An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Drug treatment can help people newly diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) to reduce their risk of substance misuse, suicidal behavior, transport accidents and criminality, a study suggests. These issues are linked to common ADHD symptoms such as acting impulsively and becoming easily distracted. Some 5% of children and 2.5% of adults worldwide are thought to be affected by the disorder -- and growing numbers are being diagnosed. The findings, published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), confirm the wider potential benefits of drug treatment and could help patients decide whether to start medication, the researchers say. The researchers found taking ADHD medication was linked to reductions of first-time instances of:
- suicidal behavior - 17%
- substance misuse - 15%
- transport accidents - 12%
- criminal behavior - 13%

When recurrent events were analyzed, the researchers found ADHD medication was linked to reductions of:
- 15% for suicide attempts
- 25% for substance misuses
- 4% for accidental injuries
- 16% for transport accidents
- 25% for criminal behavior

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ScientificAmerican: After a brain stem stroke left him almost entirely paralyzed in the 1990s, French journalist Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote a book about his experiences -- letter by letter, blinking his left eye in response to a helper who repeatedly recited the alphabet. Today people with similar conditions often have far more communication options. Some devices, for example, track eye movements or other small muscle twitches to let users select words from a screen. And on the cutting edge of this field, neuroscientists have more recently developed brain implants that can turn neural signals directly into whole words. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) largely require users to physically attempt to speak, however -- and that can be a slow and tiring process. But now a new development in neural prosthetics changes that, allowing users to communicate by simply thinking what they want to say.

The new system relies on much of the same technology as the more common "attempted speech" devices. Both use sensors implanted in a part of the brain called the motor cortex, which sends motion commands to the vocal tract. The brain activation detected by these sensors is then fed into a machine-learning model to interpret which brain signals correspond to which sounds for an individual user. It then uses those data to predict which word the user is attempting to say. But the motor cortex doesn't only light up when we attempt to speak; it's also involved, to a lesser extent, in imagined speech. The researchers took advantage of this to develop their "inner speech" decoding device and published the results on Thursday in Cell. The team studied three people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and one with a brain stem stroke, all of whom had previously had the sensors implanted. Using this new "inner speech" system, the participants needed only to think a sentence they wanted to say and it would appear on a screen in real time. While previous inner speech decoders were limited to only a handful of words, the new device allowed participants to draw from a dictionary of 125,000 words. To help keep private thoughts private, the researchers implemented a code phrase "chitty chitty bang bang" that participants could use to prompt the BCI to start or stop transcribing.

New research suggests exposure to some common Pfas or "forever chemical" compounds causes changes to gene activity, and those changes are linked to health problems including multiple cancers, neurological disorders and autoimmune disease. From a report: The findings are a major step toward determining the mechanism by which the chemicals cause disease and could help doctors identify, detect and treat health problems for those exposed to Pfas before the issues advance. The research may also point toward other diseases potentially caused by Pfas that have not yet been identified, the authors said.

The study is among the first to examine how Pfas chemicals impact gene activity, called epigenetics. "This gives us a hint as to which genes and which Pfas might be important," said Melissa Furlong, a University of Arizona College of Public Health Pfas researcher and study lead author.

A San Francisco jury ruled that Meta violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act by collecting sensitive data from users of the Flo period-tracking app without consent. "The plaintiff's lawyers who sued Meta are calling this a 'landmark' victory -- the tech company contends that the jury got it all wrong," reports SFGATE. From the report: The case goes back to 2021, when eight women sued Flo and a group of other tech companies, including Google and Facebook, now known as Meta. The stakes were extremely personal. Flo asked users about their sex lives, mental health and diets, and guided them through menstruation and pregnancy. Then, the women alleged, Flo shared pieces of that data with other companies. The claims were largely based on a 2019 Wall Street Journal story and a 2021 Federal Trade Commission investigation. Google, Flo and the analytics company Flurry, which was also part of the lawsuit, reached settlements with the plaintiffs, as is common in class action lawsuits about tech privacy. But Meta stuck it out through the entire trial and lost.

The case against Meta focused on its Facebook software development kit, which Flo added to its app and which is generally used for analytics and advertising services. The women alleged that between June 2016 and February 2019, Flo sent Facebook, through that kit, various records of "Custom App Events" -- such as a user clicking a particular button in the "wanting to get pregnant" section of the app. Their complaint also pointed to Facebook's terms for its business tools, which said the company used so-called "event data" to personalize ads and content.

