Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Jan. 13, 2025

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Jan. 13, 2025–Jan. 17, 2025.

MedPage Today (1/10, Monaco) reported, “Exposure to radon was linked to an increased risk for gestational diabetes, a population-based cohort study suggested.” Researchers found that “among 9,107 mothers-to-be, those living in U.S. counties with the highest radon level (≥2 pCi/L) had a 37% greater chance of developing gestational diabetes compared with those living in counties with the lowest radon level (<1 pCi/L).” Study results indicate that “even after adjustment for fine particulate matter air pollutants, which may share a similar biological pathway to radon, exposure to radon was still tied with gestational diabetes with borderline statistical significance.” The findings were published in JAMA Network Open.

The Washington Post (1/13, Johnson) reports, “New cases of dementia will double by 2060, when 1 million U.S. adults are projected to develop the memory-robbing condition each year, according to a sobering new study published Monday.” The “analysis shows that the risk a person faces over their lifetime is higher than some previous estimates: After age 55, 4 in 10 adults are likely to develop some form of dementia.” That is “in part because the new analysis is based on decades of close follow-up, including regular cognitive assessments, of a racially diverse group of people—a quarter of whom were Black and face an increased risk of dementia.” The findings were published in Nature Medicine.

NBC News (1/13, Sullivan, Herzberg) reports, “Older studies estimated that about 14% of men and 23% of women would develop dementia in their lifetimes.” However, “the new study puts that estimate higher, at around 42% for both men and women.”

The AP (1/13, Neergaard) reports “there are steps people can take to reduce” their risk of developing dementia, “such as controlling high blood pressure and other bad-for-the-brain health problems. And it’s not too late to try even in middle age.”

The Hill (1/14, Bink, Bartiromo) reports, “Respiratory illnesses are spreading throughout the U.S., causing multiple states to see a spike in hospital visits.” The latest data show “another virus, known as HMPV, has also been spiking in some parts of the country.” Figures “from the National Respiratory and Enteric Virus Surveillance System” show “that among lab tests submitted for HMPV, more than 2% tested positive through the first week of January.” That is “up slightly from the week prior (1.77%) and more than double the rate reported in early December (0.87%).” Across Kansas, Iowa, “Missouri and Nebraska, more than 5.8% of tests submitted for HMPV tested positive through the first week of the year, data” show.

The Washington Post (1/15, Roubein, Ovalle) reports that the FDA released a proposal “Wednesday to dramatically reduce nicotine levels in cigarettes, a move that anti-smoking advocates believe would save millions of lives even as it threatens the powerful tobacco industry.” Under the proposal, “tobacco companies would be required to cut nicotine in cigarettes to no more than 0.7 milligrams per gram of tobacco, which the FDA says is significantly lower than the average concentration in products on the market.” The FDA’s “proposal would also apply to most cigars and pipe tobacco, but not to e-cigarettes or nicotine pouches.”

The New York Times (1/15, Jewett) reports, “The FDA’s proposal includes projections that by 2100, the nicotine reduction measure would prevent an estimated 48 million young people from starting to smoke.” By 2060, the FDA “also estimates that 1.8 million tobacco-related deaths would be prevented, and that $30 trillion in benefits would accrue over 40 years, mostly from the generation that would not begin smoking.”

The New York Times (1/16, Caryn Rabin) says, “More Americans are surviving cancer, but the disease is striking young and middle-aged adults and women more frequently, the American Cancer Society reported on Thursday.” Additionally, “despite overall improvements in survival, Black and Native Americans are dying of some cancers at rates two to three times higher than those among white Americans.” The changes “reflect declines in smoking-related cancers and prostate cancer among older men and a disconcerting rise in cancer in people born since the 1950s.”

CNN (1/16, Howard) says that according to the American Cancer Society’s report published in CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, “middle-age women now have a slightly higher cancer risk than their male counterparts, and young women are nearly twice as likely to be diagnosed with the disease as young men.” Researchers found that “it appears that breast and thyroid cancers in women are driving this increasing trend.”

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