health tech
AI-based mammography is here. Human radiologists are skeptical
Adobe
There's growing excitement around several FDA-approved AI tools that can analyze mammograms — with some research finding the algorithms do the job better than human radiologists. But the humans have some concerns, as STAT's Katie Palmer reports.
"We have to be very careful what we do with AI once it's out in the wild," said Etta Pisano, chief research officer at the American College of Radiology. And the tools are out there: RadNet, a company that owns more than 400 radiology practices, says it deploys its own algorithm in 600,000 mammograms each year. And it just acquired another company, iCAD, which claims 17% of U.S. radiology practices as customers. Still, those numbers pale in comparison to the 40 million mammograms analyzed by people every year. Read more from Katie on where expert skepticism comes from.
science
As a growing number of states legalize the use of marijuana, researchers and public health advocates still have a number of questions about the drug's long-term health effects. A study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open found that people who have smoked weed or used edibles for years do worse on some measures of vascular health that are used to predict cardiovascular risk.
The study analyzed each participants' arterial flow-mediated dilation (FMD), which is a measure of how much an artery opens up for increased blood flow — the higher the better when it comes to cardiovascular risk. Out of 55 study participants, both the group that smoked weed and those who used edibles had lower FMD than those who did not. The participants were otherwise healthy, and none of them smoked tobacco or vaped. The authors also looked at the patients' carotid-femoral pulse wave velocity (PWV) and analyzed their blood serum. There were no changes to PWV, and only smoking weed, not edible use, was associated with negative changes in the blood serum.
A previous study of 35 people did not find this sort of reduced FMD among chronic cannabis users, but did find worsened PWV. The new study's authors say the discrepancy may be due to less frequent use of the drug by the other study's participants. People in the new study smoked weed three times a week for at least a year, and on average a decade, whereas the previous study recruited participants who smoked once per week. One thing is clear: More research is needed.
first opinion
A former FDA commissioner on Trump's 'cost-cutting' measures
During his first administration, President Trump often touted that he had approved "more affordable generic drugs than any administration in history." In a new First Opinion essay, Scott Gottlieb argues that the president had good reason to highlight these accomplishments, but that the cuts being made now could jeopardize any progress that's been made. He writes from experience — Gottlieb was FDA commissioner for two years during Trump's first administration. In those years, he says the FDA invested in staffing and policies with the goal of ensuring that once patents on expensive branded medications expired, lower-cost generics would become available as soon as possible.
Now, the FDA team responsible for paving the way for these complex generics has been entirely disbanded. "These substantial accomplishments risk being severely undermined, if not completely reversed, should the targeted dismantling of this critical generic drug policy team be allowed to endure," Gottlieb writes. Read more.
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