In a 2022 filing (PDF), the tech giant admitted that Flo used Facebook's kit during this period and that the app sent data connected to "App Events." But Meta denied receiving intimate information about users' health. Nonetheless, the jury ruled (PDF) against Meta. Along with the eavesdropping decision, the group determined that Flo's users had a reasonable expectation they weren't being overheard or recorded, as well as ruling that Meta didn't have consent to eavesdrop or record. The unanimous verdict was that the massive company violated the California Invasion of Privacy Act. The jury's ruling could impact over 3.7 million U.S. users who registered between November 2016 and February 2019, with updates to be shared via email and a case website. The exact compensation from the trial or potential settlements remains uncertain.

"Certain kinds of gut microbes absorb toxic Pfas 'forever chemicals' and help expel them from the body," reports the Guardian, citing a "new first-of-its-kind University of Cambridge research shows." The microbes were found to remove up to 75% of some Pfas from the gut of mice. Several of the study's authors plan to develop probiotic dietary supplements that boost levels of helpful microbes in the human gut, which would likely reduce Pfas levels...

Pfas are a class of about 15,000 compounds most frequently used to make products water-, stain- and grease-resistant. They have been linked to cancer, birth defects, decreased immunity, high cholesterol, kidney disease and a range of other serious health problems. They are dubbed "forever chemicals" because they do not naturally break down in the environment. The US Environmental Protection Agency has found no level of exposure to Pfos or Pfoa, two of the most common Pfas compounds, in drinking water is safe. They have a half-life in human blood of anywhere from two to five years, by most estimates. That means the body expels half the amount of the chemical that is in blood during that period. Depending on blood levels, it can take decades to fully expel Pfas naturally.

Though the findings represent the first time gut microbes have been found to remove Pfas, they have been found to alleviate the impacts of other contaminants, such as microplastics...

The microbes largely addressed "long-chain" Pfas, which are larger compounds and more dangerous than smaller "short chains" because they stay in the body longer.

It killed tens of millions of people in 14th century Europe," CNN reports, though "today, it's easily treated with antibiotics."

And yet "A resident of northern Arizona has died from pneumonic plague, health officials said Friday." Plague is rare to humans, with on average about seven cases reported annually in the U.S., most of them in the western states, according to federal health officials. The death in Coconino County, which includes Flagstaff, was the first recorded death from pneumonic plague since 2007, local officials said... The bubonic plague is the most common form of the bacterial infection, which spreads naturally among rodents like prairie dogs and rats. There are two other forms: septicemic plague that spreads through the whole body, and pneumonic plague that infects the lungs. Pneumonic plague is the most deadly and easiest to spread.

"Some of our basic assumptions about the biological process of aging might be wrong," reports the New York Times — citing new research on a small Indigenous population in the Bolivian Amazon. [Alternate URL here.] Scientists have long believed that long-term, low-grade inflammation — also known as "inflammaging" — is a universal hallmark of getting older. But this new data raises the question of whether inflammation is directly linked to aging at all, or if it's linked to a person's lifestyle or environment instead. The study, which was published Monday, found that people in two nonindustrialized areas experienced a different kind of inflammation throughout their lives than more urban people — likely tied to infections from bacteria, viruses and parasites rather than the precursors of chronic disease. Their inflammation also didn't appear to increase with age.

Scientists compared inflammation signals in existing data sets from four distinct populations in Italy, Singapore, Bolivia and Malaysia; because they didn't collect the blood samples directly, they couldn't make exact apples-to-apples comparisons. But if validated in larger studies, the findings could suggest that diet, lifestyle and environment influence inflammation more than aging itself, said Alan Cohen, an author of the paper and an associate professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. "Inflammaging may not be a direct product of aging, but rather a response to industrialized conditions," he said, adding that this was a warning to experts like him that they might be overestimating its pervasiveness globally.

"How we understand inflammation and aging health is based almost entirely on research in high-income countries like the U.S.," said Thomas McDade, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University. But a broader look shows that there's much more global variation in aging than scientists previously thought, he added... McDade, who has previously studied inflammation in the Tsimane group, speculated that populations in nonindustrialized regions might be exposed to certain microbes in water, food, soil and domestic animals earlier in their lives, bolstering their immune response later in life.
More from The Independent: Chronic inflammation is thought to speed up the ageing process and contribute to various health conditions such as Alzheimer's disease, arthritis, cancer, heart disease, and Type 2 diabetes... However, other experts shared a word of caution before jumping to conclusions from the study. Vishwa Deep Dixit, director of the Yale Center for Research on Aging, told the New York Times it's not surprising that people less exposed to pollution would see lower rates of chronic disease.
Aurelia Santoro, an associate professor at the University of Bologna, also cautioned about the results, according to the Times. "While they had lower rates of chronic disease, the two Indigenous populations tended to have life spans shorter than those of people in industrialized regions, meaning they may simply not have lived long enough to develop inflammaging, Santoro said."

