At first, we thought the muscle tone in her ankles wasn’t strong enough for her to walk at all, but the neurologists recently told us everything is looking good and she should be walking on her own or with limited assistance soon,” said her mom, Heather Hampton, of Metairie, Louisiana.

Hampton said Freya’s able to push the chair like a stroller on her own. She wishes they could’ve gotten it sooner but understands the adjustments that needed to be made.

“We’re just happy that she’ll ultimately be able to get around and walk independently,” Hampton said.

Platt said the mobility chairs’ original design and plans came from TOM Global but the parts were purchased in the U.S. or made and then assembled by hand at Tulane. The wood panels used for the chair’s frame were laser cut and then sanded by students to buff out any splinters and rough edges. Padded seats were stuffed into fabric cushions sewn by students. Wheels were purchased online and then screwed into place.

Elijah has had his chair since the end of March. It was made in the first batch of about 10 chairs delivered to pediatric patients for use in occupational and physical therapy sessions.

“His chair shows him that, like, ‘I could be up like other children.’ You know, he don’t let his (being) disabled get in the way,” said Jack who added Elijah will likely need some type of mobility assistance for the rest of his life.

Bumpers were added to the bottom front of the most recent batch of chairs after parents from the first round said their furniture – and feet – were taking hits as their children became better and faster at using their chairs.

Platt said there have been two rounds, so far, of chair building and 15 chairs have been given away. But, he said they’re aiming for at least 10 to 15 more by Spring 2024.

“We coordinate with our clinical partners to find kids that would be a good fit for these devices,” he said. “We work with the clinical team to make sure each chair fits the individuals and make customizations if necessary.”

Platt said the chairs cost less than $200 each to make, and even though these chairs were donated to patients at no cost, the price is still much lower than most pediatric wheelchairs on the market and electric-powered wheelchairs can run into the thousands.

The student-made chairs also look and feel more like toys than hospital equipment, Platt said. They’re made to be light and easy to maneuver.

Platt said he’d ultimately like to see the chairs be made in high schools and colleges across the country.

“For the students that I work with, I tell them this is just the beginning,” Platt said. “I’m trying to open their eyes to kind of a lifelong passion that they’ll have to solving these problems because once you see the problems, you see the scope of the problems and you can’t really ignore them.”

Researchers compiled, rated and reviewed the results of 25 studies of certain pesticides and male fertility and found that men who had been exposed to certain classes of pesticides had significantly lower sperm concentrations. The study, published Wednesday in Environmental Health Perspectives, included data from more than 1,700 men and spanned several decades.   

“No matter how we looked at the analysis and results, we saw a persistent association between increasing levels of insecticide and decreases in sperm concentration,” said study author Melissa Perry, who is an environmental epidemiologist and the dean of the College of Public Health at George Mason University. “I would hope this study would get the attention of regulators seeking to make decisions to keep the public safe from inadvertent, unplanned impacts of insecticides.” 

For decades, scientists have been trying to untangle puzzling questions over male fertility. Sperm concentrations are one of several factors that are a useful indicator. A report last year found that sperm counts were falling in every region of the globe and the pace of that decline was accelerating. 

Read the full story on NBCNews.com.

An early-stage clinical trial tested whether 32 adults with peanut allergies could safely brush their teeth with the toothpaste, which contains trace amounts of peanut protein. The hope is that introducing small amounts of peanuts to the body over time will help the immune system get used to the allergen and reduce severe reactions.

Adults in the trial used the toothpaste once daily for about 11 months. At the end of the study, none of the participants experienced severe reactions or anaphylaxis — an allergic response often characterized by difficulty breathing, swelling in the throat, pale skin, blue lips, fainting or dizziness.

A summary of the results was presented Thursday at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology’s annual meeting in Anaheim, California. Although the trial focused on the safety of the toothpaste and did not test the effectiveness of the treatment in adults, the findings are an early indication that it could help prevent life-threatening allergic reactions in people with severe peanut allergies.

Read the full story at NBCNews.com here.

More than 3,700 babies were born with congenital syphilis in 2022 — 10 times more than a decade ago and a 32% increase from 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday. Syphilis caused 282 stillbirth and infant deaths, nearly 16 times more than the 2012 deaths.

The 2022 count was the most in more than 30 years, CDC officials said, and in more than half of the congenital syphilis cases, the mothers tested positive during pregnancy but did not get properly treated.

