Researchers identified a gene that seems to help slow brain aging in women, and studied links between hormone therapy, menopause and Alzheimer’s.Women’s brains are superior to men’s in at least in one respect — they age more slowly. And now, a group of researchers reports that they have found a gene in mice that rejuvenates female brains.Humans have the same gene. The discovery suggests a possible way to help both women and men avoid cognitive declines in advanced age.The study was published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. The journal also published two other studies on women’s brains, one on the effect of hormone therapy on the brain and another on how age at the onset of menopause shapes the risk of getting Alzheimer’s disease.A gene that slows brain agingThe evidence that women’s brains age more slowly than men’s do seemed compelling.Researchers, looking at the way the brain uses blood sugar, had already found that the brains of aging women are years younger, in metabolic terms, than the brains of aging men.Other scientists, examining markings on DNA, found that female brains are a year or so younger than male brains.And careful cognitive studies of healthy older people found that women had better memories and cognitive function than men of the same age.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The condition, which entails pneumonia in both lungs, is potentially grave, according to health experts.Pope Francis, who remains hospitalized, has bilateral pneumonia, the Vatican said on Tuesday.The term simply means pneumonia in both lungs, said Dr. James Musser, director of the center for infectious diseases at the Houston Methodist Research Institute. He added that, without examining a patient, he could not say anything specific about his condition.In general, pneumonia is an infection of the small airways of the lungs. As the body mounts an inflammatory response, small pockets in the lungs fill with immune cells; symptoms can include fever, cough and shaking chills. To diagnose the illness, a doctor typically asks the patient to say a long “e,” as if the person were singing. Through a stethoscope, the “e” of a pneumonia patient sounds like an “a,” said Dr. Paul Pottinger, a professor of infectious diseases at the University of Washington.Most people with pneumonia recover well at home and do not need to be hospitalized. But for older people, pneumonia can be “a deadly situation,” infectious disease experts said.Dr. Peter Chin-Hong, professor of medicine and infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco, added that “the mortality rate goes up after age 85.” The pope is 88.The most likely cause of pneumonia is an infection caused by a bacterium, Streptococcus pneumoniae, according to Dr. Chin-Hong. “The No. 1, 2 and 3 cause of pneumonia is strep pneumonia,” he said.The illness can respond to antibiotics, but bacteria can sometimes spill out of the lungs and into the rest of the body, resulting in sepsis, a dangerous situation. A vaccine can help mitigate this sepsis risk but does not prevent the condition, Dr. Chin-Hong said.Dr. Pottinger noted that, although strep pneumonia can involve both lungs, it usually is confined to one lobe of one lung. Most bilateral pneumonia, he said, is caused by viruses, including influenza, or other bacteria. Other causes include respiratory syncytial virus, or R.S.V., Legionella, mycoplasma and chlamydia, Dr. Pottinger said.He agreed with Dr. Chin-Hong about the likely gravity of the pope’s condition.“It is a very scary situation,” Dr. Pottinger said.