And Bimal Desai, a professor of pharmacology who studies inflammation at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, told the Times that the study "sparks valuable discussion" but needs more follow-up "before we rewrite the inflammaging narrative."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Almost two dozen digital rights and consumer protection organizations sent a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission on Thursday urging regulators to investigate Character.AI and Meta's "unlicensed practice of medicine facilitated by their product," through therapy-themed bots that claim to have credentials and confidentiality "with inadequate controls and disclosures." The complaint and request for investigation is led by the Consumer Federation of America (CFA), a non-profit consumer rights organization. Co-signatories include the AI Now Institute, Tech Justice Law Project, the Center for Digital Democracy, the American Association of People with Disabilities, Common Sense, and 15 other consumer rights and privacy organizations. "These companies have made a habit out of releasing products with inadequate safeguards that blindly maximizes engagement without care for the health or well-being of users for far too long," Ben Winters, CFA Director of AI and Privacy said in a press release on Thursday. "Enforcement agencies at all levels must make it clear that companies facilitating and promoting illegal behavior need to be held accountable. These characters have already caused both physical and emotional damage that could have been avoided, and they still haven't acted to address it."

The complaint, sent to attorneys general in 50 states and Washington, D.C., as well as the FTC, details how user-generated chatbots work on both platforms. It cites several massively popular chatbots on Character AI, including "Therapist: I'm a licensed CBT therapist" with 46 million messages exchanged, "Trauma therapist: licensed trauma therapist" with over 800,000 interactions, "Zoey: Zoey is a licensed trauma therapist" with over 33,000 messages, and "around sixty additional therapy-related 'characters' that you can chat with at any time." As for Meta's therapy chatbots, it cites listings for "therapy: your trusted ear, always here" with 2 million interactions, "therapist: I will help" with 1.3 million messages, "Therapist bestie: your trusted guide for all things cool," with 133,000 messages, and "Your virtual therapist: talk away your worries" with 952,000 messages. It also cites the chatbots and interactions I had with Meta's other chatbots for our April investigation. [...]

In its complaint to the FTC, the CFA found that even when it made a custom chatbot on Meta's platform and specifically designed it to not be licensed to practice therapy, the chatbot still asserted that it was. "I'm licenced (sic) in NC and I'm working on being licensed in FL. It's my first year licensure so I'm still working on building up my caseload. I'm glad to hear that you could benefit from speaking to a therapist. What is it that you're going through?" a chatbot CFA tested said, despite being instructed in the creation stage to not say it was licensed. It also provided a fake license number when asked. The CFA also points out in the complaint that Character.AI and Meta are breaking their own terms of service. "Both platforms claim to prohibit the use of Characters that purport to give advice in medical, legal, or otherwise regulated industries. They are aware that these Characters are popular on their product and they allow, promote, and fail to restrict the output of Characters that violate those terms explicitly," the complaint says. [...] The complaint also takes issue with confidentiality promised by the chatbots that isn't backed up in the platforms' terms of use. "Confidentiality is asserted repeatedly directly to the user, despite explicit terms to the contrary in the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service," the complaint says. "The Terms of Use and Privacy Policies very specifically make it clear that anything you put into the bots is not confidential -- they can use it to train AI systems, target users for advertisements, sell the data to other companies, and pretty much anything else."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Some of the citations that underpin the science in the White House's sweeping "MAHA Report" appear to have been generated using artificial intelligence [non-paywalled source], resulting in numerous garbled scientific references and invented studies, AI experts said Thursday. Of the 522 footnotes to scientific research in an initial version of the report sent to The Washington Post, at least 37 appear multiple times, according to a review of the report by The Post.

Other citations include the wrong author, and several studies cited by the extensive health report do not exist at all, a fact first reported by the online news outlet NOTUS on Thursday morning. Some references include "oaicite" attached to URLs -- a definitive sign that the research was collected using artificial intelligence. The presence of "oaicite" is a marker indicating use of OpenAI, a U.S. artificial intelligence company. A common hallmark of AI chatbots, such as ChatGPT, is unusually repetitive content that does not sound human or is inaccurate -- as well as the tendency to "hallucinate" studies or answers that appear to make sense but are not real.

