Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of May 12, 2025

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of May 12, 2025–May 16, 2025.

The New York Times (5/9, Astor) reported the FDA on Friday “approved the United States’ first at-home cervical cancer screening tool,” potentially giving “women an accessible alternative to Pap smears, which many find painful or traumatic. The new test, made by Teal Health, involves swabbing the vagina with a spongelike tool rather than inserting a speculum and scraping cells from the cervix, as health care providers do in Pap smears.”

The Washington Post (5/12, Docter-Loeb) reports new research published in JAMA Network Open shows that “more U.S. high-schoolers used nicotine pouches—smokeless nicotine powder products—last year than the year before.” The study used data from a 2023-2024 survey of 10,146 youths, revealing that “5.4% of 10th- and 12th-graders reported having used nicotine pouches, up from 3% the year before. The 10th- and 12th-graders’ use of pouches in the 12 months and 30 days before the surveys also increased year to year.” According to the study, teens who are male, white, and living in rural areas showed higher usage. The study also noted increased dual use with e-cigarettes, “but the sole use of e-cigarettes decreased across a lifetime, as well as in the previous 12 months and past 30 days.”

MedPage Today (5/13, Robertson) reports the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) has “renewed its recommendation for early and universal screening for syphilis during pregnancy.” The recommendation, published in JAMA, is in line with its 2018 guidance and “endorsed early and universal screening for syphilis infection during pregnancy and screening at the first available opportunity if an individual is not screened in early pregnancy.” The task force wrote, “Using a reaffirmation process, the USPSTF concludes with high certainty that screening for syphilis infection in pregnancy has a substantial net benefit.”

The AP (5/14, Stobbe, Mulvihill) reports early CDC data released Wednesday indicate “there were 30,000 fewer U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2024,” a decline of 27% from the 110,000 in 2023 and the “largest one-year decline ever recorded.” The previous one-year decline was 4% in 2017, “according to the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics.” All states but Nevada and South Dakota saw declines last year, with some of the most significant drops in Ohio, West Virginia, “and other states that have been hard-hit in the nation’s decades-long overdose epidemic.” Among the factors experts cited to explain the decline were the increased availability of naloxone, expanded addiction treatment, a shift in how people use drugs, and the “growing impact of billions of dollars in opioid lawsuit settlement money.” Nevertheless, “annual overdose deaths are higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

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The AP (5/15, Ungar) reports that a “baby born with a rare and dangerous genetic disease is growing and thriving after getting an experimental gene editing treatment made just for him.” In a study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers said the child is “among the first to be successfully treated with a custom therapy that seeks to fix a tiny but critical error in his genetic code that kills half of affected infants.” The infant, KJ Muldoon, was “diagnosed shortly after birth with severe CPS1 deficiency, estimated by some experts to affect around one in a million babies. Those infants lack an enzyme needed to help remove ammonia from the body, so it can build up in their blood and become toxic.” Researchers at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Penn Medicine “created a therapy designed to correct KJ’s faulty gene. They used CRISPR, the gene editing tool that won its inventors the Nobel Prize in 2020.”

The New York Times (5/15, Kolata) reports researchers believe the “implications of the treatment go far beyond treating KJ.” More than 30 million people in the U.S. “have one of more than 7,000 rare genetic diseases.” KJ’s treatment “offers a new path for companies to develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive development and testing.” While KJ’s treatment was “customized so CRISPR found just his mutation, the same sort of method could be adapted and used over and over again to fix mutations in other places on a person’s DNA.”

The Washington Post (5/15, Y. Johnson) adds that while it is still “very early days...KJ—now nearly 10 months old—is showing signs of clinical benefit from his personalized treatment.”

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