The rise in congenital syphilis comes despite repeated warnings by public health agencies and it’s tied to the surge in primary and secondary cases of syphilis in adults, CDC officials said. It’s also been increasingly difficult for medical providers to get benzathine penicillin injections — the main medical weapon against congenital syphilis — because of supply shortages.

“It is clear that something is not working here, that something has to change,” the CDC’s Dr. Laura Bachmann said. “That’s why we’re calling for exceptional measures to address this heartbreaking epidemic”

The federal agency wants medical providers to start syphilis treatment when a pregnant woman first tests positive, rather than waiting for confirmatory testing, and to expand access to transportation so the women can get treatment. The CDC also called for rapid tests to be made available beyond doctors’ offices and STD clinics to places like emergency rooms, needle-exchange programs and prisons and jails.

Federal officials again advised sexually active women of childbearing age and their partners to get tested for syphilis test at least once if they live in a county with high rates. According to a new CDC map and definition, 70% of U.S. adults live in a county with high rates. That’s likely tens of millions of people, according to an Associated Press estimate based on federal data.

The CDC’s recommendations are just that; there is no new federal money going out to state and local health departments to bolster testing or access. Some state health departments have already said they’re stretched thin when it comes to treatment and prevention, though Illinois announced last week it was starting a phone line for health care providers to help with record searching, consultation and assistance with mandatory reporting.

Syphilis is a bacterial infection that for centuries was a common but feared sexually transmitted disease. New infections plummeted in the U.S. starting in the 1940s when antibiotics became widely available and fell to their lowest mark in the late 1990s. By 2002, cases began rising again, with men who have sex with other men being disproportionately affected, though the STD is spreading among several demographics.

In congenital syphilis, moms pass the disease on to their babies, potentially leading to death of the child or health problems for the child like deafness, blindness, and malformed bones. Case rates have been rising across racial and ethnic groups.

Dr. Mike Saag, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said syphilis can be “a silent infection” in women because it’s tricky to diagnose without a blood test — not everyone gets painless sores, wart-like lesions or other visible symptoms.

The CDC has long recommended that all pregnant women should be tested for syphilis at their first prenatal visit, but poor access to prenatal care — largely in rural areas of the U.S. — can make that difficult. Nearly 40% of last year’s congenital syphilis cases involved mothers who didn’t have prenatal care, the CDC said.

If syphilis is diagnosed early in a pregnancy, the threat of passing it to the baby can be removed by a single penicillin shot. But experts say the later you get into pregnancy, the more likely you’ll need multiple shots, and they have to be completed at least 30 days before delivery.

“I have had patients who have been on (a three-shot) regimen who then miss a shot,” said Dr. Nina Ragunanthan, an OB/GYN at the Delta Health Center in Mound Bayou, Mississippi. “So they are trying to get their shots, but if they don’t get the three in a row, because of transportation issues, because of job issues, child care issues, any number of reasons that prevent them from coming back, they don’t complete their treatment.”

Plus, the shortage of shots makes the task of getting syphilis numbers down difficult, health officials across the U.S. told the AP. Patients who are not pregnant can use the antibiotic doxycycline to treat syphilis, but health officials are concerned that the 14- to 28-day timeline of treatment is difficult to complete, leaving infected people uncured.

Pfizer is the nation’s sole supplier of the penicillin shot. Earlier this year, company officials said it was in short supply because of increased demand. Pfizer also said the shortage may not be resolved until next year.

The CDC said the shortage didn’t affect the 2022 congenital syphilis case numbers and that, despite the shortage, it isn’t aware of patients not getting their needed shots.

Gonorrhea is the second most common STI in the U.S. and has developed resistance to all antibiotics used to treat it, except for the recommended combined therapy of an injection of the antibiotic ceftriaxone with one dose of azithromycin pills. In recent years, ominous reports have suggested that this antibiotic arsenal might not maintain its robust effectiveness against the fast-evolving pathogen for much longer.

On Wednesday, results from a late-stage clinical trial of a new antibiotic called zoliflodacin showed the drug cured so-called uncomplicated gonorrhea infections as effectively as ceftriaxone and azithromycin. The drug was developed by the Global Antibiotic Research & Development Partnership, a Swiss nonprofit, and the U.S.-based Innoviva Specialty Therapeutics.

“Zoliflodacin gives us a new tool in the treatment of gonorrhea, and if used wisely, a barrier against the further spread of resistant infections,” said Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious disease expert at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, who was not involved in the trial.

