June 20, 2024
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Morning Rounds Writer and Podcast Producer
Good morning! I'd love for you to take a listen to this week's episode of the First Opinion Podcast. It's an affecting conversation with a medical anthropologist who is living with long Covid. She describes the experience as worse than both the time she got dengue, and the time she was held at gunpoint on a research trip.

obesity

For kids with obesity, task force chooses behavioral therapy over drugs

Jae C. Hong/AP

Doctors debating whether to prescribe obesity drugs for children whose weight tops growth charts now have two camps to choose from: the American Academy of Pediatrics, which got pushback last year when it advised considering obesity drugs for kids 12 and older with high BMI, and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, which landed yesterday on behavioral interventions to help children 6 and older with high BMI (itself a controversial measure). Both groups encourage better nutrition, physical activity, and behavioral therapy from age 6, which can be hard to find.

Why such dissonance? The task force cited “inadequate” evidence on obesity drugs. AAP’s Sarah Armstrong, a Duke professor of pediatrics, cited the “P,” for preventive, in the task force's name. “The USPSTF really focuses on interventions clinicians can initiate for long-term prevention of chronic disease,” she told STAT. “We’re looking at the here and now: What do we need to treat obesity?” Read more.


politics

Abortion is on the ballot this November

Two years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and less than five months before the general presidential election, abortion is still a major political issue for voters. But its relative importance depends on age, partisanship, and state dynamics, according to new results from the KFF Survey of Women Voters

One in 10 women voters in the survey say that abortion is the most important issue for their vote this November. In the past, abortion has been more important to Republicans than Democrats, but that dynamic has reversed post-Roe, especially for Democrats living in states with abortion restrictions. Democrats living in these states also say they’re more motivated to vote in this year’s election, compared to those in states where reproductive rights are not on the ballot. 

Read STAT’s abortion coverage to stay up to date as the election gets closer.


addiction

Addiction experts are sounding the alarm on a potential new crisis: gambling

A casino on the Las Vegas strip may have been an odd choice for a conference about treating opioid addiction. But it came with a silver lining: An opportunity for addiction experts to sound the alarm about the proliferation of online sports betting and, more broadly, the intersection of gambling and substance use disorders.

Drug counselors might be ill-equipped to help patients who present with concerning gambling behavior alongside a substance use disorder, one presenter said. Many will need to get up to speed quickly: Americans bet nearly $120 billion on sports in 2023, and the link between gambling and suicidality is well-documented. But the field is working to adapt, and a select few lawmakers are working to step in and regulate an industry that Rep. Paul Tonko (D-N.Y.) suggested could quickly turn into a “Wild West.” Read more from STAT’s Lev Facher. 



first opinion

Why haven’t journals retracted ‘research’ from Richard Lynn?

Arantza Pena for STAT 

The researcher Richard Lynn died in 2023, but his work continues to be cited today; Google Scholar reports more than 22,000 citations, with almost 4,500 of them coming after 2019. The last article he co-authored in a mainstream journal was published early in the year he died, and a posthumously published article recently appeared in a fringe journal.

What did he research, you ask? For decades, Lynn was one of the loudest proponents of the unfounded idea that Western civilization is threatened by “inferior races” that are genetically predisposed to low intelligence, violence, and criminality. His work has been repeatedly condemned by social scientists and biologists for using flawed methodology and deceptively collated data to support racism.

But despite decades of criticism of the poor quality and practices of his work, only a few journals have taken any action to retract his papers or even acknowledge the criticism. Read more in a new First Opinion essay about the legacy of his work.


telemedicine

Telehealth use continues to drop in the United States

Since the earliest days of the pandemic, when people had few in-person options to access health care, telehealth use has been on the decline. The National Health Interview Survey continues to track that trend, showing that the percentage of adults who used telehealth dropped from 37% in 2021 to 30% in 2022. 

But the dropoff has been unequally distributed. In 2021, seniors were the biggest users of telehealth, with 43% of people over 65 using it at some point during the year. But in 2022, telehealth use in that group dropped by nearly 30%, bringing rates in line with younger groups. And existing differences in telehealth use continue to pop up in the data: more frequent users of telehealth include women, people with college degrees, and urban residents.


neuroscience

New research aims to close the racial gap in neuroscience data

In neuroscience research, data is typically dominated by participants with European descent. This limits the potential for researchers to investigate disparities in neurological diseases — Black Americans are 20% more likely to experience major mental health problems, and twice as likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease. But one new study is making strides to change that.

More than 100 Black people in Baltimore donated the brains of their deceased loved ones for the study, published in Nature Neuroscience last month. It’s the first major undertaking from the African Ancestry Neuroscience Research Initiative — a collaboration between the Lieber Institute for Brain Development, local community leaders, and Morgan State University, a historically Black research university in the city. The study’s findings could have implications for future personalized therapies informed by genetic ancestry. Read more on what researchers learned from STAT’s Alia Sajani.


More around STAT
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What we're reading

  • Parole and probation rules limit travel. That can be complicated for people seeking abortions, The 19th

  • Getting ahead of a non-alcoholic beverage boom among youths, STAT
  • Older women are different than older men. their health is woefully understudied, KFF Health News
  • There’s a heat wave coming. Here’s what you need to know, STAT

Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,


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