Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Nov. 11, 2024

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Nov. 11, 2024–Nov. 15, 2024.

HealthDay (11/8, Thompson) reported, “More than 1 in 5 Americans likely suffer from long COVID, a new AI-assisted review has found.” The findings suggest “that nearly 23% of U.S. adults experience the symptoms of long COVID.” That is “much higher than the 7% prevalence of long COVID that’s been suggested by other studies, researchers said.” The findings were published in Med.

The Washington Post (11/11, McMahan) says, “About 41% of U.S. adults with hypertension are unaware they have it, according to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics.” In adults older than “18, 48% of the survey’s 6,084 subjects were found to have hypertension – 60% of whom were aware that they had high blood pressure.” The survey found that “men were more likely than women to have high blood pressure, NCHS said, but men were also less likely than women to know they had hypertension.”

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The New York Times (11/12, Mandavilli) reports that “after decades of unrelenting increases, rates of sexually transmitted infections in the United States are showing hints of a downturn.” According to data (PDF) released by the CDC, “diagnoses of gonorrhea dipped in nearly all age groups last year, compared with 2022, and new cases of syphilis and chlamydia remained about the same.” Still, “more than 2.4 million new S.T.I.s were diagnosed last year, about a million more than the figure 20 years ago.” However, “experts said they were cautiously optimistic that a resurgent tide of infections was beginning to turn.”

The AP (11/12, Stobbe) also reports that “last year, cases of the most infectious stages of syphilis fell 10% from the year before.” Meanwhile, “gonorrhea cases dropped 7%, marking a second straight year of decline and bringing the number below what it was in 2019.” Several experts say one contributor to the decrease is the growing use of the antibiotic doxycycline as a “morning-after pill.” In addition, “some experts believe that the 2022 mpox outbreak...may have had a lingering effect on sexual behavior in 2023.” Finally, “another factor may have been an increase in the number of health workers testing people for infections, doing contact tracing and connecting people to treatment” after “Congress gave $1.2 billion to expand the workforce over five years.”

NBC News (11/13, Sullivan) reports “Ozempic [semaglutide] and Wegovy [semaglutide] may help people cut back on drinking, new research” suggests. In a study of about “228,000 people in Sweden who had alcohol use disorder, researchers found that people who were taking a GLP-1 drug like semaglutide were less likely to be hospitalized for alcohol-related issues.” The findings were published in JAMA Psychiatry.

Reuters (11/14, Roy, Sunny) reports, “Measles cases rose 20% last year, driven by a lack of vaccine coverage in the world’s poorest countries and those riddled with conflict, the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said on Thursday.” Almost “half of all the large and disruptive outbreaks occurred in the African region where the number of deaths increased by 37%, they said.” Roughly “10.3 million cases of the highly contagious infection were reported in 2023, compared with 8.65 million reported in the previous year, a report by the two agencies showed.” The findings were published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

ABC News (11/14, Zusstone) says, “Nearly 107,500 people died from measles worldwide in 2023 and children under the age of 5 were hit the hardest, the report found.” In the U.S., “there have been 277 measles cases reported across 30 states and the District of Columbia in 2024, more than four times the number of cases last year when there were 59 cases, according to” CDC data.

CNN (11/14, Christensen) reports, “Globally, about 83% of children got their first dose of the measles vaccine in 2023, and only 74% got their recommended second dose, the health organizations said.” Over “22 million children missed getting vaccinated altogether.”

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