Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Jan. 27, 2025

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Jan. 27, 2025–Jan. 31, 2025.

Healio (1/24, Feller) reported, “The vast majority of people in a study with long COVID had experienced multiple SARS-CoV-2 infections over the course of a 4-year period, researchers reported.” One investigator said, “While it is possible that the causes of long COVID could be many and variable depending on the patient population studied, with this cohort the evidence is clear that by having COVID numerous times, patients became more at-risk for developing long COVID.” The findings were published in The Lancet Regional Health–Americas.

The New York Times (1/27, Mandavilli) reports bird flu “has infected more than 900 herds and dozens of people, killing one, and the outbreak shows no signs of abating.” According to over a dozen experts, “a human pandemic is not inevitable, even now.” However, “a series of developments over the past few weeks indicates that the possibility is no longer remote.” Reinfections suggest that the virus “could circulate on farms indefinitely, finding opportunities to evolve into a more dangerous form—a ‘high-risk’ scenario, said Louise Moncla, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Pennsylvania.”

Editor’s note: Stay informed on highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) A(H5N1) with the latest updates from the AMA’s bird flu (H5N1) resource center.

HealthDay (1/28, Thompson) reports, “Major heart health risk factors like obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure remain on the rise in the United States, according to an annual report from the American Heart Association” published in Circulation. Altogether, the report indicates that “there were 941,652 heart-related deaths in 2022, an increase of more than 10,000 from the 931,578 deaths in 2021.” Meanwhile, “the report indicates that heart-related deaths appear to be leveling out after a major uptick during the COVID pandemic...but heart disease remains the No. 1 killer in the U.S.”

STAT (1/29, Gaffney, Subscription Publication) reports, “In July 2022, 988 launched as the number anyone across the country could dial in a mental health crisis.” The phone number is “one entryway to a sprawling system of mental health care options, but new research shows that since then, critical crisis services have not become more available—a key objective of the nationwide rollout, designed to strengthen an underfunded, patchwork system that left many people alone in times of crisis.” Although “calls to the national hotline have continued to increase, fewer psychiatric facilities are offering emergency psychiatric walk-in services, mobile crisis response units, and suicide prevention services, according to a study.” The findings were published in JAMA Psychiatry.

You may also be interested in: What doctors wish patients knew about depression.

The New York Times (1/30, Kolata) reports that the FDA has approved suzetrigine, “a new medication...to treat” patients with “pain from an injury or surgery.” The Times adds that “unlike opioid pain medicines, it cannot become addictive.”

CNN (1/30, Goodman) reports, “Unlike opioid medications, which dull the sensation of pain in the brain, suzetrigine works by preventing pain-signaling nerves around the body from firing in the first place.”

You may also be interested in: What comes next in the fight to end the drug-overdose epidemic? 

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