Closer Look
Opinion: Trend of closing rural labor and delivery services jeopardizes children's lives
More times than she cares to count, neonatologist Rachel Fleishman has had to tell parents that their infant is dying. It is the hardest part of her job, the outcome she and her colleagues are doing their utmost to avoid. "These babies, often born at the limits of viability, slipped beyond the grasp of modern neonatal intensive care interventions," she writes. But she fears it will become more frequent as access to perinatal health care becomes more restricted in post-Roe America.
One hospital in Idaho recently said it will shutter its labor and delivery services due to doctors' unwillingness to practice medicine in the face of the state's punitive laws surrounding reproductive health care — and CNN recently reported that 13 hospitals have announced similar closures, many of them in states where Medicaid programs are more bare bones. Read more about this concerning trend in Fleishman's First Opinion for STAT.
microbiome
Gut microbiota may play a role in anorexia, study finds
The biology of anorexia is mysterious. Underneath the emotional torment are potential genetic risk factors, shifts in the endocrine system, and perturbations of signals in the brain. But some small studies have also pointed to the role that gut microbiota might play in the disorder — and new research published in Nature Microbiology explores that connection.
By comparing stool samples from 77 women with anorexia to 70 age-matched counterparts without the condition, the team saw different profiles in the microbial communities present. When they seeded some of those microbes into mice whose digestive tracts were germ-free and put the rodents on a calorie-restricted diet, the researchers noted that the ones that got fecal transplants from people with anorexia lost more weight initially and gained it more slowly than the ones who'd gotten transplants from healthy volunteers. However, the usual caveats about small studies and extrapolating from mice to humans apply.
research
New government research projects tackle cancer in firefighters and 'Gulf War Illness'
In the 1990s, veterans returned from the Gulf War with a mysterious set of symptoms that included fatigue, headache, cognitive issues, joint and muscle pain, poor sleep, and gastrointestinal and respiratory problems. This wasn't rare: It affected about a third of the 700,000 people who'd served. The similarity to fibromyalgia helped garner funding from the Department of Defense for research into that disorder — but causes and possible treatments of "Gulf War Illness," as it's known, remain elusive, decades later.
Yesterday, the VA and NIH opened general enrollment for a study that hopes to unravel some of those mysteries. The CDC also announced a new national registry for firefighters, to better understand how exposure to smoke and chemicals might affect the risk of work-related cancer.
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