The antibiotic, which would be the first new gonorrhea treatment approved in decades, could make it to market by 2025. The World Health Organization estimates that globally there are more than 82 million new gonorrhea cases every year. In the U.S., in the wake of decades of cuts to state and local public health departments, STIs have soared to record heights.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

Lawrence Faucette, 58, was dying from heart failure and ineligible for a traditional heart transplant when he received the genetically modified pig heart on Sept. 20.

According to the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the heart had seemed healthy for the first month but began showing signs of rejection in recent days. Faucette died Monday.

In a statement released by the hospital, Faucette’s wife, Ann, said her husband “knew his time with us was short and this was his last chance to do for others. He never imagined he would survive as long as he did.”

The Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a heart from a genetically altered pig into another dying man. David Bennett survived two months before that heart failed, for reasons that aren’t completely clear although signs of a pig virus later were found inside the organ. Lessons from that first experiment led to changes, including better virus testing, before the second experiment.

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“Mr. Faucette’s last wish was for us to make the most of what we have learned from our experience,” Dr. Bartley Griffith, the surgeon who led the transplant, said in a statement.

Attempts at animal-to-human organ transplants — called xenotransplants — have failed for decades, as people’s immune systems immediately destroyed the foreign tissue. Now scientists are trying again using pigs genetically modified to make their organs more humanlike.

Faucette, a Navy veteran and father of two from Frederick, Maryland, had been turned down for a traditional heart transplant because of other health problems when he came to the Maryland hospital, out of options and expressing a wish to spend a little more time with his family.

Many scientists hope xenotransplants one day could compensate for the huge shortage of human organ donations. More than 100,000 people are on the nation’s list for a transplant, most awaiting kidneys, and thousands will die waiting.

A handful of scientific teams have tested pig kidneys and hearts in monkeys and in donated human bodies, hoping to learn enough for the Food and Drug Administration to allow formal xenotransplant studies.

Lawrence Faucette was dying from heart failure and ineligible for a traditional heart transplant because of other health problems when doctors at the University of Maryland School of Medicine offered the highly experimental surgery.

In the first glimpse of Faucette provided since the Sept. 20 transplant, hospital video shows physical therapist Chris Wells urging him to smile while pushing through a pedaling exercise to regain his strength.

“That’s going to be tough but I’ll work it out,” Faucette, 58, replied, breathing heavily but giving a smile.

The Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a heart from a genetically altered pig into another dying man. David Bennett survived just two months before that heart failed, for reasons that aren’t completely clear although signs of a pig virus later were found inside the organ. Lessons from that first experiment led to changes before this second try, including better virus testing.

Attempts at animal-to-human organ transplants — called xenotransplants — have failed for decades, as people’s immune systems immediately destroyed the foreign tissue. Now scientists are trying again using pigs genetically modified to make their organs more humanlike.

In Friday’s hospital video, Faucette’s doctors said the pig heart has shown no sign of rejection.

“His heart is doing everything on its own,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, the Maryland team’s cardiac xenotransplantation chief.

A hospital spokeswoman said Faucette, of Frederick, Maryland, has been able to stand and physical therapists are helping him gain strength needed to attempt walking.

Many scientists hope xenotransplants one day could compensate for the huge shortage of human organ donations. More than 100,000 people are on the nation’s list for a transplant, most awaiting kidneys, and thousands will die waiting.

A handful of scientific teams have tested pig kidneys and hearts in monkeys and in donated human bodies, hoping to learn enough for the Food and Drug Administration to allow formal xenotransplant studies.

What’s more, for some, hitting the button multiple times over 30 minutes may spark alertness more quickly than sleeping through without a break, according to the study, published Wednesday in the Journal of Sleep Research.

The study found “that snoozing for 30 minutes in the morning does not make you more tired or more likely to wake up from deep sleep,” the study’s lead author, Tina Sundelin, an associate professor in the department of psychology at Stockholm University in Sweden, said in an email. “For those who usually snooze, it might even be helpful with waking.”

Among the 1,732 adults who filled out a questionnaire about their waking habits in the morning, 69% said they hit the snooze button at least sometimes, especially on weekdays. Many, 60%, said they “most often” or “always” fell asleep between alarms, the result being that, on average, snoozers got just a little less sleep.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com here.

The well-being of Finnish people has sparked great interest in the country and its practices. And Finland is offering guidance on how to be happier, free of charge.