At cardiology conferences and diabetes meetings, doctors can’t help noticing that thin seems to be very in.When Dr. C. Michael Gibson, a cardiologist at Harvard Medical School, goes to heart disease meetings, he can’t help noticing a change.“We will sit around at dinner and halfway through the meal, we will simultaneously push our plates away,” Dr. Gibson said. “We look at each other and laugh and say, ‘You, too?’”They share what is becoming an open secret: They tried for years to control their weight but are now taking the new obesity drugs manufactured by Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.Dr. Robert Califf, the former chief of the Food and Drug Administration, says he hardly recognizes his colleagues. So many are now so thin.“Looking good,” he says he tells his fellow cardiologists at conferences and meetings.There are no studies documenting the percentage of doctors taking the drugs. But physicians “are a good litmus test for drugs that are highly effective,” Dr. Califf said. If doctors who read the papers describing clinical-trial results are rushing to get a new drug, that is an indication that it’s really promising.His colleagues’ use of Wegovy and Zepbound reminds him of the use of statins, drugs that lower cholesterol, in their early days. Cardiologists, who were most familiar with the consequences of high cholesterol levels, were among the first to take the drugs in large numbers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The study may suggest that other researchers should be less optimistic about the prospects for treating a range of other conditions with newer weight-loss drugs.The idea was so tantalizing. Drugs in the GLP-1 class, which includes Wegovy and Ozempic, have proved miraculous in treating weight loss and other diseases. And some researchers hoped that the drugs could also help with some of the most difficult diseases to treat — those of the brain, like Parkinson’s.But now, at least for Parkinson’s, that hope seems dimmed. A rigorous study that randomly assigned Parkinson’s patients to take exenatide, a relative of Ozempic, showed absolutely no benefit or slowing of the course of the degenerative disease after 96 weeks.And there were no effect on patient symptoms, no effect on brain scans, no subgroup that showed any benefit. No matter how the researchers sliced the data the results were the same.The study, published Tuesday in The Lancet, is bad news for the half million Americans who have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. Symptoms include tremors, stiffness and difficulty with balance. Patients also may develop dementia. Treatments, including medications and deep brain stimulation, can help with symptoms. But no treatment has been shown to slow the disease’s progress.“It’s hugely disappointing,” said Dr. Thomas Foltynie of University College London, who led the trial. “We were expecting we would come through and we would get a positive result.”Parkinson’s experts shared his sentiment.“This is a sobering moment,” said Dr. Michael S. Okun, a Parkinson’s disease expert at the University of Florida and the national medical adviser for the Parkinson’s Foundation. “This is a really well done study and it came up empty-handed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The drug, Journavx by Vertex Pharmaceuticals, blocks pain signals to the brain, making it nonaddictive.The Food and Drug Administration approved a new medication Thursday to treat pain from an injury or surgery. It is expensive, with a list price of $15.50 per pill. But unlike opioid pain medicines, it cannot become addictive.That is because the drug, suzetrigine, made by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and to be sold as Journavx, works only on nerves outside the brain, blocking pain signals. It cannot get into the brain.Researchers say they expect it to be the first of a new generation of more powerful nonaddictive drugs to relieve pain.To test the drug, Vertex, which is based in Boston, conducted two large clinical trials, each with approximately 1,000 patients who had pain from surgery. They were randomly assigned to get a placebo; to get the opioid sold as Vicodin, a widely used combination pain medicine of acetaminophen (Tylenol) and hydrocodone; or to get suzetrigine.In one trial, patients had an abdominoplasty, or tummy tuck. In the other, they had a bunionectomy. Side effects of suzetrigine reported by patients were similar to the ones reported by those taking the placebo.The company also submitted data from a 250-person study that assessed the drug’s safety and tolerability in patients with pain from surgery, trauma or accidents.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

While the announcement is good news for the Princess of Wales, cancer experts describe the challenges of a life shadowed by an earlier diagnosis.Princess Catherine, wife of Prince William, reported on Tuesday that her cancer was in remission. But what does it mean to be in remission from cancer?Doctors discovered her cancer unexpectedly last March when she had abdominal surgery. She has not revealed the type kind of cancer she has, nor how advanced it was when it was discovered.But she did say she had chemotherapy, which she said had been completed in September. She told the British news agency PA Media that she had a port, a small device that is implanted under the skin and attached to a catheter that goes into a large vein. It allows medicines like chemotherapy drugs to be delivered directly to veins in the chest, avoiding needle sticks.Catherine told PA Media that chemotherapy was “really tough.”“It is a relief to now be in remission and I remain focused on recovery,” she wrote on Instagram.Her announcement “certainly is good news and is reassuring,” said Dr. Kimmie Ng, associate chief of the division of gastrointestinal oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.But cancer experts like Dr. Ng say that the meaning of remission in a patient can vary.In general, when doctors and patients talk about remission, they mean there is no evidence of cancer in blood tests or scans.The problem is that a complete remission does not mean the cancer is gone. Even when a cancer is “cured” — defined as no evidence of cancer for five years — it may not be vanquished.That makes life emotionally difficult for patients, who have to have frequent visits with oncologists for physical exams, blood tests and imaging.“It’s really scary,” Dr. Ng said. “The amount of uncertainty is very very hard,” she added.But that ongoing surveillance is necessary, despite the toll it takes on patients.“Different cancers have different propensities of returning or not returning,” said Dr. Elena Ratner, a gynecologic oncologist at the Yale Cancer Center.As many as 75 to 80 percent of ovarian cancers, she noted, can come back in an average of 14 to 16 months after a remission, depending on the stage the cancer had reached when it was found and on the cancer’s biology.“Once the cancer returns, it becomes a chronic disease,” Dr. Ratner said. She tells her patients: “You will live with this cancer. You will be on and off chemotherapy for the rest of your life.”Dr. Ratner’s gynecological cancer patients have to come back every three months for CT scans to keep an eye out for evidence that the cancer has returned.“The women live CT scan to CT scan,” she said. “They say that for two and a half months, they have a wonderful life, but then, in time for the next CT scan, the fear returns.”“It costs them — it costs them a lot,” she said.“It’s awful, yet I am amazed every day by their strength,” she said of her patients.

