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(New York Times) – The Federal Trade Commission announced on Wednesday that it had reached a settlement with Cigna’s Express Scripts, one of the nation’s largest pharmacy benefit managers, over its role in driving up insulin prices.

Express Scripts will not pay a fine or face a financial penalty as part of the settlement and did not admit to any wrongdoing. But the company agreed to a range of changes to its business model. (Read More)

(Axios) – A review of rules governing Colorado’s psychedelic therapy program will include potentially expanding the substances available for treatment.

Why it matters: The change would make Colorado the first state to use ibogaine — a psychoactive found in the roots of the African shrub iboga — for regulated medical treatment. (Read More)

(Wired) – The cultural obsession with wellness and optimization, which is currently driven and designed by male biohackers like Bryan Johnson and Peter Attia, has come for this murky preconception period, coined “the zero trimester” by sociologist Miranda Waggoner in her 2017 book by the same name. Women have started training for pregnancy “like it’s a marathon,” as influencer Kaylie Stewart announced to her 1 million TikTok followers last fall. After all, if you spend months planning a wedding, some influencers point out, why wouldn’t you do the same for a baby?

A growing group of influencers and holistic women’s health experts, doctors, life coaches, and nutritionists are posting content that speaks to the “Trying to Conceive” (TTC) demographic—including women who are struggling to conceive and those who haven’t started yet. The concept is simple: If you follow this wellness formula, you will set yourself up for the quickest conception, the easiest pregnancy, and the healthiest child. Pregnancy, these accounts argue, doesn’t have to be traumatic. You get to be in the driver’s seat. And what mom-to-be wouldn’t want that? (Read More)

(MedPage Today) – For the first time, a major U.S. physician group has recommended against gender transition surgeries for youths.

On Tuesday, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) sent a position statement to its 11,000 members recommending against gender-related breast/chest, genital, and facial surgery until a patient is at least 19 years old.

The news was first reported by the Washington Post. (Read More)

(Nature) – Hindering studies involving fetal tissue will impede the development of the alternatives intended to replace it, while slowing the search for new medicines.

“This decision is about advancing science by investing in breakthrough technologies more capable of modeling human health and disease,” NIH director Jayanta Bhattacharya said in a statement. Those technologies, the statement added, include computer modelling, organ-on-a-chip systems and complex 3D cell cultures called organoids.

But developmental biologists say that these tools are not yet able to model human health and disease accurately. That is also the view of the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) in Evanston, Illinois. In response to the NIH decision, the ISSCR said: “Research with human fetal tissue (HFT) and HFT-derived cell lines has been integral to biomedical progress for nearly a century”. (Read More)

(Nature) – Many cancers are linked to two modifiable habits: tobacco smoking and alcohol consumption.

Nearly 40% of new cancer cases worldwide are potentially preventable, according to one of the first investigations of its kind, which analysed dozens of cancer types in almost 200 countries.

The study found that in 2022, roughly seven million cancer diagnoses were linked to modifiable risk factors — those that can be changed, controlled or managed to reduce the likelihood of developing the disease. Overall, tobacco smoking was the leading contributor to worldwide cancer cases, followed by infections and drinking alcohol. The findings suggest that avoiding such risk factors is “one of the most powerful ways that we can potentially reduce the future cancer burden”, says study co-author Hanna Fink, a cancer epidemiologist at the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France. (Read More)

(Nature) – Although scientists have known for more than a century that mental imagery varies between people, the topic received a surge of attention when, a decade ago, an influential paper coined the term aphantasia to describe the experience of people with no mental imagery.

Since then, aphantasia has shot into the canon of unusual phenomena that are invaluable for studying how the mind works. Like synaesthesia (in which people’s senses are connected in exceptional ways, so they hear colours, for example) and prosopagnosia (also known as face blindness), aphantasia has opened many new research avenues.

Much of the early work sought to describe the trait and assess how it affected behaviour. But over the past five years, studies have begun to explore what’s different about the brains of people with this form of inner life (Read More)

(WSJ) – A lone semiretired Austrian coder built Moltbot and unleashed it on the world. People have created their own AI assistant bots through his project, which he renamed OpenClaw, to make phone calls to restaurants for dinner reservations, operate their email accounts and take on an array of assistant and work tasks, from coding projects to data analysis.

Then, the bots started talking to one another.

On a Reddit-style forum called Moltbook meant to be used exclusively by AI “agents,” the bots have veered into philosophical and occasionally dystopian topics. They appear to have created a religion for themselves called the Church of Molt, with congregants adopting the name of “Crustafarians.” One agent proposed creating a language humans couldn’t understand. (Read More)

(New York Times) – Onchocerciasis is one of 21 afflictions, most of them treatable and preventable, that the World Health Organization classifies as neglected tropical diseases. Together, they affect more than a billion people, but because many are among the poorest people in the least developed places, these diseases have historically received little funding, research or attention.

While they are rarely fatal, these diseases exact a huge toll in human suffering, including pain, disfigurement and disabilities such as blindness. They are sometimes called “biblical” because they have plagued humans for so long that they are mentioned in ancient texts.

The United States was a major funder of a 20-year effort to finally wipe them out. That money vanished a year ago when the Trump administration dismantled much of U.S. foreign assistance. (Read More)

(New York Times) – In a legal first, a jury in New York awarded $2 million to a patient who said that doctors had deviated from accepted medical standards.

In the first malpractice verdict against providers of gender-affirming care for minors, a jury in New York State has awarded a woman $2 million in damages for a double mastectomy she received as a teenager that she said had left her disfigured.

The plaintiff, Fox Varian, 22, of Yorktown Heights, had accused her psychologist and the plastic surgeon who performed the operation of failing to obtain adequate consent about the risks before she agreed to undergo the procedure in 2019.

She also claimed that the providers had deviated from standard practices governing gender-related medical care. (Read More)

(New York Times) – For decades, hospitals have given babies a vitamin K injection to protect against bleeding. Now, the shot appears to be facing resistance.

Vitamin K plays a crucial role in blood clotting but doesn’t pass to the baby through the placenta effectively, and there isn’t much of it in breast milk. Infants are deficient in it until they can eat solid foods. This can lead to bleeding, from minor oozing from the umbilical cord to potentially life-threatening gastrointestinal or brain hemorrhages.

One injection immediately after birth is very effective at fixing the deficiency, and it has been routinely administered in the United States for more than 60 years.

Now, the shot appears to have been swept up in broader anti-vaccine sentiment, even though it isn’t a vaccine. (Read More)

(WSJ) – There is a looming crisis in America’s death industry. Green-Wood Cemetery might have found a lifeline.

The storied 478-acre Brooklyn burial ground, like many across the U.S., is running out of room for new occupants. With the help of a German entrepreneur, cemetery officials believe they can profitably augment the property by turning loved ones into gardening soil.

The process, called natural organic reduction, uses the body’s own bacteria to transform human tissue. The dead are placed in a sealed vessel bedded with clover, hay and straw and equipped to regulate airflow, temperature and moisture. Then nature takes its course. Microbes break down everything but bones, which are ground into the final compost mix. (Read More)