Back in March, the country’s tourism department, Visit Finland, announced an offer for 10 people to visit the country and embark on their take of a masterclass on happiness.

Visit Finland reports that they received over 150,000 applications from all around the world for the unique opportunity. In an attempt to reach as many people as possible, they decided to also offer the masterclass for free in a virtual format.

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“This masterclass will take you a step closer with insights from five coaches under four core themes: Nature & Lifestyle, Health & Balance, Design & Everyday and Food & Wellbeing,” the course, which became available online on September 14, states.

In hopes of “finding my inner Finn,” I watched all five lessons of the course, and these are my biggest takeaways.

Here’s what I learned from Finland’s happiness masterclass

1. Connecting with nature is important for your mental health, no matter where you live

As someone who lives in a city, I thought reaping nature’s benefits would be virtually impossible for me without traveling far. However, the course taught me that having a relationship with nature doesn’t have to look like being in the forest or sailing on a river; it’s more about being in tune with our five senses as we walk outside to do the simple things like grabbing a coffee or commuting to work.

Without pausing and intentionally paying attention to the beauty around me, I was denying myself the easiest way to boost my happiness: connecting with nature.

Finland is ahead of the game because they have a law called “Everyman’s Rights” which grants people the right to roam and stay overnight in nature, regardless of land ownership. Many Finnish people camp frequently, walk and bike in nature and simply embrace all that nature has to offer.

“It’s true that even a small amount of time spent in nature reduces your stress, clears your mind, gives you experiences and lets you connect with yourself in ways that only nature can do,” Mikaela Creutz, a hiker and nature lover, says during the masterclass.

2. It’s better to have enough than to want for more

I’ll be the first to admit that I view myself as a go-getter, and it’s something that I’ve taken much pride in. But there is a downside to always aiming higher and wanting more, according to April Rinne, an author and speaker who teaches about the importance of embracing change and uncertainty.

“When we’re focused on more, we’re actually never able to find enough,” says Rinne during the course. “The goalpost keeps changing.”

Rinne defines “enough” as balance, harmony and sufficiency. Embracing “enough” means “having all that you need to thrive, but not carrying around excess,” she adds.

“That includes knowing that you are enough just as you are, and you always have been — rather than ‘I will only be happy when I achieve this goal or make this amount of money or can get this particular product.'”

My goal moving forward is to honor where I am in life. Instead of focusing too much on everything else I want, I’ll aim to simply be open to the possibilities that are on the horizon. Not only can this take a huge weight off of my shoulders, but it’ll likely also allow me to feel happier about what I have now.

3. The way you design your space can impact your mental health

Initially, I wasn’t sure what I’d gain from the lesson about design because it didn’t seem to me that it would be essential to happiness. Yet, hearing design professional, Taina Snellman-Langenskiöld, talk about how much our homes and the spaces we visit frequently affect our well-being was fascinating.

“In Finnish, we have an old saying that a poor man cannot afford bad quality,” Snellman-Langenskiöld says in the course.

And you may be surprised to hear that “good” quality for her doesn’t mean the most expensive things. Sometimes, things can have more value to us because we made them with our own hands or the materials used to make them were sustainable and better for our planet.

Snellman-Langenskiöld suggests using design to improve your lifestyle by:

• Only buying meaningful objects that will stand the test of time and always be appealing to you
• Making beautiful things and surrounding yourself with them
• “Taking nature in” by having plants and buying yourself flowers
• Thinking about how you can design your space to make your life easier and more functional

She leaves viewers with this last piece of advice to consider: “Meaningfulness in design is one of the keys to happiness.”

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The 58-year-old Navy veteran was facing near-certain death from heart failure but other health problems meant he wasn’t eligible for a traditional heart transplant, according to doctors at University of Maryland Medicine.

“Nobody knows from this point forward. At least now I have hope and I have a chance,” Lawrence Faucette, from Frederick, Maryland, said in a video recorded by the hospital before Wednesday’s operation. “I will fight tooth and nail for every breath I can take.”

While the next few weeks will be critical, doctors were thrilled at Faucette’s early response to the pig organ.

“You know, I just keep shaking my head – how am I talking to someone who has a pig heart?” Dr. Bartley Griffith, who performed the transplant, told The Associated Press. He said doctors are feeling “a great privilege but, you know, a lot of pressure.”

