fallout
Who benefits from the cuts at CDC?
Amid the 10,000 job cuts so far this month at the U.S. health department, the CDC's Office on Smoking and Health — responsible for projects aimed at spotting trends in tobacco use and preventing it — is effectively shuttered. Tim McAfee, who headed the division from 2010 to 2017, called the move "the greatest gift to the tobacco industry in the last half century."
Now, the future of the office's many initiatives is unclear. OSH ran the annual National Youth Tobacco Survey, which helped spur federal action on the alarming uptake of Juul and other e-cigarettes among teenagers a few years back. States and U.S. territories received the bulk of OSH's $240 million in funding, relying on its support to run quit hotlines and introduce other initiatives like cigarette taxes or restaurant smoking bans. Read more from STAT's Sarah Todd about how well the past few months have gone for the tobacco industry.
On the other hand, Helen Branswell writes today about how the loss of the CDC's viral hepatitis lab will leave the country with no good way to measure the scale of the problem it faces with these diseases, per the lab's former employees. It will be harder for scientists to find the sources of — and put an end to — outbreaks that can be linked to contaminated food, in the case of hepatitis A, or poor infection control procedures in medical facilities, in the case of hepatitis B and C. Read more.
research
Autism and the gut-brain connection
Days after a Cabinet meeting where Kennedy said that HHS will determine the cause of autism by September, with Trump suggesting a long-disproved link to vaccines, researchers at USC have come one step closer to understanding the actual mechanisms behind some symptoms of the disorder. A study published today in Nature Communications found an association between levels of certain gut metabolites and autism symptoms among children.
Researchers analyzed brain images, stool samples, and collected behavioral data from 43 kids with autism and 41 neurotypical kids, all ages 8 to 17. They found that kids with autism had significantly lower levels of certain tryptophan-related metabolites (substances like serotonin created when tryptophan, an amino acid, is processed in the gut) in stool samples than neurotypical children. And the level of metabolites in the gut was associated with changes in cortical activity in parts of the brain involved with autism, as well as the severity of someone's disorder and the symptoms they experience.
"We demonstrated that gut metabolites impact the brain, and the brain, in turn, affects behavior," study author Lisa Aziz-Zadeh said in a press release. "Essentially, the brain acts as the intermediary between gut health and autism-related behaviors."
health
'The clinical significance of sleepiness' (seriously)
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has released a new statement today emphasizing that sleepiness is "a critical patient-reported outcome that is associated with increased risk for adverse health effects and diminished quality of life." Excessive sleepiness is reported by one-third of U.S. adults, according to the statement, and can be a symptom of anything from narcolepsy or obstructive sleep apnea to viral infections, brain injuries, hypothyroidism, neurodegenerative diseases, mood disorders, behavioral disorders, and more.
The statement calls for more research where sleepiness is measured as a primary outcome in order to improve treatment for sleep disorders. There should be "objectively measured and reliable biomarkers" of sleepiness, the authors write.
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