Closer Look
Mandy Cohen built bridges in North Carolina. Will that be enough to succeed at CDC?
NC Department of Public Safety
Her bio — raised on Long Island, educated at Yale and Harvard — didn't make success for Mandy Cohen (above) as North Carolina's health leader a sure thing in politically divided state. But even her ideological opponents acknowledge the new CDC director is a good listener and a bridge builder capable of shoring up trust — an important challenge at the pandemic-battered CDC. Cohen's track record in North Carolina includes selling conservative lawmakers on a Medicaid expansion and surviving the pandemic without political backlash.
Not everyone's a fan, including 28 Republicans who opposed her nomination, citing her support for Obamacare, a ban on semi-automatic rifles, and a depiction of climate change as a public health crisis. "She will never gain the support of everybody. But I think she stands a great likelihood of gaining the type of support she needs to make sure that CDC is provided the tools that she needs," former Sen. Richard Burr told STAT contributor Joanne Kenen. Read more.
chronic disease
MS drug delivery time dropped from hours to minutes in Roche clinical trial
Living with multiple sclerosis might get just a bit easier. Patients with the chronic, debilitating neurological disease often have to endure hours-long infusions of their treatments, but a new clinical trial from the maker of Ocrevus has shown a 10-minute injection beneath the skin works just as well as twice-yearly IV delivery for people with certain types of the disease. A caveat: The results from Roche were issued in a press release, not a peer-reviewed journal. More information will come when it presents the findings at a future medical conference and in regulatory filings.
Ocrevus, already a blockbuster therapy, works by latching onto CD20, a molecule made by antibody-producing B cells, in an attempt to tamp down the contribution of these immune cells to the destruction of myelin, a fat that swaddles connections between nerve cells. The loss of this protective sheath can lead to symptoms that range from tingling and fatigue to difficulty moving and thinking. STAT's Jonathan Wosen has more.
aging
'Superagers' with sharp memory are also more mobile and in better mental health than peers
Do you know anyone in their 80s whose memory is as sharp, their movements as agile, and their minds as sound as people 30 years their junior? (I aspire to be one one day.) Here's a study from The Lancet Health Longevity connecting mobility and mental health to the remarkable memory skills defining "superagers." The researchers found this association in older people after testing them on cognitive tasks, collecting demographic data and blood samples, and imaging their brains.
After identifying 64 superagers around age 80 for their memory skills, the scientists compared them to 55 more typical older adults who did well on cognitive tasks but didn't display superb memory. Superagers had more gray matter in brain areas linked to memory and movement while showing fewer biomarkers of neurodegenerative disease. They also moved more quickly and had lower rates of anxiety and depression. Which came first — activity or brain health — isn't clear, so more research is needed to explain the overlap.
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