The same Maryland team last year performed the world’s first transplant of a genetically modified pig heart into another dying man, David Bennett, who survived just two months.

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There’s a huge shortage of human organs donated for transplant. Last year, there were just over 4,100 heart transplants in the U.S., a record number but the supply is so tight that only patients with the best chance of long-term survival get offered one.

Attempts at animal-to-human organ transplants have failed for decades, as people’s immune systems immediately destroyed the foreign tissue. Now scientists are trying again using pigs genetically modified to make their organs more humanlike.

Recently, scientists at other hospitals have tested pig kidneys and hearts in donated human bodies, hoping to learn enough to begin formal studies of what are called xenotransplants.

To make this new attempt in a living patient outside of a rigorous trial, the Maryland researchers required special permission from the Food and Drug Administration, under a process reserved for certain emergency cases with no other options.

It took over 300 pages of documents filed with FDA, but the Maryland researchers made their case that they’d learned enough from their first attempt last year – even though that patient died for reasons that aren’t fully understood – that it made sense to try again.

And Faucette, who retired as a lab technician at the National Institutes of Health, had to agree that he understood the procedure’s risks.

In a statement his wife, Ann Faucette, said: “We have no expectations other than hoping for more time together. That could be as simple as sitting on the front porch and having coffee together.”

What’s different this time: Only after last year’s transplant did scientists discover signs of a pig virus lurking inside the heart – and they now have better tests to look for hidden viruses. They also made some medication changes.

Possibly more important, while Faucette has end-stage heart failure and was out of other options, he wasn’t as near death as the prior patient.

By Friday, his new heart was functioning well without any supportive machinery, the hospital said.

“It’s just an amazing feeling to see this pig heart work in a human,” said Dr. Muhammad Mohiuddin, the Maryland team’s xenotransplantation expert. But, he cautioned, “we don’t want to predict anything. We will take every day as a victory and move forward.”

This kind of single-patient “compassionate use” can provide some information about how the pig organ works but not nearly as much as more formal testing, said Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for xenotransplant clinical trials. That FDA allowed this second case “suggests that the agency is not ready to permit a pig heart clinical trial to start,” Mashke added.

The pig heart, provided by Blacksburg, Virginia-based Revivicor, has 10 genetic modifications – knocking out some pig genes and adding some human ones to make it more acceptable to the human immune system.

___

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The dramatic experiment came to an end Wednesday as surgeons at NYU Langone Health removed the pig kidney and returned the donated body of Maurice “Mo” Miller to his family for cremation.

It marked the longest a genetically modified pig kidney has ever functioned inside a human, albeit a deceased one. And by pushing the boundaries of research with the dead, the scientists learned critical lessons they’re preparing to share with the Food and Drug Administration -– in hopes of eventually testing pig kidneys in the living.

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How a family's choice to donate a body for pig kidney research could help change transplants

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Pig kidney works in a donated body for over a month, a step toward animal-human transplants

“It’s a combination of excitement and relief,” Dr. Robert Montgomery, the transplant surgeon who led the experiment, told The Associated Press. “Two months is a lot to have a pig kidney in this good a condition. That gives you a lot of confidence” for next attempts.

Montgomery, himself a recipient of a heart transplant, sees animal-to-human transplants as crucial to ease the nation’s organ shortage. More than 100,000 people are on the national waiting list, most who need a kidney, and thousands will die waiting.

So-called xenotransplantation attempts have failed for decades — the human immune system immediately destroyed foreign animal tissue. What’s new: Trying pigs genetically modified so their organs are more humanlike.

Some short experiments in deceased bodies avoided an immediate immune attack but shed no light on a more common form of rejection that can take a month to form. Last year, University of Maryland surgeons tried to save a dying man with a pig heart –- but he survived only two months as the organ failed for reasons that aren’t completely clear. And the FDA gave Montgomery’s team a list of questions about how pig organs really perform their jobs compared to human ones.

Montgomery gambled that maintaining Miller’s body on a ventilator for two months to see how the pig kidney worked could answer some of those questions.

“I’m so proud of you,” Miller’s sister, Mary Miller-Duffy, said in a tearful farewell at her brother’s bedside this week.

Miller had collapsed and was declared brain-dead, unable to donate his organs because of cancer. After wrestling with the choice, Miller-Duffy donated the Newburgh, New York, man’s body for the pig experiment. She recently got a card from a stranger in California who’s awaiting a kidney transplant, thanking her for helping to move forward desperately needed research.

