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After being far from the first person to roll down the social media clips → Gamechanger → Dimension 20 pipeline, I played my first game of Dungeons & Dragons this past weekend. (It was fabulous.)
Which reminds me — with how many fantasy-themed buildings there are at Epic Systems’ headquarters (yes, THAT Epic) and the fantasy-themed costumes CEO Judy Faulkner wears to Epic’s annual meetings, I’m convinced there have to be many ongoing Epic employee DnD games.
Are you or anyone you know part of Judy’s DnD campaign? Email me: [email protected]
How early exposure to sugar shapes long-term health
Through this candy IQ quiz, I learned that kids getting sugar highs from candy is a myth. In other Halloween-y sugar news, a new Science study examines a natural experiment: The health outcomes of babies born before and after World War II-era British sugar ration rules.
The daily ration for sugar was the equivalent of about 6 to 7 teaspoons of sugar, an amount comparable to today’s dietary guidelines from the World Health Organization. After rations were lifted in September 1953, sugar consumption nearly doubled, going from 41 grams to 80 grams per day.
Researchers found that people who consumed less sugar in the womb or in toddlerhood during the rationing era had a lower risk of type 2 diabetes and hypertension than those who had more sugar before and after birth. Those from the low-sugar cohort who did develop diabetes and hypertension did so four and two years later, respectively, than their high-sugar counterparts.
For more detail on the findings, and what that means for us today in a world of ultra-processed Nerd Gummy Clusters and Ghost Toast KitKats, read Liz Cooney’s story in STAT.
What stem cells get up to after a transplant
Doctors have been performing stem cell transplants — also known as bone marrow transplants — for decades. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions about what goes on in a recipient’s body after transplant and how the transferred cells fare.
In a new study in Nature, researchers sequenced the stem cells of transplant recipients, as well as those of their siblings who donated to them, to see how they differed. The 10 transplant recipients in the study had received the cells between nine to 31 years previously.
The study found that ten times more stem cells took hold in the transplant recipients if the donors were younger at the time of the transplant (18–47 years) rather than older (50–66 years). The researchers also found that the transplant recipients’ blood systems were aged about 10–15 years more than their matched donors’, mostly due to a lower diversity in their stem cells.
The better understanding of what factors make stem cells thrive in transplants will help improve the success of future transplants, the researchers said.
Should science stay out of partisan politics?
In a post-Covid-era election, with trust in science and scientists lower than ever, should scientific journals be making presidential endorsements?
STAT’s Anil Oza takes a look at how Nature, Science, JAMA, NEJM, and others have treated the election, what their reasoning is, and why — though always political — experts say science shouldn’t be partisan. Read more here.
On a similar subject, don’t miss STAT’s First Opinion Podcast with Scientific American editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth and chief opinion editor Megha Satyanarayana (a former STATian herself), who explain why the magazine chose to endorse Harris.
And if you missed our special edition of the D.C. Diagnosis newsletter earlier this week on what to expect in health care whichever way the presidential election goes, you can read it here. Our D.C. team will have another special edition next Wednesday after the election, so sign up today! (It’s free!)
Dr. Google: Better than nothing
In a perspective in NEJM, Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s faculty member Isaac Kohane argues that we should conduct clinical trials comparing ChatGPT medical advice not against doctors, but against something more realistic: Not going to the doctor.
Kohane couldn’t find a primary care doctor to recommend to a new colleague, even in doctor-heavy Boston, due to the (somewhat artificially created) doctor shortage. Medicine is increasingly turning to AI to alleviate the shortage by employing tools that save doctors time, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg of AI in medicine, he argues.
Patients are already using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude 3 to ask about their health symptoms. Instead of assuming patients will take the chatbots’ caveat and ask a medical professional, “shouldn’t we be comparing health outcomes achieved with patients’ use of these programs with outcomes in our current primary-care-doctor–depleted system?” he asks.
Read more in STAT about how hospitals are training residents to think about ChatGPT, how well it works for diagnosing patients, and a Microsoft executive’s warning that ChatGPT shouldn’t be used for diagnosis.
When doctors judge patients
Surveys indicate that most adults admit to hiding information about everything from their exercise habits to their medication regimens from their doctors. While it’s easy to say that people should just be more forthcoming, Samantha Kleinberg, Farber chair professor of computer science at Stevens Institute of Technology, says that her research shows that the onus lies with doctors, who do judge their patients negatively.
Kleinberg says doctors need to change their mindsets to focus on empathy and education, allowing patients to share more freely. Not only is open communication important for patients’ health, but it can also help uncover unexpected side effects of medicines, as was the case with the discovery that the drug combination fen-phen caused heart damage.
Read more on Kleinberg’s findings in this STAT First Opinion.
What we’re reading
- Is there still any pop left in California’s fight against soda?, Politico
- Throw out your black plastic spatula, The Atlantic
- Some states are turning miscarriages and stillbirths into criminal cases against women, The Marshall Project
- Yes on abortion, no on Tester? A Democratic senator’s struggle underscores his party’s conundrum, STAT
- Mucus: It’s snot what you think, New York Times
- To mitigate drug shortages, a new study suggests looking at Canada, STAT