Closer Look
'I want to help folks': This medical student is living with two autoimmune diseases
Photo illustration: Casey Shenery for STAT
Third-year med school student Brianna Celix has the challenge of managing two autoimmune conditions: Hashimoto's thyroiditis and celiac disease. She chatted with STAT's Isabella Cueto about how her chronic conditions led her to study medicine and how she works with the dietary restrictions required of her celiac disease.
How did your thyroid disease show up? And celiac?
The first pediatric endocrinologist I met with essentially told me, "You're an unhealthy, fat kid and you need to get it together." It probably took about a month and a half for us to figure out what was really going on.
How did these twin diagnoses affect your career choice?
That's my "why" for medicine. I usually disclose it right away: I've got this and I've got this, and I want to help folks with it and figure it out with them.
Read the full interview.
In the lab
Racial, ethnic differences in the gut microbiome emerge early in life, but not at birth
STAT's Annalisa Merelli brings this report: The gut microbiome differences associated with certain races and ethnicities are likely due to environmental and social exposures, according to a new PLOS Biology study. The study found that such variations are not present at birth and for the first weeks of life, even as this is when mother-to-infant direct microbial transmission (through breastfeeding, for example) is strongest. Instead, the changes begin emerging at three months, suggesting external factors influence it.
The childhood gut microbiome can affect the immune system and metabolic development later in life, so the factors that shape the microbiome early on could contribute to future ethnic and racial health disparities. Psychosocial stressors, socioeconomic status, environmental pollutants are all tied to health disparities, but further studies are necessary to identify which of these, if any, has an impact on gut microbiome development.
drug pricing
Weight loss drugs cost far more in the U.S.
Wildly popular
weight loss drugs are hard to find. They're also expensive. A
new KFF analysis compares list prices for the drugs in the U.S. to those in similar countries. Prices are much higher here for the drugs, also prescribed for diabetes, even though obesity is more prevalent in the U.S. (33.6%) than in other high-income nations (17.1%). A previous
KFF poll found that about half of U.S. adults were interested in taking the drugs until they learned insurance might not pay and the weight might come back. Two price checks:
- Ozempic, approved in the U.S. for diabetes, is more than five times as expensive in the U.S. ($936) as in the next costliest nation, Japan ($169).
- Wegovy, approved in the U.S. for weight loss, is four times as expensive in the U.S. ($1,349) as in Germany ($328).
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