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Ultra-processed food consumption and all cause and cause specific mortality

This study found that a higher intake of ultra-processed foods was associated with slightly higher all cause mortality, driven by causes other than cancer and cardiovascular diseases

China’s declining fertility rate

A persistently low fertility rate will affect both population health and the organisation of health services. China’s population challenges are shared by many high income countries globally

Revolving doors: board memberships, hedge funds, and the FDA chiefs responsible for regulating industry

Financial entanglements with industry are common among FDA leaders, finds investigation

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Sarah Benn explains why suspension from the medical register will not stop her protesting

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Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence

Title: capabilities of gemini models in medicine.

Abstract: Excellence in a wide variety of medical applications poses considerable challenges for AI, requiring advanced reasoning, access to up-to-date medical knowledge and understanding of complex multimodal data. Gemini models, with strong general capabilities in multimodal and long-context reasoning, offer exciting possibilities in medicine. Building on these core strengths of Gemini, we introduce Med-Gemini, a family of highly capable multimodal models that are specialized in medicine with the ability to seamlessly use web search, and that can be efficiently tailored to novel modalities using custom encoders. We evaluate Med-Gemini on 14 medical benchmarks, establishing new state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance on 10 of them, and surpass the GPT-4 model family on every benchmark where a direct comparison is viable, often by a wide margin. On the popular MedQA (USMLE) benchmark, our best-performing Med-Gemini model achieves SoTA performance of 91.1% accuracy, using a novel uncertainty-guided search strategy. On 7 multimodal benchmarks including NEJM Image Challenges and MMMU (health & medicine), Med-Gemini improves over GPT-4V by an average relative margin of 44.5%. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Med-Gemini's long-context capabilities through SoTA performance on a needle-in-a-haystack retrieval task from long de-identified health records and medical video question answering, surpassing prior bespoke methods using only in-context learning. Finally, Med-Gemini's performance suggests real-world utility by surpassing human experts on tasks such as medical text summarization, alongside demonstrations of promising potential for multimodal medical dialogue, medical research and education. Taken together, our results offer compelling evidence for Med-Gemini's potential, although further rigorous evaluation will be crucial before real-world deployment in this safety-critical domain.

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False Health Claims Abound, but Physicians Are Still the Most Trusted Source for Health Information

• 1 Senior Staff Writer, Medical News & Perspectives, JAMA
• 2 Manager and Senior Medical Illustrator, Editorial Graphics, JAMA and JAMA Network
• Editor's Note Introducing JAMA Data Brief Jennifer Abbasi, BA; Karen Bucher, MA, CMI; Andy Rekito, MS; Stephen Schenkel, MD, MPP; Annette Flanagin, RN, MA JAMA

The COVID-19 pandemic spotlighted a growing problem: the pervasiveness of false claims about health. To better understand how people in the US view health inaccuracies and learn about them through media use, KFF (formerly Kaiser Family Foundation), a nonprofit organization focused on health policy, tracked exposure to and beliefs about certain claims. For their Health Misinformation Tracking Pilot Poll , conducted last year, public opinion researchers at KFF asked a nationally representative sample of 2007 Black, Hispanic, and White adults about inaccurate information pertaining to COVID-19, gun violence, and reproductive health. The survey team also asked where people get their news and which sources of health information they trust.

The poll showed that trust in health care professionals crossed party lines: 95% of both Democrats and Republicans reported trusting their personal physicians to provide the right recommendations about health issues. “Doctors are particularly well positioned to be the messengers when it comes to health recommendations that people really trust,” Lunna Lopes, MSc, the lead author of the report and a senior survey analyst at KFF, told JAMA Medical News in an interview.

Most people have a fair amount of trust in the government to provide accurate information about health issues, but trust varies across political party lines. For example, 87% of Democrats reported trust in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention compared with 49% of Republicans. State and local public health officials were trusted by 74% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans.

Overall, 96% of participants reported that they’ve heard at least 1 of the 10 inaccurate health claims listed on KFF’s survey—that measles-mumps-rubella (MME) vaccines cause autism, for example, or that ivermectin is effective against COVID-19. And while exposure to health misinformation was rampant, the percentage of people who have heard false claims and believe they’re probably or definitely true ranged from 14% to 35%. “A key takeaway that we got from the data is that people are hearing misinformation, but not many are convinced that it’s true,” Lopes said.

