closer look
It's time to reframe our thinking on menopause, researchers say
Adobe
Here's the take-home message from today's issue of The Lancet devoted to menopause: Stop treating it like a disease. A series of articles and essays, including the journal's first photo essay (Ponch Hawkes's playful images of naked women at age 50) describe the need for a better understanding of early menopause, mental health, and menopause after cancer. The authors call for better education, more non-medical ways to address menopause, and more research into all available treatments, not just medicines that drug companies promote.
"There are many ways to make it through the menopausal transition with greater comfort … and each of them involves a different set of risks and benefits and effort and cost," said Andrea LaCroix, an author of the essay on empowerment and an epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego. But there's a scarcity of large and diverse studies comparing treatments head-to-head, she also said. STAT's Annalisa Merelli has more.
health tech
Working with Meta, Headspace heads into VR
If you know Headspace, it's probably for its mindfulness app. Now the digital business is partnering with Meta to launch a meditation app for Quest, which is Meta's virtual reality headset. The new VR app, called Headspace XR and developed with funding from Meta, guides users through meditation, but also through activities like a Tai Chi-inspired movement game to promote well-being. The idea is to engage younger users and, at the same time, help the companies understand how products like these might potentially improve mental health.
Virtual reality treatments, including ones for mental health cleared by the FDA, are becoming more widely available. But Headspace isn't moving into VR for therapy or psychiatry or coaching right away. "I think there's not enough research yet to support that," CEO Russell Glass said. "For us, we see this as a starting point to understand this medium better, really get members in, and learn how it's being used." STAT's Mario Aguilar has more.
cancer
Early in Covid, detection of high-risk GI cancers was delayed, but survival was stable
In our fifth year of the coronavirus pandemic, it's still too early to know the full effects of early 2020's gaps in medical care. Cancer screenings were missed and primary care visits were skipped, two opportunities to spot some early cases. Then-National Cancer Institute Director Ned Sharpless warned there could be 10,000 excess deaths from breast and colorectal cancer over the next 10 years if patients continued to miss screening. (He also wondered if less screening might also mean less overdiagnosis.)
A new study in JAMA Network Open tells us what we know so far about four high-risk GI cancers: esophageal, gastric, primary liver, and pancreatic. While there were 3,000 fewer patients diagnosed from March through May 2020 compared to previous years, those numbers rebounded by July. More people were diagnosed with later-stage cancers, likely because their symptoms rather than a screening test drove them to seek care, but there was no difference in one-year survival curves for patients diagnosed in 2020. The authors call it a "a tribute to the efforts of cancer clinicians" at a time when hospitals and health care were overwhelmed by pandemic upheaval.
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