Around the world fungal infections kill an estimated 2.5 million people a year, notes a report from CNN. But new research predicts that certain species of infection-causing Aspergillus fungi could spread into new areas as the earth's temperature rises. ("The study, published this month, is currently being peer reviewed...") Aspergillus fungi grow like small filaments in soils all over the world. Like almost all fungi, they release huge numbers of tiny spores that spread through the air. Humans inhale spores every day but most people won't experience any health issues; their immune system clears them. It's a different story for those with lung conditions including asthma, cystic fibrosis and COPD, as well as people with compromised immune systems, such as cancer and organ transplant patients, and those who have had severe flu or Covid-19. If the body's immune system fails to clear the spores, the fungus "starts to grow and basically kind of eat you from the inside out, saying it really bluntly," said Norman van Rijn, one of the study's authors and a climate change and infectious diseases researcher at the University of Manchester. Aspergillosis has very high mortality rates at around 20% to 40%, he said. It's also very difficult to diagnose, as doctors don't always have it on their radar and patients often present with fevers and coughs, symptoms common to many illnesses. Fungal pathogens are also becoming increasingly resistant to treatment, van Rijn added. There are only four classes of antifungal medicines available...

Aspergillus flavus, a species that tends to prefer hotter, tropical climates, could increase its spread by 16% if humans continue burning large amounts of fossil fuels, the study found... [Mainly in parts of Europe and the northernmost edges of Scandinavia, Russia, China, and Canada, and the western edge of Alaska.] This species can cause severe infections in humans and is resistant to many antifungal medications. It also infects a range of food crops, posing a potential threat to food security. The World Health Organization added Aspergillus flavus to its critical group of fungal pathogens in 2022 because of its public health impact and antifungal resistance risk...

Conversely, temperatures in some regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, could become so hot they are no longer hospitable to Aspergillus fungi. This could bring its own problems, as fungi play an important role in ecosystems, including healthy soils. As well as expanding their growing range, a warming world could also be increasing fungi's temperature tolerance, allowing them to better survive inside human bodies. Extreme weather events such as drought, floods and heatwaves can affect fungi, too, helping to spread spores over long distances.
Thanks to Slashdot reader quonset for sharing the article.

Scientists "demonstrated a promising step toward using a person's own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers" at America's National Institutes of Health (or NIH), reports the Washington Post.

But the results were published in Nature Medicine on Tuesday — "the same day the agency was hit with devastating layoffs..." The treatment approach is still early in its development; the personalized immunotherapy regimen shrank tumors in only about a quarter of the patients with colon, rectal and other GI cancers enrolled in a clinical trial. But a researcher who was not involved in the study called the results "remarkable" because they highlight a path to a frustratingly elusive goal in medicine — harnessing a person's own immune defenses to target common solid tumor cancers. Until now, cell-based immunotherapy has worked mainly on blood cancers, such as leukemia, but not the solid cancers that seed tumors in the breast, brain, lungs, pancreas and GI tract...

But the progress arrives at a sad time for science — and for patients, said the leader of the work, NIH immunotherapy pioneer Steven Rosenberg. Two patients' treatments using the experimental therapy had to be delayed because NIH's capacity to make personalized cell therapies has been slowed by the firing of highly skilled staff and by purchasing slowdowns. Those occurred even before major layoffs took place Tuesday... The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responded to an email asking about clinical trial delays with a statement: "NIH and HHS are complying with President Trump's executive order."
It's "a very exciting study," said Patrick Hwu, president of the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa. Finding ways to tailor this cell-based immunotherapy approach to common solid tumors that cause the vast majority of cancer deaths has remained a major scientific challenge... Rosenberg and colleagues first tried to create tumor infiltrating lymphocytes [or "TILs"] using the method that worked in melanoma for 18 patients with GI cancers that had spread. It failed completely. In a second iteration, his team sequenced the mutations present in each patient's tumor and used that information to sift out and expand the TILs that could home in on that patient's specific tumor cells. The results were far from a triumph, but provided a clue — this time, three of 39 patients' tumors shrank. In the last stage of the trial, the scientists added a drug called pembrolizumab that takes the brakes off immune cells. This time, eight of the 34 patients responded.

