closer look
How Kamala Harris' late mom shaped her health care views
Kamala Harris via Facebook
This past Mother's Day, Kamala Harris posted a picture of herself and her sister in brightly colored coats, standing next to their mother on a sidewalk. "My mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, had two goals in life: to cure breast cancer and to raise my sister and me," she wrote.
Gopalan was best known for her research on the relationship between progesterone receptors and breast cancer. She worked at institutions including McGill and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, served on the President's Special Commission on Breast Cancer under Clinton, and peer reviewed for the NIH before her death in 2009 from colon cancer.
It's uncertain what the future of Biden's Cancer Moonshot and the NIH might be under an administration change. With Harris as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, it's interesting to see what she has said about her mom, health care, and thinking like a scientist, even as a policymaker. Go deeper with this story from STAT's Rohan Rajeev.
reproductive health
Barbie, the SEO queen of gynecology
Last summer's Barbie movie spawned endless memes (that even the American Medical Association got in on), songs of the summer from Billie Eilish and Dua Lipa, and a shortage of hot pink paint. But did the iconic last scene — Barbie's very enthusiastic declaration, "I'm here to see my gynecologist" — birth a renewed interest in getting Pap smears?
Other high-profile medical mentions — such as Katie Couric's televised colonoscopy and Angelina Jolie's breast cancer essay in the New York Times — led to increases in colonoscopies and genetic testing, so researchers in JAMA Network Open wondered if Barbie did the same thing.
Looking at online search trends, researchers reported that while searches for "gynecologist" and "gynecologist definition" spiked 51% and 154%, respectively, at the time of the Barbie movie's release, there was no change in searches for gynecologist appointments. It wasn't clear to researchers whether people needing the definition of a gyno were the same people who require gynecologic care, but the trend overall suggested that an increased awareness didn't translate to an increase in people seeking out appointments.
neuroscience
Hot mice unlock the brain's secret to pain placebos
The placebo effect is mysterious and often pesky in clinical trials, but new research in Nature offers new evidence for which brain circuit is responsible for the placebo effect in treating pain.
A team led by researchers from the University of North Carolina conditioned mice to expect pain relief by putting them in a chamber with two rooms: one with a hot floor and one with a comfortably warm floor. They induced the placebo effect by making both chambers hot, but mice kept crossing into the one they had been conditioned to expect to be less hot. By studying their brains, researchers pinned down which specific neurons seemed to be responsible for convincing the mice that they were experiencing pain relief. Injecting the mice with naloxone, an opioid receptor antagonist, got rid of the placebo effect, suggesting the brain's natural opioid system is involved with modulating those neurons.
Though there's still more work to be done, researchers noted that their results indicate that the pathway they identified could be tackled by new pain-relieving interventions like drugs or cognitive behavioral therapies.
No comments