Good morning! Allison DeAngelis here, filling in for Liz. Let me take you through the latest news, including proposals for new childhood mental health screening and one health insurer's new financial strategy.

Influential group recommends children ages 8 and up be screened for anxiety

For the first time, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force is recommending that children and adolescents between 8 and 18 should be screened for anxiety by primary care providers, STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling reports.

The group didn’t go so far as to recommend screening for all children, at any age. Members said there is still insufficient evidence to do so. But the task force emphasized that any child with symptoms of anxiety, regardless of age, should be connected to care.

The recommendations follow findings from the 2018-19 National Survey of Children’s Health, which found that 7.8% of children and adolescents ages 3-17 had a current anxiety disorder — numbers that many researchers believe have worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Biotech startup hit by ripple effects of Huntington’s disease drug failures

People with Huntington’s disease — a neurological condition that causes both cognitive and physical problems — were dealt a blow last year when two clinical trials were shut down in the span of a week.

The fallout didn’t end there. I wrote today about how the clinical trial failures last year spooked investors. That, combined with some safety issues that popped up during preclinical studies in animals, led to the demise of Triplet Therapeutics, which has quietly ceased operations.

Triplet was cofounded by Atlas Venture and launched in 2019 with a $59 million Series A round. But it wasn’t able to raise the money needed to move forward.

Read more.

For Swedish professor and his tiny biotech, Alzheimer’s drug means vindication

Most of the scientists and executives at Biogen and Eisai aren’t familiar with the man behind their red-hot Alzheimer’s disease drug, lecanemab. Inventors’ names rarely come up in due diligence, according to one of the executives who helped negotiate the Biogen-Eisai partnership in 2014.

STAT’s Jason Mast tracked down the man behind the drug, Lars Lannfelt, and spoke to him about what lecanemab’s success means for him and the small Swedish biotech company he founded, BioArctic. The company could reap several hundred million dollars per year from lecanemab sales, if the drug reaches Wall Street’s estimates of $8 billion in sales annually.

Read more.

Closer look: When is a doctor not a doctor? Often, when patients address women physicians

(Adobe)

Women physicians were more than twice as likely as their male colleagues to have patients omit their “doctor” titles when addressing them, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Jayne Williamson-Lee writes.

The study authors used a natural language processing algorithm to comb through nearly 91,000 messages sent from patients in the Mayo Clinic electronic medical record, picking out the greeting and closing salutations of each message.

The findings resonate with many women doctors. The omission of these doctors’ titles (or “untitling”) is subtle, but these remarks accumulate to create “death by a thousand cuts,” said Lekshmi Santhosh, an associate professor of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

Read more.

Bright exits ACA health insurance marketplaces to stay afloat

The financially troubled health insurance company Bright Health Group is drastically cutting back its health insurance offerings, including fully exiting the individual Affordable Care Act marketplaces. It is also attempting to raise $175 million to keep the company afloat, Bob Herman writes.

Bright has been running dangerously low on cash this year. Executives had to tell investors in August the company would go under if it didn’t raise additional outside money — after recently blowing through $550 million from Cigna and a $200 million from its major venture capital partner, New Enterprise Associates.

Leaving the ACA marketplaces is Bright’s biggest and most significant decision, and will leave nearly 1 million people who have Bright’s ACA policies in the lurch.

CBO’s dismissal of health care price transparency is based on faulty premises

Can price transparency meaningfully reduce the cost of health care and coverage? The last several presidential administrations, led by Democrats and Republicans, and nearly 90% of Americans believe it can.

The Congressional Budget Office, however, doesn’t seem to think highly of transparency. Its new report on strategies to reverse runaway commercial health insurance costs estimates that greater price transparency will lead to only “very small price reductions” of about 0.1% to 1% over 10 years.

This conclusion is news to those who believe that providing consumers with actual, upfront prices will arm them with information they need to lower their costs through choice and competition, life sciences founder and chair of PatientRightsAdvocate.org, Cynthia Fisher, writes in a First Opinion column.

Read more.

On this week's episode of the "First Opinion Podcast," First Opinion editor Patrick Skerrett talks with law professor Lawrence O. Gostin about several cases before the Supreme Court that could worsen the myriad health inequalities. Listen here.

What we're reading

For decades, fear and failure in the hunt for an RSV vaccine. Now, success. (WaPo)
Maternity care ‘deserts’ on the rise across the U.S., report finds. (STAT)
SoftBank-backed Elemy aimed to transform autism care. But current and former employees say the $1.15 billion startup overpromised on its capacity to treat kids. (Insider)
As small-town telepharmacies struggle to stay open, national chains eye an opportunity. (STAT)
With fall migration, bird flu flies back into town. (NYT)