Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Sept. 25, 2023

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Sept. 25, 2023–Sept. 29, 2023.

CNN (9/28, Holcombe) reports “adolescents whose parents drank regularly or binge drank were four times more likely to drink themselves, according to a study.” The reason behind “that connection could be tied to multiple things like modeling, alcohol accessibility in the home or a parent’s permissiveness around drinking, said Dr. Scott Hadland, chief of adolescent and young adult medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital for Children and Harvard Medical School in Boston.” The findings were published in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

The Hill (9/27, Nazzaro) reports the FDA “updated the label for Ozempic, a type 2 diabetes drug that is often used for weight loss, to now note the potential side effect of intestinal blockage.” The agency “said the medication will now include a warning of increased reports of ileus, or the blockage of intestinal contents, according to the National Institute of Health.” The label warning was also added to weight loss drug Wegovy, “which is made by the same manufacturer of Ozempic.”

CBS News (9/27, Tin) reports that “the FDA stopped short of directly blaming the potentially life-threatening condition on the drug.” The label now reads, “Because these reactions are reported voluntarily from a population of uncertain size, it is not always possible to reliably estimate their frequency or establish a causal relationship to drug exposure.”

The Hill (9/26, Fortinsky) says almost “18 million U.S. adults reported having struggled with long COVID-19 as of 2022, according to a...Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report.” The report “found that about 6.9% of adults reported that they had experienced long COVID in last year’s National Health Interview Survey, and about 3.4% of adults reported that they were currently suffering from long COVID at the time.” The report also “noted significant differences in those most likely to report having had long COVID in terms of sex and sociodemographic characteristics.”

CBS News (9/26, Moniuszko) reports that a “study from earlier this year, funded by the National Institutes of Health, brought new understanding to symptoms associated with” long COVID. After analyzing “data from thousands of adults, researchers identified the 12 symptoms that most set apart those with long COVID, which included” fatigue, brain fog, heart palpitations, chest pain, and a chronic cough, among others.

Editor's note: Interested in more on long COVID and other great health care content? Subscribe to the AMA's YouTube channel and get all our latest Updates.

NBC News (9/25, Edwards) reports “scientists have found clear differences in the blood of people with long COVID – a key first step in the development of a test to diagnose the illness.” The findings of the research published in Nature “also offer clues into what could be causing the elusive condition.” The researchers “compared blood samples of 268 people.” Some of those people had COVID-19 “but had fully recovered, some had never been infected, and the rest had ongoing symptoms of long COVID at least four months after their infection.” A number of “differences in the blood of people with long COVID stood out from the other groups.”

CNN (9/25, Goodman) reports that a second study “used magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, to scan 259 people who’d been hospitalized with COVID-19.” The researchers “compared their scans with those of 52 people who’d never had COVID-19.” According to CNN, “after an average of five months after discharge, researchers found evidence of damage to the lungs, brain or kidneys of 1 out of 3 people who’d been hospitalized with COVID-19.” The findings were published in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine. Together, CNN says, the two “studies are providing insights about the biology behind long COVID and, if reproduced, could point to potential biomarkers for” long COVID.

The Washington Post (9/22, Malhi) reported, “Federal regulators recommended on Friday that expectant mothers get an RSV vaccine to protect their newborns from the potentially deadly respiratory disease.” A CDC advisory panel has recommended the vaccine “for people who are between 32 and 36 weeks pregnant and who will give birth during the fall and winter, when RSV cases usually spike.”

The AP (9/22, Stobbe) reported the Pfizer vaccine (Abrysvo) “prompts the moms-to-be to develop virus-fighting antibodies that pass through the placenta to the fetus.” That protection “likely drops after 6 months of age, so the shot is for use between September and January in most of the U.S., to coincide with the time of year when RSV infections tend to be most common.”

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