GENERAL MEDICAL NEWS
The staff of The Reproductive Times here offers brief referenced notifications on interesting general medical and scientific news with broad relevance to reproductive medicine and biology. Some of these news items may become subjects of more detailed reporting in The Reproductive Times on later occasions. The purpose of these short notifications is to give readers the opportunity to get immediately more detailed information by looking up the reference of the notification.
Is it time to worry about H5Ni, the bird flu?
After initial reports of a Missouri patient who was diagnosed with bird flu with no apparent contact with animals,1 now a follow-up report suggested that someone who lived with the initial patient also got ill.2 A CDC official was quoted as saying that there currently was no epidemiological evidence to support person-to-person transmission of the H5N1 virus but his comments suggested that this must be considered a possibility and further research would be pursued. Since first discovered in dairy cattle in March, the virus has been reported in 14 people, 13 of whom had direct contact with infected cattle or chickens.
References
Aleccia J. AP News. September 6, 2024. https://apnews.com/article/bird-flu-human-missoiri-769d0a52bae2f97a5a 0df13f9e733619
Mandavilli A, Anthes E.The New York Times. September 13m 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/health/bird-flu-missouri.html
FDA WARNING regarding Veozah® (fezolinetant); may cause liver injury
Veozah®, the only FDA-approved non-hormonal medication for hot-flashes in menopause (Astellas Pharma), according to a recent warning by the FDA can cause rare but serious liver injuries. According to the warning, stopping the medication if there are potential signs or symptoms of liver injury, could prevent worsening of the injury and potentially return liver function to normal. This warning was posted after only one post-marketing report of a patient with elevated liver function tests and signs and symptoms of liver damage after taking the medication for approximately 40 days. The FDA, therefore, does not discourage women from using this effective treatment but recommends more frequent liver function testing.1
Reference
1. Manalac. T. BioSpace. September 13, 2024. https://www.biospace.com/fda/astellas-hot-flash-drug-veozah-slapped-with-another-fda-warning-for-liver injury#:~:text=The%20FDA%20on%20Thursday%20added,rare%20but%20serious %E2%80%9D%20liver%20injury.
Summer Olympics in Paris, a COVID “success story”
According to the WHO, at least 40 athletes tested positive for COVID during the Games in Paris (not including the Paralympic Games) but that is considered an improvement over Tokyo and Beijing. One additional feature supporting the relative irrelevance of COVID in comparison to the 2021 Summer Games in Tokyo and the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing—which both had strict restrictions—the Paris games had absolutely no formal requirement for testing or reporting.1
Reference
1. Kekatos M. ABC News. August 15, 2024. https://abcnews.go.com/Health/summer-olympic-games-paris-covid-success-story/story?id=112829794
Alabama IVF clinics still concerned
The New York Times reported that despite a new law meant to protect IVF clinics in Alabama, patient and physician concerns persist, driving some doctors and their patients to move their embryos out of state and/or destroy them. There appears to be little trust between the state’s public and its legislature, which is somewhat surprising, considering that, following the now-infamous Alabama Supreme Court decision equating human embryos with “life,” both major parties supported a new law that was supposed to keep IVF where it was before the court decision.
Though the reported concerns appear exaggerated, the CHR will gladly accept frozen embryos from Alabama and promised they will stay on the center’s premises (many IVF clinics increasingly sub-contract long-term cryopreservation out). New York City, according to the article, is a popular shipment destination.
Reference
1. Chorayshi A, Kliff S. The New York Times. August 13, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/12/health/ivf-embryos-alabama.html
Making pregnancies safe for surgeons (and obstetricians/ gynecologists)
Published data suggesting significantly larger pregnancy risks and complications among surgeons (probably including obstetricians and gynecologists) than in control populations have become very convincing. A surgeon, an obstetrician/gynecologist, and public health specialists from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, WI, now got together and wrote an interesting review on the subject that should be very helpful to who either is trying to go through pregnancy as a practicing surgeon or supervises especially surgical training programs.1
Reference
1. Glazer et al., JAMA Surg 2024. doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2024.0979
Watch your facial temperature; it reveals age and disease
We usually like the weekly Commentary of Yale’s F. Perry Wilson, MSCE, MD under the name “Impact Factor,” published by Medscape. He pointed us in a recent issue 1 toward a paper in the journal Cell Metabolism 2 which went beyond the increasingly ubiquitous presence of facial recognition software in our environment to reporting on algorithms that from a picture of a face can also obtain the age of the individual.
Unsurprisingly performed in China (considering how pervasive facial recognition already is there), the study involved 2,811 facial images of Han Chinese at age 20-90 years. What they called their “ThermoFace” deep learning model had a mean absolute deviation for age of about 5 years in cross-validation and of 5.18 years in validation with an independent cohort. The difference between predicted and chronological age—according to the authors—was highly associated with metabolic parameters, sleeping time, and selected gene expression pathways for DNA repair, lipolysis, and ATPase in blood transcriptome, as well as exercise. A ThermoFace disease predictor, consequently, was able to forecast metabolic diseases. Fatty liver, for example, was predicted with considerable accuracy (AUC >0.80).
The investigators could also with considerable accuracy determine who ate seafood (they usually looked younger than their age) and who ate meats (who looked older than their age); they could predict who was getting more sleep (they looked younger), and who ate more yogurt (also looked younger). These patterns also allowed recognition of those with higher BMI, higher blood pressure, and higher fasting glucose. Moreover, two weeks of rope-jumping makes one look five years younger.
Can you imagine where all of this may end up?
References
1. Wilson FP. Medscape July 2, 2024. https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/how-facial-temperature-revelas-age-and-disease- 2024a1000c73
2. Yu et al., Cell Metab 2024;36(7):1482-1493