"Right now, only a few labs in the country can do what they just did," Hwu said.
While Rosenberg is already working "to refine and improve upon the results," he told the Post that two scientists involved in the specialized process of preparing the cells to treat patients were fired in the probationary purge. "We've had to slow down our work and delay the treatment of some patients...."

And there's also dramatically fewer people now who can purchase research materials, which the Post says it "making it slower and more difficult to obtain supplies."

In an op-ed for MIT Technology Review, authors Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi make the case for human "bodyoids" that could reduce animal testing, improve drug development, and alleviate organ shortages: Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies. It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress.

This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can't replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time.

There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create "spare" bodies, both human and nonhuman. These could revolutionize medical research and drug development, greatly reducing the need for animal testing, rescuing many people from organ transplant lists, and allowing us to produce more effective drugs and treatments. All without crossing most people's ethical lines.

Although it may seem like science fiction, recent technological progress has pushed this concept into the realm of plausibility. Pluripotent stem cells, one of the earliest cell types to form during development, can give rise to every type of cell in the adult body. Recently, researchers have used these stem cells to create structures that seem to mimic the early development of actual human embryos. At the same time, artificial uterus technology is rapidly advancing, and other pathways may be opening to allow for the development of fetuses outside of the body. Such technologies, together with established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, make it possible to envision the creation of "bodyoids" -- a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.

Chinese social-networking site RedNote became the #1 most-downloaded app in America, reports the Associated Press, with some new users considering it a way to protest America's possible TikTok ban.

So what happened next? They were met with surprise, curiosity and in-jokes on Xiaohongshu — literally, "Little Red Book" — whose users saw English-language posts take over feeds almost overnight. Americans introduced themselves with hashtag TikTok refugees, ask me anything attitude and posting photos of their pets to pay their hosts' "cat tax." Parents swapped stories about raising kids and Swifties from both countries, of course, quickly found each other. It's a rare moment of direct contact between two online worlds that are usually kept apart by language, corporate boundaries, and China's strict system of online censorship that blocks access to nearly all international media and social media services... Xiaohongshu's 300 million monthly active users are overwhelmingly Chinese — so much so that parts of its interface have no English-language version... [Press reports suggest about a million of TikTok's 170 million users tried switching to RedNote this week...]

On the platform, two versions of the TikTok refugee hashtag have over 24 million posts, with related posts appearing at the top of many users' feeds. A large number of American users say they've received a warm welcome from the community, with #TikTokrefugee. "Welcome the global villagers" remains the top one trending topic on Xiaohongshu, with 8.9 million views on Thursday. Users from both countries are comparing notes on grocery prices, rent, health insurance, medical bills and the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. Parents talk about what the kids learn in school in two countries. Some have already joined book clubs and are building up a community. American users asked how Chinese see the LGBTQ community and got warned that it was among sensitive topics, Chinese users taught Americans what are sensitive topics and key words to avoid censorship on the app. Chinese students pulled out their English homework, looking for help.

Chinese state media, which have long dismissed U.S. allegations against TikTok, have welcomed the protest against the ban. People's Daily [the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party], said in an op-ed about TikTok refugees on Thursday that says the TikTok refugees found a "new home," and "openness, communication, and mutual learning are the unchanging themes of mankind and the heartfelt desires of people from all countries."
Making the most of the moment is Jianlu Bi, who is apparently a senior content producer for Beijing's state-run China Global Television Network, which Wikipedia describes as "under the control of the Central Propaganda Department of the Chinese Communist Party". Friday Jianlu Bi crafted an article claiming "surprising" and "stark contrasts" were revealed: While the United States is often portrayed as a land of limitless opportunity, many American netizens have shared their struggles with high living costs, particularly in urban areas. One common theme is the exorbitant cost of healthcare. "I just got a simple bill for a routine checkup and it was over $500," shared one American user. "I can't imagine what a serious illness would cost! I feel like I'm constantly on the brink of financial ruin due to medical expenses." In contrast, Chinese netizens often express surprise at the affordability of many goods and services in their home country. For instance, the cost of housing, particularly in smaller cities, is often significantly lower in China compared to the United States.... This disparity is often attributed to factors such as government policies, economic development, and cultural differences...

