Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Jan. 13, 2020

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Jan. 13, 2020 – Jan. 17, 2020.

ABC News (1/10, Schumaker) reported that influenza cases and deaths caused by influenza continue to increase across the U.S., according to the CDC. The agency says that 2,900 people have died and 55,000 have been hospitalized so far this season.

NBC News (1/10, Edwards) reported that “this season’s flu continues to hit children and young adults particularly hard,” according to the CDC. The article said “that there have been twice as many pediatric flu deaths so far this year than at the same time last year.”

CNN (1/10, Cohen) reported that flu activity in the U.S. decreased last week, but health officials warned that it would be premature to conclude that the season has already peaked.

Newsweek (1/13, Gander) reports that in a study published in Nature Medicine, researchers predicted that “deaths by suicides, assaults, transport accidents, drownings and falls were forecast to be on the up if temperatures rose on average by 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.” For the study, “the researchers analyzed data on deaths and temperatures between 1980 to 2017 in mainland United States, excluding Alaska and Hawaii, to see if anything changed when the weather was 1.5 and 2 degrees Celsius higher than average” and found that “a spike of 1.5 degrees Celsius was linked to an annual estimated 1,601 additional deaths as a result of injuries across the country, while a rise of over at least 2 degrees Celsuis was linked to 2,135 extra deaths per year.”

HealthDay (1/13, Norton) reports the researchers predicted that the increase in injuries would most likely have the biggest impact on males “between the ages of 15 and 64.” Robbie Parks, the study’s lead researcher, said that the increase would disproportionately affect this demographic because they are already at higher risk for certain injuries, and heat has a greater impact on certain risks, like drowning, for men than women.

Reuters (1/14, Carroll) reports a study published in JAMA suggests that changes in FDA “procedures meant to speed approvals for medications may have resulted in less exacting standards.” The article suggests that the FDA is approving drugs faster, but based on weaker evidence than in the past.

NPR (1/14, Lupkin) reports that the FDA “has gotten faster at approving new prescription drugs over the last four decades, but the evidence it relies on in making those decisions is getting weaker.” The researchers found that “almost half of recent new drug approvals were based on only one pivotal clinical trial instead of the two or more that used to be the norm.” Jonathan Darrow, a lawyer with Harvard Medical School’s Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law and the study’s lead author, said, “There has been a gradual erosion of the evidence that’s required for FDA approval,” and therefore physicians and patients “should not expect that new drugs will be dramatically better than older ones.”

Bloomberg Law (1/14, Baumann, Subscription Publication) reports that in an interview, Darrow said, “There’s nothing inherently wrong with faster approval of drugs. It has to do with the approval of the drugs on the basis of less evidence--or really less certainty.” Darrow also said that many new treatments only offer “extremely modest benefits” over older ones.

The New York Times (1/15, Bakalar) reports, “Blood pressure [BP] begins to increase at younger ages in women than in men, and it goes up at a faster rate,” research indicates. Therefore, “the physiological processes that lead to heart disease, the” study suggests, “may start earlier in women than in men.” After analyzing “data collected over 43 years in 32,833 people ages five to 98,” investigators “found that by the time women are in their 20s, they are showing faster rates of increases in blood pressure than men, and the difference persists throughout life.” What’s more, “the variation was significant for all blood pressure measures...as well as for pulse pressure” and “for mean arterial pressure.” The findings were published online in JAMA Cardiology.

STAT (1/16, Chakradhar) reports CDC data reveal that more than one in seven “adults across all U.S. states and territories are physically inactive.” Investigators arrived at this conclusion after compiling “2015-2018 data collected as part of the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is a telephone-based survey of people’s health activities, chronic conditions, and use of preventive health services.” The study revealed that “Colorado ranked lowest, with 17.3% of people physically inactive, compared to Puerto Rico, which had the highest total at 47.7%.”

HealthDay (1/16, Preidt) reports physical inactivity was defined by the CDC “as doing no leisure-time physical activities in the past month/ – such as running, walking for exercise or gardening.” Across the U.S., “southern states had the highest rate of inactivity (28%), followed by the Northeast (25.6%), Midwest (25%), and the West (20.5%).” Breaking down the data by ethnic and racial differences, investigators found that “Hispanics had the highest rate of inactivity (31.7%), followed by blacks (30.3%) and whites (23.4%).” Click here to see more data on the topic.

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