opinion
It'll take more than social media bans to ease teen mental health crisis 
Adobe
Et tu, Strava? The fitness tracker isn't the first social media app that comes to mind when considering the damage Instagram, TikTok, and others can do to some teens' mental health. But any forum that invites people to compare themselves to others can amp up the pressure young people feel, Harvard social scientist Emily Weinstein and Indiana University social psychologist Sara Konrath note in a STAT First Opinion. Still, "One thing is clear: We can't pin all the blame for teen mental health on social media, and school phone bans can't fix it."
In their national survey of over 1,500 American teens, they found that more than half reported negative pressure to grind out a game plan for life. They pointed to teachers, guidance counselors, coaches, and other school adults; themselves; and their parents and family members as the top three sources of that pressure to achieve. Social media came in fourth — not even making the podium.
"Social media can be like gasoline on the fires that are burning some teens out," they write. "But to fix mental health trends, we also need to widen our lens beyond Instagram and TikTok: to other technologies, and even to the Strava-fication of school in the form of educational technology platforms that continually pressure students and parents with endless performance updates." Read more.
pandemic fallout
A long look at long Covid (and other mysteries)
Ever since long Covid emerged in the pandemic's first year, people suffering from other post-infection syndromes have been clamoring for serious attention to their illnesses, too, rather than the skepticism and stigma that have so often greeted myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), long-term Lyme disease, or other unexplained conditions. A new issue of Science Translational Medicine published yesterday considers these often debilitating syndromes together, whether leaders of federal health agencies are describing the NIH's RECOVER initiative (criticized for its slow progress), immunobiologists are looking at sex differences in susceptibility, or infectious disease clinicians are making the case for sustained funding to study these chronic illnesses, separately and together with long Covid.
Here's what they say:
- "Like medical mysteries of the past, this one too will be solved by science. How fast that occurs depends on continued attention and robust and rigorous scientific pursuit."— NIH's Jeanne Marrazzao, NHLBI's Gary Gibbons, and NINDS's Walter Koroshetz
- "Despite their potential to substantially contribute to our scientific understanding of [post-acute infection syndromes, or PAIS] and autoimmune diseases, current research has yet to extensively focus on the development of PAISs in transgender individuals, a group disproportionately afflicted with PAISs and one uniquely positioned to illuminate the interplay between biological sex differences and the impact of sex hormones on disease outcomes."— Julio Silva and Akiko Iwasaki
- "The risks of conflating long Covid and ME/CFS go both ways; although there is hope that long Covid research will provide some of the answers needed to fully understand ME/ CFS, this should not come at the expense of investment in efforts to study pre-2020 ME/CFS, which may still be driven by distinct biology" — Michael Peluso, Maureen Hanson, and Steven Deeks
one big chart
Infant mortality is stable. So are disparities
National Center for Health Statistics
After rising between 2021 and 2022, infant mortality has plateaued, new national data from the CDC show. Looking past the overall figures, differences among racial and ethnic groups also didn't budge significantly, as this chart shows. Geography looks different, too. State by state, the rate of deaths per 1,000 live births ranged from 3.32 in Massachusetts to 9.11 in Mississippi. Mortality rates declined in New Mexico (5.88) and West Virginia (7.32) but increased in Nevada (4.49) and Washington (4.34).
No comments