Closer Look
The impossibility of being a mom in U.S. medicine
Mike Reddy for STAT
In a new column for STAT, psychiatrist and mother Jennifer Adaeze Okwerekwu writes poignantly about the particular and difficult pressures that face mothers in medicine, who feel the tug of war for care and attention not only between their babies and themselves, but also from often overwhelming patient loads. She writes that we need to pay more attention and screen for postpartum depression that can lead to tragic situations among medical professionals, as it did this year in Boston and New York.
The difficulties are compounded in medicine, she says, because practitioners tend not to prioritize self-care or their own mental health and often refuse to ask for help from superiors or colleagues. "Illness or any perceived inability to keep up with the long hours and heavy workloads feels like weakness," she writes, adding that maternal care practices from her own Igbo-Nigerian culture helped protect her from the harshness of the American maternal experience. Read more.
Long Covid
A negative Covid test doesn't rule out long Covid, study finds
A new study of a small group of long Covid patients suggests that millions of people who never tested positive for Covid may nonetheless have the often debilitating constellation of symptoms that follow an initial infection. Researchers tested 29 long Covid patients who never tested positive and found 41% to have T cell or antibody responses to the virus — meaning they had indeed been infected.
"We estimated that there were approximately 10 million people in the first year of the pandemic in the U.S. who are in this predicament: who got Covid, got long Covid, but tested negative for Covid," said Northwestern Medicine's Igor Koralnik, who led the study. Many who never tested positive — something which may be common for people infected at the start of the pandemic when testing was less accessible — have also had trouble accessing care at long Covid clinics, he said. Read more from my colleague Annalisa Merelli.
genetics
What finally sequencing the Y chromosome could mean for medical research
Once dismissed as a "genetic wasteland" — or as my colleague Megan Molteni lyrically writes, "a scramble of highly repetitive DNA letters that sometimes reverse on themselves, forming unreadable palindromes" — the Y chromosome is finally getting its day in the sun. A group of 100 scientists announced yesterday that they had successfully sequenced the nettlesome Y chromosome, an advance that could help researchers better understand fertility problems.
The work, published in Nature, could also help researchers probing the genetic risks of cancer and heart disease that may be linked to blood cells jettisoning their Y chromosomes over time — a process that so far has been little understood. Over time, the breakthrough could help bring X and Y chromosomes, often excluded from genomics studies because they are so difficult to analyze, back into the research fold. Read more.
AP Photo/Morry Gash
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