For most of her life, Claudia Stearns dreaded Thanksgiving. As a person who struggled with obesity since childhood, Stearns hated the annual turmoil of obsessing about what she ate — and the guilt of overindulging on a holiday built around food. Now, after losing nearly 100 pounds using medications including Wegovy, a powerful new anti-obesity [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration has announced a White House initiative to improve how the federal government approaches and funds research into the health of women, who make up more than half of the U.S. population but remain understudied and underrepresented in health research. That underrepresentation can lead to big gaps in research and [...]
NEW YORK (AP) — Respiratory syncytial virus infections are rising sharply in some parts of the country, nearly filling hospital emergency departments in Georgia, Texas and some other states. To help counter the surge, federal officials last week announced they were releasing more doses of a new RSV shot for newborns that have been in [...]
A new version of the popular diabetes treatment Mounjaro can be sold as a weight-loss drug, federal regulators announced last week. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Eli Lilly’s drug Zepbound, also known as tirzepatide. The drug helped dieters lose as much as 40 to 60 pounds in testing. Zepbound is the latest diabetes [...]
More than 40 percent of American adults are considered obese, yet the medications many take are rarely tested in people who are overweight. That’s because they are not required to be included in drug studies and, often, they’re explicitly excluded. “Clinical trials and dosing instructions don’t always ensure that drugs will be safe and effective [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — As doctors scale back their use of opioid painkillers, a new option for difficult-to-treat pain is taking root: ketamine, the decades-old surgical drug that is now a trendy psychedelic therapy. Prescriptions for ketamine have soared in recent years, driven by for-profit clinics and telehealth services offering the medication as a treatment for [...]
NEW YORK (AP) — The nation’s infant mortality rate rose 3 percent last year — the largest increase in two decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC's report, released earlier this week, noted larger increases for two of the leading causes of infant deaths — maternal complications and bacterial meningitis. [...]
About four decades ago, when the Environmental Protection Agency was first trying to figure out what to do about lead in drinking water, Ronnie Levin quantified its damage: Roughly 40 million people drank water with dangerous levels of lead, degrading the intelligence of thousands of kids. New regulations, however, were going to be costly and [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of suicides among military members and their families dipped slightly in 2022, compared with the previous year, as the Defense Department tries to build prevention and treatment programs to address what has been a steadily growing problem over the past decade, The Associated Press has learned. While the total number [...]
Powdered drink mixes that are widely promoted as "toddler milks" for older babies and children up to age 3 are unregulated, unnecessary and "nutritionally incomplete," according to an American Academy of Pediatrics report. The drinks, which are touted to parents on TikTok, in television ads and in other media, often contain added sugar and salt. [...]