Closer Look
Building trust among LA's unhoused, one GPS tracker at a time
Crystal Milner/STAT
Just the idea of wearing a location tracker makes many people feel uneasy, sparking fears of a further loss of privacy in our connected world. To persuade people who are homeless to accept a GPS tracker, worn on a lanyard around the neck, means earning their trust. In Los Angeles, a health care team is building relationships with unhoused people, using trackers that allow them to check up on patients periodically for routine visits or in case of medical emergency.
"It's reassuring that they use the trackers," a woman who introduced herself as Rockelle told STAT's Mohana Ravindranath about the health care team, which helped her get needed medication and secure a place on a housing waitlist. "We don't have much trust with unfamiliar things, but I feel like if [they're] patient enough to go out on a limb for us, we'll see that it's genuine." Read more.
health
'Staggering': 1 in 6 people face infertility
Around the world, one in six people are affected by infertility over their lifetimes, a statistic that Pascale Allotey, director of sexual and reproductive health and research at WHO, called "staggering" at a news conference yesterday. The first new estimates in 10 years were based on 133 studies through 2021. More research is needed to determine how infertility rates may have changed over time, and for whom, but disparities in access to treatment, including IVF, are undisputed.
Given the prevalence of infertility and the high costs of procedures like IVF, the report calls for universal health coverage of infertility treatments. Many European countries, as well as Morocco (where fertility treatment is available in the public sector), and Indonesia (where it's part of primary care) are already leading the way, WHO said. STAT's Theresa Gaffney has more.
health
Study ties early menopause and later timing of hormone therapy to Alzheimer's risk
More women than men develop Alzheimer's disease in old age, but it may not be just because they live longer: Women also have more tau tangles in their brains, proteins consistent with an Alzheimer's diagnosis. A new study in JAMA Neurology suggests there's a link between early menopause (before age 45), the timing of hormone therapy, and those tau deposits. Women have been wary of hormone therapy to ease troubling menopause symptoms since the landmark Women's Health Initiative study was halted in 2002 after finding higher risks, including cancer and dementia, in women over 65, but more recent guidelines say the therapy is safe closer to menopause onset.
Researchers in the new trial reiterate the role of timing. After analyzing PET scans for 292 cognitively unimpaired adults (193 female, 99 male), they found the highest levels of tau in hormone therapy users with a long delay between menopause onset and starting hormone therapy. Caveats: the study was small and too short to say who eventually developed dementia.
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