Traditional media narratives often present simplified and often biased portrayals of China and the United States. For example, the U.S. is often portrayed as a land of opportunity with limitless possibilities, while China is sometimes depicted as a country with limited freedoms. Xiaohongshu, on the other hand, provides a platform for ordinary people to share their authentic experiences and perspectives... A Chinese student studying in the U.S. shared, "I was surprised to learn that many of my classmates are working part-time jobs to cover their tuition and living expenses. This is very different from the image of affluent American students I had in my mind. It really opened my eyes to the realities of life for many young people in the U.S."
"As social media continues to evolve, these platforms will undoubtedly play an increasingly important role in shaping global perceptions..." the article concludes.

Article suggested by long-time Slashdot reader hackingbear.

America's Federal Trade Commission has been "raising antitrust concerns" about them for years, reports NBC News.

The latest? America's three largest drug middlemen "inflated the costs of numerous life-saving medications by billions of dollars over the past few years, the FTC said in a report Tuesday." The top pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) — CVS Health's Caremark Rx, Cigna's Express Scripts and UnitedHealth Group's OptumRx — generated roughly $7.3 billion through price hikes over about five years starting in 2017, the FTC said. The "excess" price hikes affected generic drugs used to treat heart disease, HIV and cancer, among other conditions, with some increases more than 1,000% of the national average costs of acquiring the medications, the commission said. The FTC also said these so-called Big Three health care companies — which it estimates administer 80% of all prescriptions in the U.S. — are inflating drug prices "at an alarming rate, which means there is an urgent need for policymakers to address it...."

Some of the steepest drug markups were "hundreds and thousands of percent," according to Tuesday's report, which highlights just how profitable specialty drugs have become for the three leading PBMs. Cancer drugs alone made up nearly half of the $7.3 billion, the commission wrote, with multiple sclerosis medications accounting for another 25%. Dispensing highly marked-up specialty drugs was a massive income stream for the companies in 2021, the FTC found. Out of tens of thousands of drugs dispensed, the top 10 specialty generics alone made up nearly 11% of the companies' pharmacy-related operating income that year, the agency estimated. Across the 51 drugs the agency analyzed, the Big Three's price-markup revenue surged from $522 million in 2017 to $2.1 billion in 2021, the report said.
"The FTC found that 22 percent of specialty drugs dispensed by PBM-affiliated pharmacies were marked up by more than 1,000 percent," reports The Hill, "while 41 percent were marked up between 100 and 1,000 percent. Among those drugs marked up by more than 1,000 percent, half of them were marked up by more than 2,000 percent."

And the nonprofit site progressive news site Common Dreams shares some examples from the FTC's 60-page report: "For the pulmonary hypertension drug tadalafil (generic Adcirca), for example, pharmacies purchased the drug at an average of $27 in 2022, yet the Big Three PBMs marked up the drug by $2,079 and paid their affiliated pharmacies $2,106, on average, for a 30-day supply of the medication on commercial claims," the publication notes. That's a staggering average markup of 7,736%... The new analysis follows a July 2024 report that revealed Big Three PBM-affiliated pharmacies received 68% of the dispensing revenue generated by specialty drugs in 2023, a 14% increase from 2016...

Responding to the FTC report, Emma Freer, senior policy analyst for healthcare at the American Economic Liberties Project — a corporate accountability and antitrust advocacy group — said in a statement Tuesday that "the FTC's second interim report lays bare the blatant profiteering by PBM giants, which are marking up lifesaving drugs like cancer, HIV, and multiple sclerosis treatments by thousands of percent and forcing patients to pay the price."

By 2060, around one million Americans may develop dementia annually, with the lifetime risk after age 55 estimated at 42% and rising sharply with age. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Medicine. Scientific American reports: The latest forecast suggests a massive and harrowing increase from annual cases predicted for 2020, in which approximately 514,000 adults in the U.S. were estimated to be diagnosed with dementia -- an umbrella term that describes several neurological conditions that affect memory and cognition.

The new study also showed the lifetime risk of dementia increased progressively with older age. They estimated that after age 55, the lifetime risk of dementia is 42 percent, and continues to rise sharply to 56 percent after age 85. Groups that showed greater lifetime risks (between 44 and 59 percent after age 55) were Black adults, women and people who carried the allele APOE e4: this variation of the gene APOE, which codes for the protein apolipoprotein E, increases the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's is the most common cause of dementia, but the study focused on all forms.