The results suggest that many people fall into what KFF refers to as the “malleable middle”: people who hear or read incorrect claims but are uncertain whether the information is accurate. “They say the claims are either probably true or probably false, but they’re not convinced in either direction,” Lopes explained. She emphasized that health communication needs to be more customized to reach this group. “They’re in the middle, but that doesn’t mean that they will respond to the same types of messages or interventions.”

Another key finding was that many individuals are concerned about the spread of false health claims and want more done to limit it. People overwhelmingly reported that inaccurate information about health is an important issue. In fact, 86% of respondents said false and inaccurate information in general is a major problem, and 74% reported that false claims about health specifically are a major problem.

Most respondents—regardless of their demographics or partisanship—also believe that not enough is being done to limit false claims about health. Among those polled, 78% and 68%, respectively, reported that Congress and President Joe Biden aren’t doing enough, and about 7 in 10 reported that the US news media and social media platforms need to step up.

But the idea of false claims varies from person to person. “While people agree there’s a problem, there isn’t necessarily agreement on what constitutes health misinformation, so that’s what makes addressing the problem particularly challenging,” Lopes added.

Many people reported high social media use, yet few have trust in health information published on such platforms. YouTube and Facebook were the most popular sites: 65% and 63% of respondents reported visiting the platforms every week, respectively. But trust in these sites was considerably low. Only 8% of respondents said they would have a lot of trust in health information on YouTube, and 5% would trust health information on Facebook. Twitter, now known as X, was used weekly by 21% of respondents, although only 4% would trust health information on the site. People who frequently used social media to search for health information were more likely to believe false claims about health.

When asked about traditional news sources, most respondents said they rely on local television, national networks, and digital aggregators. Overall, 62% reported regularly watching local television news, and 56% often tune into national networks like ABC, CBS, or NBC. Digital aggregators like Apple, Google, or Yahoo news followed closely behind at 55%.

But fewer than 3 in 10 adults reported having a lot of trust in each of the media sources listed in the survey. About a fourth of respondents said they would have a lot of trust in information about health issues reported by local television news or national networks, the most trusted sources.

“You’re going to have at least a little bit of trust in the news source that you’re following, but there is some skepticism there,” Lopes said.

The takeaway, Lopes said, is that although exposure to inaccurate health information remains high, so does public doubt surrounding such claims. “Most adults express uncertainty and may be open to additional information from trusted messengers, especially from their own doctors.”

Published Online: April 26, 2024. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.6837

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Ms Lopes reported that some support for KFF’s Health Misinformation Tracking Poll Pilot was provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

See More About

Suran M , Bucher K. False Health Claims Abound, but Physicians Are Still the Most Trusted Source for Health Information. JAMA. Published online April 26, 2024. doi:10.1001/jama.2024.6837

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Study finds association between neighborhood deprivation and DNA methylation in an autopsy cohort

by Impact Journals LLC

A new research paper was published in Aging , titled, "The association between neighborhood deprivation and DNA methylation in an autopsy cohort."

Previous research has found that living in a disadvantaged neighborhood is associated with poor health outcomes. Living in disadvantaged neighborhoods may alter inflammation and immune response in the body, which could be reflected in epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation (DNAm).

In this new study, researchers from Emory University, University of British Columbia, BC Children's Hospital Research Institute, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, and Atlanta VA Medical Center used robust linear regression models to conduct an epigenome-wide association study examining the association between neighborhood deprivation (Area Deprivation Index; ADI), and DNAm in brain tissue from 159 donors enrolled in the Emory Goizueta Alzheimer's Disease Research Center (Georgia, U.S.).

"We found one CpG site (cg26514961, gene PLXNC1) significantly associated with ADI after controlling for covariates and multiple testing (p-value = 5.0e -8 )," write the researchers.

Effect modification by APOE ε4 was statistically significant for the top ten CpG sites from the EWAS of ADI, indicating that the observed associations between ADI and DNAm were mainly driven by donors who carried at least one APOE ε4 allele. Four of the top ten CpG sites showed a significant concordance between brain tissue and tissues that are easily accessible in living individuals (blood, buccal cells, saliva), including DNAm in cg26514961 (PLXNC1).

This study identified one CpG site (cg26514961, PLXNC1 gene) that was significantly associated with neighborhood deprivation in brain tissue . PLXNC1 is related to immune response , which may be one biological pathway to how neighborhood conditions affect health.

"The concordance between brain and other tissues for our top CpG sites could make them potential candidates for biomarkers in living individuals," the authors conclude.

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