Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of June 12, 2023

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of June 12, 2023–June 16, 2023.

CNN (6/15, Goodman) reports, “Pfizer, the manufacturer of Bicillin (benzylpenicillin)—a long-acting injectable form of the antibiotic penicillin—is warning doctors that it expects to run out of its formulations for children by the end of June. Formulations for adults are also expected to be in short supply but are not expected to run out.” Pfizer “sent a letter to clinicians this week, which was posted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.”

CNN (6/15, McPhillips) reports, “In 2021, suicide and homicide rates for children and young adults ages 10 to 24 in the U.S. were the highest they’ve been in decades, according to a new report from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” The report found that “suicide and homicide were the second and third leading causes of death for this age group,” while “the homicide rate for this age group in 2021 was the highest it’s been since 1997, and the suicide rate was the highest on record, since 1968.”

The AP (6/13, McGill) reports that the federal government can keep enforcing “requirements that health insurance plans cover preventative care—such as HIV prevention, some types of cancer screenings and other illnesses—while a legal battle over the mandates plays out, under a court agreement approved Tuesday.” The compromise “approved by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals preserves—at least for now—cost-free preventive care coverage for millions of Americans under the Affordable Care Act.”

Bloomberg Law (6/13, Anne Pazanowski, Subscription Publication) reports, “The Fifth Circuit order allows the U.S. Health and Human Services Department to continue enforcing the requirement against all but the named plaintiffs.” In exchange for this, “the agency agreed not to seek penalties against these plaintiffs for any actions they’ve take on the basis of” the Texas judge’s “order while it remains in effect, even if it’s later vacated or reversed.”

CNN (6/12, LaMotte) reports, “Obesity may damage the brain’s ability to recognize the sensation of fullness and be satisfied after eating fats and sugars, a...study found.” Moreover, “those brain changes may last even after people” with obesity “lose a significant amount of weight—possibly explaining why many people often regain the pounds they lose.” The findings were published in Nature Metabolism.

STAT (6/12, Chen, Subscription Publication) reports “researchers saw that when people without obesity received nutrients, they experienced reduced activity in areas of the brain involved in food intake, suggesting the brain is signaling to them that they’ve received food and no longer need more.” However, “in people with obesity, those changes were not detected.” In terms of observing whether “brain responses were correlated with any hormones that are released when nutrients are in the gut,” researchers “didn’t find an association with insulin or glucose, but they did find that after infusion of fats in people without obesity, increased levels of the hormone glucagon-like peptide 1 were correlated with reductions in brain activity in certain food intake-related areas.”

Medscape (6/9, Yasgur, Subscription Publication) reported, “Patients with ‘treatment-resistant depression’ may be taking other medications with side effects that interfere with antidepressant efficacy,” researchers concluded after having “studied over 800 patients who were taking antidepressants for major depressive disorder.” The study revealed that “close to two thirds were taking at least one nonpsychiatric medication with potential depressive symptom side effects (PDSS) more than 30% were taking two or more such medications, and 20% at least three such medications.” In fact, such “medications, which included antihypertensive medications and corticosteroids, among others, were associated with higher odds of moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms, compared with medications without PDSS.” The findings were published online May 24 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

AMA Morning Rounds news coverage is developed in affiliation with Bulletin Healthcare LLC. Subscribe to Morning Rounds Daily.