The health headlines move fast and most coverage gets the science wrong. Every day, Dr. Ravi Kumar, MD, a board-certified neurosurgeon, cuts through the noise: what a new study or story actually says, what it doesn’t, and what it means for you. Researched, sourced, and reviewed before it’s published.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found soda purchases dropped about 12% among SNAP households in 10 states with new restrictions, but recipients shifted up to 39% of that money into juice and other sugary drinks the rules do not cover.
A UK Biobank study of 46,448 people born around the end of British sugar rationing found lower rates of adult anxiety and depression in those restricted the longest, but the design cannot separate sugar from everything else that changed in 1953.
A Columbia team mapped nearly half a million cells from donated human hippocampus tissue and found that in major depressive disorder, new neurons start forming but fail to mature.
A 376,511-person Swedish cohort found that people who returned their mailed stool kit had 43% lower colorectal cancer mortality, while everyone who was merely invited had 26% lower mortality, and the difference between those two numbers is behavior, not biology.
Federal officials traced an unusual two-pathogen outbreak to Calco and Everything Sprouts brand alfalfa sprouts, which the grower is now recalling.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has reported 5,290 confirmed Bundibugyo virus cases and 2,516 deaths in the largest and fastest-growing Ebola outbreak ever recorded, and the one licensed Ebola vaccine was built against a different species.
In 8,454 adults aged 70 and older, newly elevated heart stress raised 8-year cardiovascular risk by 7.4 percentage points, but people whose level came back down looked like those who never had it.
A 20-patient randomized trial in Nature Medicine found no tumors and no sustained ventricular tachycardia after injecting lab-grown human heart muscle cells during bypass surgery, but every patient who got the cells developed an abnormal rhythm within a month.
In the 29-patient ASPIRE trial, anastrozole, palbociclib, trastuzumab and pertuzumab held advanced breast cancer in check for a median of nearly 25 months without any chemotherapy, though 62 percent of patients still had a severe side effect.
Merck and Moderna say their personalized mRNA vaccine plus Keytruda delayed melanoma recurrence in 1,137 patients after surgery, the first positive phase 3 result for an mRNA cancer therapy, though no effect sizes have been released.
A 168-patient French randomized trial found that adding a soft lumbar belt to usual care improved disability and pain more than usual care alone, and cut the share of patients using pain medication from 67.6% to 50.6%.
A 28-person Japanese study found that a rare tumor-fighting immune cell climbs steeply after age 100, but the direction of cause and effect is still wide open.