Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of July 29, 2024

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of July 29, 2024–Aug. 2, 2024.

The New York Times (7/28, Belluck) says researchers on Sunday “reported that a blood test was significantly more accurate than doctors’ interpretation of cognitive tests and CT scans in signaling” Alzheimer’s disease. The study “found that about 90% of the time the blood test correctly identified whether patients with memory problems had Alzheimer’s,” while “dementia specialists using standard methods that did not include expensive PET scans or invasive spinal taps were accurate 73% of the time” and “primary care doctors using those methods got it right only 61% of the time.” The findings were published in JAMA and presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.

MedPage Today (7/29, Lou) reports, “The rules for statin and blood pressure (BP) medication initiation may be rewritten with a new and improved cardiovascular risk prediction tool, research suggested.” Investigators found that “use of the PREVENT equations would reclassify 53% of U.S. adults to lower atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) risk categories—and just 0.41% to higher risk categories—as currently defined by the American College of Cardiology...and American Heart Association.” The research indicated that “these risk estimates, if applied to existing treatment criteria, would bring the number of eligible statin users down from 81.8 million to 67.5 million, and candidates for antihypertensive therapy down from 75.3 million to 72.7 million, according to nationally representative projections by” the researchers, with “the expected result” being “107,000 additional instances of myocardial infarction (MI) or stroke over 10 years.” The findings were published in JAMA.

You may also be interested in: Patients can take these steps to lower their high blood pressure.

The Washington Post (7/30, Sun) reports the CDC “is launching a $5 million initiative to provide seasonal flu shots this fall to about 200,000 livestock workers in states hardest hit by the bird flu outbreak.” The Post adds, “Workers on poultry, dairy and pig farms are at greatest risk of being simultaneously exposed to seasonal flu and the H5N1 bird flu that has infected at least 172 dairy herds in 13 states, according to the Department of Agriculture.”

Reuters (7/30, Douglas, Steenhuysen) reports the agency “will allocate $5 million to organizations including the National Center for Farmworker Health to educate and train workers on protecting themselves from bird flu, and another $5 million to providing seasonal flu shots to farm workers, [CDC Principal Deputy Director Nirav] Shah said.”

CNN (7/30, Christensen) reports the “CDC said with this new initiative, the seasonal flu vaccine will not be mandatory for farm workers.” Instead, “public health officials on a state-level will bring vaccines to workers at local events and to areas where farm workers typically gather.”

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.

NBC News (7/31, Sullivan) reports a study published on Wednesday “found that Gen X and millennials are more likely to be diagnosed with 17 types of cancer, including nine that had been declining in older adults.” Researchers “used cancer diagnosis and mortality data from two databases—the North American Association of Central Cancer Registries and the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics—to analyze cancer trends in people born between 1920 and 1990, who were diagnosed with cancer between 2000 and 2019.” They found that “seventeen of the 34 cancers had increasing incidence in younger people,” with risk being “two-to-three times higher in people born in 1990, for pancreatic, kidney and small intestine cancers, compared to people born in 1955.” The findings were published in The Lancet Public Health.

HealthDay (8/1, Foster) reports, “New research has added two conditions to the list of 12 risk factors that boost the chances of a dementia diagnosis.” In a study published Wednesday, “scientists reported that new evidence now supports adding vision loss and high cholesterol to the list of modifiable risk factors for the memory-robbing illness.” The findings were published in The Lancet.

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