H/T
A hat to treat depression?
Darrell Ingham/Getty Images
Scientists have been zapping brains to alleviate depression for decades through a method called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS. The startup Motif Neurotech wants to build on that technology, except with a baseball hat. The idea is that each morning, the hat would activate a blueberry-sized device implanted in your skull that sends a pulse of electricity into your brain.
“Think of it like charging your phone,” Motif co-founder and CEO Jacob Robinson told STAT’s O. Rose Broderick. Read their conversation to learn more about the science, and also for Robinson’s interesting comments on how he would feel giving this device to his kids or enrolling them in clinical trials.
biology
What’s the true risk for eating disorders with GLP-1s?
As GLP-1 weight loss medications proliferate, the potential for users to develop eating disorders has lingered in the public consciousness, largely unaddressed except for occasional media coverage. Actual research is scant, though one analysis of medical records found that, out of more than 60,000 people taking GLP-1s, 1.28% were diagnosed with an eating disorder within two years.
In an NEJM perspective published over the weekend, physician Amanda Banks calculated that, if about one in eight Americans takes a GLP-1, more than 420,000 people could develop an eating disorder. “Physicians, trialists, regulators, policymakers, and drug developers are unprepared for this coming wave,” Banks wrote.
Patients should be screened for eating disorders before being prescribed these medications, she argued. And more research is needed on both the risks for eating disorders with GLP-1s and how the drugs could be used for potential treatments, given what Banks calls the “mechanistic overlap in the underlying biology” of obesity and anorexia in particular.
one big number
$7,500
As Sarah Cady reviewed the employment contract for a job as a psychiatric nurse practitioner one day, she was shocked to see that if she ever left the practice, that’s how much money she’d owe for each patient that left with her.
The moment was a turning point for Cady. “In too many private mental health practices, patients are treated not as autonomous human beings engaged in vulnerable therapeutic relationships,” she writes in a new First Opinion essay, “but as proprietary assets to be retained, priced, and controlled.” And patients often have no idea this is even happening. Read more from Cady on what she believes patients are owed amid these dynamics.
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