spoilers ahead
What if 'The Fugitive' was real?
Alex Hogan/STAT
In honor of last night's Oscars ceremony, Alex Hogan's latest video considers a critically important question: How would STAT reporters react if the events represented in "The Fugitive," which took home the best picture award more than three decades ago, really happened?
In the film, a doctor played by Harrison Ford discovers that a fictional pharmaceutical giant is falsifying data in order to get a blockbuster treatment for coronary artery disease approved. "You have no idea how current that was at the moment," Matt Herper told Alex. "This movie came out the year before the big study that proved statins prevent second heart attacks."
How would STAT tackle the news? At first, "just invert the pyramid," said Damian Garde, when asked how to approach the initial allegations. Watch the video to hear how he'd write the lede of that first story, and what reporting steps Bob Herman, Lizzy Lawrence, and Allison DeAngelis would take first for a deeper dive.
health
Should maternal morbidity surveillance expand?
By 2017, all U.S. states had incorporated a checkbox on death certificates to indicate if a person had been pregnant at the time of — or within a year of — their death. The system, while imperfect, has helped reveal the scale of the problem. In a study published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, researchers argue that a similar expansion is needed to capture severe maternal morbidity, meaning the most serious pregnancy complications that could result in death, long-term hospitalization, or disability after giving birth.
In both the U.S. and Canada, surveillance and reporting for these complications typically ends after delivery. But the new study that analyzed data from an Ontario cohort through six weeks postpartum found the current practice misses more than 40% of cases with severe complications. Similar research in the U.S. has found that including the periods before and after birth in morbidity surveillance would identify an additional 22% to 49% of severe cases.
first opinion
A declaration of hope, dashed
Mindy Uhrlaub learned that she carried the mutated gene that causes the fatal neurodegenerative disease ALS as her own mother was dying from it. It was a dark time, but over the years, she put her faith in researchers and other activists, joining more than a dozen observational research studies. "With every spinal tap I suffered through and nerve conduction test I endured, I told myself that we were getting closer to a cure," Uhrlaub writes in a new First Opinion essay. It was "a tremendous declaration of hope."
But everything changed at the beginning of the second Trump administration. Read more about the series of events that have left Uhrlaub, in her own words, terrified.
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