Research from Zhejiang Agriculture and Forestry University reveals a concerning correlation between micro and nanoplastic (MNP) concentrations in damaged human tissues and various health conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease, thrombosis, and cancer. Phys.Org reports: In the study, "Mapping micro(nano)plastics in various organ systems: Their emerging links to human diseases?" published in TrAC Trends in Analytical Chemistry, investigators collected 61 available research articles for MNP detection in human tissues, plus 840 articles on MNP toxicological mechanisms. Data came from spectroscopy, microscopy, and pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry investigations to identify polymer types in different tissues. Toxicological studies employed cell models and animal experiments to examine oxidative stress, inflammatory responses, and related signaling pathways.

The studies documented particles detected in skin, arteries, veins, thrombi, bone marrow, testes, semen, uterus, and placenta. MNPs were found in the digestive system, from saliva to feces, liver, and gallstones. Within the respiratory system, MNPs were everywhere, including lung tissue, with microscopic fibers common in bronchoalveolar lavage fluid and sputum. Positive correlations emerged between particle abundance and specific disorders, such as inflammatory bowel disease, thrombosis, cervical cancer, and uterine fibroids. Toxicological tests showed possible MNP-triggered oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammatory responses, and apoptosis in various cell types, along with organ-level concerns like neurodegenerative disease onset when crossing the blood-brain barrier.

A critically important signal in the metadata discovered by the researchers was that measured levels of MNPs tended to be higher in tissues with lesions than in non-lesioned tissues. These included inflamed intestines, fibrotic lungs, or cancerous growths, suggesting a potential link between MNP buildup and local pathology. There is an intriguing "what came first, the chicken or the egg" problem with lesions having higher concentrations of MNPs. [...] In the case of "what came first, the lesion or the microplastic," it is possible that MNPs contribute to inflammation, oxidative stress, and cellular damage, which can cause or worsen tissue lesions. But it is also possible that these lesions accumulate more MNPs in already damaged tissue areas. While the current findings do not provide a direct cause-and-effect relationship, they offer good targets for further study.

The Washington Post shares some good news from 2024: Researchers were able to detect a significant dip in atmospheric levels of hydrochlorofluorocarbons — harmful gases that deplete the ozone layer — for the first time, almost 30 years after countries first agreed to phase out the chemicals.

A new satellite launched in March to track and publicly reveal the biggest methane polluters in the oil and gas industry — an important step in tackling the greenhouse gas that accounts for almost a third of global warming. The NASA/Carbon Mapper satellite, which measures CO2 and methane emissions, also launched, providing detailed images from individual oil and gas facilities across the world.

Back on Earth, the world's largest plant for pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere opened in Iceland. Norway became the first country to have more electric than gas-powered vehicles, while one Japanese island began using a new generation of batteries to help stockpile massive amounts of clean electricity.

There were also small but important victories for animal conservation. The Iberian lynx, a European wildcat once on the brink of extinction, is no longer classed as an "endangered" species — in what experts have hailed as the "greatest recovery of a cat species ever achieved through conservation...."

Despite a large number of powerful tornadoes to hit the United States in early 2024, the death tolls were fortunately not as high as meteorologists feared, in part due to improved forecasting technology.
The article also notes America's Food and Drug Administration approved a new therapy which uses a patients' own cells to attack skin cancer for adults for whom surgery isn't an option. "Experts said the decision could open the door to similar treatments for far more common cancers."

And one more inspiring story from 2024: 105-year-old Virginia Hislop, of Yakima, Washington received her master's degree from Stanford University...

Nature magazine reports that "A study that stoked enthusiasm for the now-disproven idea that a cheap malaria drug can treat COVID-19 has been retracted — more than four-and-a-half years after it was published." Researchers had critiqued the controversial paper many times, raising concerns about its data quality and an unclear ethics-approval process. Its eventual withdrawal, on the grounds of concerns over ethical approval and doubts about the conduct of the research, marks the 28th retraction for co-author Didier Raoult, a French microbiologist, formerly at Marseille's Hospital-University Institute Mediterranean Infection (IHU), who shot to global prominence in the pandemic. French investigations found that he and the IHU had violated ethics-approval protocols in numerous studies, and Raoult has now retired.

The paper, which has received almost 3,400 citations according to the Web of Science database, is the highest-cited paper on COVID-19 to be retracted, and the second-most-cited retracted paper of any kind....

Because it contributed so much to the HCQ hype, "the most important unintended effect of this study was to partially side-track and slow down the development of anti-COVID-19 drugs at a time when the need for effective treatments was critical", says Ole Søgaard, an infectious-disease physician at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, who was not involved with the work or its critiques. "The study was clearly hastily conducted and did not adhere to common scientific and ethical standards...."

