first opinion
Searching for patients during the LA fires
Ethan Swope/AP
Gabriel Waterman is a primary care physician who helps to run a Los Angeles-area program providing services to thousands of older adults in assisted-living facilities and nursing homes. Most of his patients are at least 80 years old, and half have dementia. So as fires spread across the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods, he worried about how his patients and traveling staff members were faring. When he saw news coverage of a Pasadena nursing home being evacuated, he wondered — "Were those our patients?"
In a new First Opinion essay, Waterman details three days of harrowing work to find and treat patients during the raging fires. Read his on-the-ground account.
cardiovascular health
Heart disease is still the biggest killer
In 2022, about 40% of deaths in the U.S. were caused by cardiovascular heart disease, including heart disease and stroke, which kill more people in the U.S. than the next two biggest killers — all forms of cancer and accidental deaths — combined. That's according to an annual update from the American Heart Association on heart disease and stroke statistics, published today in Circulation.
Cardiovascular disease is "common, catastrophic, and costly," an accompanying editorial notes. Despite its dominance, the overall number of deaths is leveling out after the pandemic shot numbers upwards. Yet contributing risk factors like high blood pressure and obesity continue to rise.
Here are some more interesting findings:
- The percentage of high schoolers who are physically active for over an hour every day decreased from almost 29% to just under 24% between 2011 to 2021.
- Nearly 47% of all Americans have high blood pressure. In 2022, the prevalence was worst in Mississippi at about 40% and best in Colorado, at just under 25%.
- The rate of gestational diabetes in the U.S. increased 38% from 2016 to 2021, to 8.3% of pregnancies.
health
Could bariatric surgery help treat liver disease?
For people with obesity and cirrhosis, a late stage of liver disease, one new, small study says that bariatric surgery might be an option. The study, published today in Nature Medicine, followed 168 patients, about a third of whom underwent bariatric surgery. After 15 years, fewer people in the surgical group developed one of the major complications of liver disease, which include cancer and death, than in the non-surgical group.
"We can change the trajectory of the disease," Ali Aminian, a co-author on the study, told STAT's Liz Cooney. Read more on the specifics.
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