“This has been quite the journey,” Miller-Duffy said as she and her wife Sue Duffy hugged Montgomery’s team.

On July 14, shortly before his 58th birthday, surgeons replaced Miller’s own kidneys with one pig kidney plus the animal’s thymus, a gland that trains immune cells. For the first month, the kidney worked with no signs of trouble.

But soon after, doctors measured a slight decrease in the amount of urine produced. A biopsy confirmed a subtle sign that rejection was beginning –- giving doctors an opportunity to tell if it was treatable. Sure enough, the kidney’s performance bounced back with a change in standard immune-suppressing medicines that patients use today.

“We are learning that this is actually doable,” said NYU transplant immunologist Massimo Mangiola.

The researchers checked off other FDA questions, including seeing no differences in how the pig kidney reacted to human hormones, excreted antibiotics or experienced medicine-related side effects.

“It looks beautiful, it’s exactly the way normal kidneys look,” Dr. Jeffrey Stern said Wednesday after removing the pig kidney at the 61-day mark for closer examination.

The next steps: Researchers took about 180 different tissue samples –- from every major organ, lymph nodes, the digestive tract –- to scour for any hints of problems due to the xenotransplant.

Experiments in the deceased cannot predict that the organs will work the same in the living, cautioned Karen Maschke, a research scholar at the Hastings Center who is helping develop ethics and policy recommendations for xenotransplant clinical trials.

But they can provide other valuable information, she said. That includes helping to tease out differences between pigs with up to 10 genetics changes that some research teams prefer — and those like Montgomery uses that have just a single change, removal of a gene that triggers an immediate immune attack.

“Why we’re doing this is because there are a lot of people that unfortunately die before having the opportunity of a second chance at life,” said Mangiola, the immunologist. “And we need to do something about it.”

Tally Health created and administers a test that collects DNA samples from a cheek swab, and calculates what the company calls a “biological age.” The process involves identifying how your body ages on a cellular level based on epigenetics.

“We call it the credit score for the body that measures all aspects of your health,” Dr. David Sinclair, a Harvard scientist and longevity expert, tells CNBC Make It.

Sinclair co-founded Tally Health and, as its scientific advisor, had a hand in creating its test which partly relies on his years of research in the field of longevity.

“We have a new understanding of why we age, and how important it is to live a lifestyle that slows down that process. Because we’re aging every day,” he adds.

I was offered the opportunity to take the “TallyAge Test” and despite my generally healthy lifestyle, I was still a bit nervous to learn my biological age.

Here are my results, and how I was advised to interpret them.

My ‘biological age’ is just one month older than my actual age

Though the goal is to have a younger biological age than your actual age, only a drastically older biological age may be cause for concern, says Adiv Johnson, the director of research and innovation at Tally Health.

According to my results, my “TallyAge” is around 23 years and 7 months, just one month older than I was when I took the test in January.

And having the same biological age as your actual age is pretty great, says Johnson. But, “if I was 85, and I got told that it looks like a typical 95-year-old’s [DNA], there I might feel differently or respond differently,” he adds.

And as it turns out, my eating habits may be responsible for my positive results. I eat a mostly plant-based diet.

“What we found with our model is, on average, people that exercise tend to [test] younger than people that don’t exercise. People that eat lots of plant-based foods correlate with a younger TallyAge,” Johnson says.

The same correlation is seen for people who get enough good-quality sleep, are more socially fulfilled and drink less alcohol, he adds.

“There’s of course variability, because human beings are so complex,” Johnson says. Some people who smoke cigarettes often, have gotten younger biological ages, which he believes is likely due to their genetics.

‘More than 90% of how you age is up to lifestyle choices, environment’

While my biological age is pretty low, I was advised to strive for an even lower one to help reverse some of my aging.

“You can naturally lower your TallyAge by adopting the right lifestyle habits. More than 90% of how you age is up to your lifestyle choices and environment,” Tally Health advised in my results.

TallyAge test results come with a questionnaire about your behaviors like what you eat, how often you exercise and more. Using your responses, the company creates an action plan to improve your lifestyle, and hopefully reduce your biological age.

The company aims to help you track if, and how, your behaviors are affecting how you’re actually aging.

Users are encouraged to track their progress over time by taking a Tally test, and completing the lifestyle questionnaire, quarterly.

A Tally Health test will cost you $229, but the company also offers monthly and yearly subscriptions with prices that vary.

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