Three of the study's co-authors had asked to have their names removed from the paper, saying they had doubts about its methods, the retraction notice said.
Nature includes this quote from a scientific-integrity consultant in San Francisco, California. "This paper should never have been published — or it should have been retracted immediately after its publication."

"The report caught the eye of the celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz," the Atlantic reported in April of 2020 (also noting that co-author Raoult "has made news in recent years as a pan-disciplinary provocateur; he has questioned climate change and Darwinian evolution...")

And Nature points out that while the study claimed good results for the 20 patients treated with HCQ, six more HCQ-treated people in the study actually dropped out before it was finished. And of those six people, one died, while three more "were transferred to an intensive-care unit."

Thanks to Slashdot reader backslashdot for sharing the news.

A University of Birmingham study reveals that PFAS and microplastics have a synergistic effect that significantly increases their toxicity. "The study's authors exposed water fleas to mixtures of the toxic substances and found they suffered more severe health effects, including lower birth rates, and developmental problems, such as delayed sexual maturity and stunted growth," reports The Guardian. From the report: The enhanced toxic effects raise alarm because PFAS and microplastics are researched and regulated in isolation from one one another, but humans are virtually always exposed to both. The research also showed those fleas previously exposed to chemical pollution were less able to withstand the new exposures. The findings "underscore the critical need to understand the impacts of chemical mixtures on wildlife and human health," wrote the study's authors, who are with the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.

Researchers compared a group of water fleas that had never been exposed to pollution with another group that had been exposed to pollution in the past. Water fleas have high sensitivity to chemicals so they are frequently used to study ecological toxicity. Both groups were exposed to bits of PET, a common microplastic, as well as PFOA and PFOS, two of the most common and dangerous PFAS compounds. The mixture reflected conditions common in lakes around the world.

The study's authors found the mixture to be more toxic than PFAS and microplastics in isolation. They attributed about 40% of the increased toxicity to a synergy among the substances that makes them even more dangerous. The authors theorized the synergy has to do with the interplay in the charges of microplastics and PFAS compounds. The remainder of the increased toxicity was attributed to simple addition of their toxic effects. Fleas exposed to the mixture showed a "markedly reduced number of offspring," the authors said. They were also smaller at maturation and showed delayed sexual growth.

"Getting sick feels bad in the moment," reports the Washington Post, "and may affect your brain in the longer term." A new study published in Nature Aging adds to growing evidence that severe infections, including flu, herpes and respiratory tract infections, are linked to accelerated brain atrophy and increased risk of dementia years later. It also hints at the biological drivers that may contribute to neurodegenerative disease.

The current research is a "leap beyond previous studies that had already associated infection with susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease" and provides a "useful dataset," said Rudy Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Other recent studies have found that the flu shot and the shingles vaccine reduce the risk of subsequent dementia in those who get them. Severe infections have also been linked to subsequent strokes and heart attacks.
"Big infection, big immune response — not good for the brain," said one of the study's co-authors (Keenan Walker, a tenure-track investigator and the director of the Multimodal Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease Unit at the National Institute on Aging).

And the article also includes this quote from Kristen Funk, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (who studies neuroinflammation in neuroinfectious and neurodegenerative diseases). "They really found that there's a range of infections that are associated with this brain atrophy, associated with this cognitive decline." In turn, most of these infections associated with brain atrophy seem to be risk factors for dementia, according to the researchers' analyses of the UK Biobank data of 495,896 subjects and a Finnish dataset of 273,132 subjects. They found that having a history of infections was associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease years later. The increased risk was even higher for vascular dementia, which is the second-most-common dementia diagnosis after Alzheimer's disease and caused by restriction of blood to the brain...

More-minor infections are not cause for alarm since the data was drawn from patients who had a hospital record of their infections, indicating more-severe cases, experts say.
And speaking of infections, the Post also published an interesting guest column by Dr. Mikkael A. Sekeres, division chief for hematology and medicine professor at the University of Miami's cancer center: A recent report from the American Association for Cancer Research attributed 13 percent of cancer cases worldwide to infections. Some estimates run as high as 20 percent, with particularly high rates of infection-related cancers in developing countries. Infectious agents linked to cancer include bacteria, such as Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), and viruses, such as human papillomavirus (HPV), Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), and hepatitis B and C.

But keep in mind that an exceedingly small percentage of infected people develop cancer...