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Good morning. You might think the year was 2004 the way some parts of the STAT newsroom have locked into this week’s duel for a playoffs slot between the Red Sox and Yankees (baseball). But Usher is nowhere to be seen on the Billboard Hot 100 and I’m nowhere to be seen in fourth grade.
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If only we had any data on pregnant women …
In May, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unilaterally pulled a recommendation that healthy pregnant women receive Covid vaccines, diverging with medical experts who urge vaccination to protect against illness and spread immunity to the infant. Later in the summer, the FDA put together a panel filled with antidepressant skeptics who said, without compelling data, that SSRIs were likely to harm developing babies. And last week, Kennedy and President Trump both urged pregnant women to avoid Tylenol, claiming without clear evidence that its active ingredient causes autism.
Researchers have shut pregnant women out of clinical trials in order to protect them and their babies. But the practice has had the opposite effect, STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence writes. Besides sowing confusion, the lack of robust, inclusive research makes it easier for people to obfuscate and misconstrue whatever data does exist. And as federal officials zero in on the medical decisions of pregnant women, this longstanding data gap has gained new relevance. Read more from Lizzy on how we got here and how we might move forward.
Why promising women’s health companies die
And while we’re on the topic of women’s health — consider this First Opinion essay. Health tech executive and researcher Veronica Adamson knows from personal experience how difficult it can be to launch a women’s health startup, or even a new product. After her own harrowing experience giving birth to her son, she convinced her company to launch first-of-their-kind innovation partnerships and pursue upgrades to fetal monitoring systems. But it was an uphill battle with regulatory friction, reimbursement shortfalls, and structural barriers.
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“It wasn’t a question of will, patients’ need for the product, or technical capability — it was a system calibrated to sustain the status quo,” Adamson writes. Read more about why women’s health innovations so often fail to make it into practice, and what could be done to change that pattern.
Anyone can use a CGM. But should they?
Last year, Dexcom and Abbott began selling glucose monitoring devices over the counter, opening up a massive potential market: nearly 100 million Americans with prediabetes, people with type 2 diabetes who don’t use insulin, and even healthy people who want to keep an eye on their blood sugar levels. The only problem is that most existing research on these devices and the data they gather has been collected from people with diabetes. A study published yesterday in Diabetes Technology and Therapeutics delivers new findings on how well the devices work for everyone else.
To put it plainly: Not that well. For patients with type 2 diabetes, the metrics provided by the CGM accurately correlated with hemoglobin A1c, considered the gold-standard assessment for average blood sugar control. But for prediabetic people, CGM metrics weren’t as well aligned with the patients’ A1C measurements and for those with normal blood sugar levels, they weren’t aligned at all.
The results emphasize the growing tension between wellness and medicine that CGMs provoke. STAT’s Katie Palmer recently wrote about how these devices straddle that line. Read more.
A long-trusted doctor resource catches the AI wave
Over the last two years, doctors have rapidly adopted chatbot-like tools powered by large language models that give them quick, through-written answers to medical queries. Now, the decades-old, expert-curated medical resource for doctors, UpToDate, has announced the launch of its own generative AI update.
“It’s the obvious thing to do,” said hospitalist and researcher Jonathan Chen. “They actually do have this very powerful asset, which is the content that nobody else has, content that doctors have trusted for a decade, and do trust.” Read more from Katie on how the company made the decision and how the tool will work.
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Who will lose coverage after work requirements?
Millions of people are set to lose insurance coverage when President Trump’s budget bill — which was signed into law on July 4 and includes work requirements for Medicaid enrollment — goes into effect in 2027. But who are they? A new study published in JAMA analyzes nationally representative federal survey data to better understand the characteristics of those who are most at risk.
The data included 344 people ages 20 to 64 who worked fewer than 20 hours per week or who were unemployed but won’t be considered exempt from work requirements. Overall, 41% had three or more chronic conditions, and that rose to 66% when looking at those over age 50. More than 20% overall had dyslipidemia, obesity, hypertension, urinary incontinence, depression, or arthritis. The study reaffirms previous research that has found that Medicaid beneficiaries who do not meet work requirements have worse health than the people who do.
Split asunder
Can you solve this week’s mini crossword? Try it and let me know.
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