The Association for Palliative Care Medicine (APM) continues to misinform on palliative medicine doctors’ stance on assisted dying, warn a group of palliative medicine consultants in The BMJ today.

The World Health Organization (WHO) says that it is adhering to standard protocol in pursuing its transgender health guideline, but the process has been criticised for lacking transparency and an association with WPATH - an organisation that supports the “gender affirming” approach, including hormones and surgery, for all ages - and is under fire for meddling with its own guideline development.

Chronic, low-level lead poisoning is a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease in adults and cognitive deficits in children, even at levels previously thought to be safe,  Low-level lead poisoning is a risk factor for preterm Birth, cognitive deficits and attention deficit–hyperactivity disorder, (ADHD), as well as increased blood pressure and reduced heart rate variability.

What: Young people with severe obesity who underwent weight-loss surgery at age 19 or younger continued to see sustained weight loss and resolution of common obesity-related comorbidities 10 years later, according to results from a large clinical study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Ten years after undergoing bariatric surgery as teens, over half of study participants demonstrated not only sustained weight loss, but also resolution of obesity-related conditions, such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol, according to the report published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may one day play a larger role in medicine than the online symptom checkers available today. But these “AI doctors” may need to get more personal than human doctors to increase patient satisfaction, according to a study led by researchers at Penn State. They found that the more social information an AI doctor recalls about patients, the higher the patients’ satisfaction, but only if they were offered privacy control.

The amount of money people pay out-of-pocket for branded drugs to treat neurological diseases like multiple sclerosis (MS), Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s disease continues to rise, especially for MS drugs, according to a study published in the October 30, 2024, online issue of Neurology^®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology. The study found that average out-of-pocket costs for drugs for MS increased by 217% over a nine-year period.