An international commission made the case for focusing on body fat quantity and the illnesses people experience.Obesity should be assessed in a way that goes beyond the standard measure of body mass index, or B.M.I., according to a new definition of the condition released by an international commission.Its report, published Tuesday in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology journal, makes the case for focusing on how much body fat and what medical complications the person has, not just their weight.If the guidelines are widely adopted, they could change doctors’ perceptions of who needs to be treated for obesity. They could also affect the use of prescription drugs that treat obesity, like Wegovy and Zepbound. The new definition of obesity was endorsed by 76 organizations around the world.The commission proposed that instead of continuing the current use of B.M.I. — as a way to define obesity — it should be a screening tool to determine who should be tested for excess body fat.The commission said that people who had a B.M.I. over 25 and too much fat, but who are otherwise healthy, should pretty much be left alone. They should be monitored and counseled not to gain any more weight and possibly to lose some.Their condition would be called pre-clinical obesity.Other people with any of the 18 medical conditions caused by obesity — 13 for children and adolescents — require medical treatment to improve their health and prevent serious injuries to organs. The conditions include breathlessness, heart failure, hip or knee pain, metabolic abnormalities and poorly functioning organs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Medical historians say that the phrase “Make America Healthy Again” obscures a past during which this country’s people ate, smoked and drank things that mostly left them unwell.“We will make Americans healthy again,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has declared. A political action committee that has promoted Mr. Kennedy, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, says his movement is “igniting a health revolution in America.”But the word “again” presumes a time in the country’s past when Americans were in better health. Was there ever really a time when America was healthier?For historians of medicine, there is a short answer.“No,” said Nancy Tomes, a historian at Stony Brook University.John Harley Warner, a historian at Yale, said, “It’s hard for me to think of a time when America, with all the real health disparities that characterize our system, was healthier.”Dr. Jeremy Greene, a historian at Johns Hopkins University, asked: “Which particular era does R.F.K. want to take us back to?”Probably not the 19th and early 20th century.Rich men smoked cigarettes and cigars, the poor chewed tobacco. Heavy drinking was the norm.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

Statements by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Elon Musk tap into a dispute over whether lifestyle changes or drugs are a better way to treat obesity.For Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the activist whom President-elect Donald J. Trump will nominate to serve as the secretary of health and human services, the solution to obesity in America — now at 40 percent of adults — is straightforward: “The first line of response should be lifestyle,” he told Jim Cramer in a Dec. 12 interview on CNBC.Elon Musk, the technology billionaire who advises the president-elect, sees things differently: “Nothing would do more to improve the health, lifespan and quality of life for Americans than making GLP inhibitors super low cost to the public,” he wrote on X, referring to the new class of drugs that cause weight loss, including Ozempic. “Nothing else is even close.”And there, with the contrasting views of two men in Mr. Trump’s ear, lie two sides of an issue that is plaguing health and nutrition researchers. Is it even possible to change lifestyles and the food environment enough to solve America’s obesity problem? And, if not, do we really want to solve it by putting millions of people on powerful drugs? What is the right balance between the two approaches?Many people find that eating well is easier said than done. Food companies have saturated the United States and other nations with seductively cheap and tasty things to eat, available seemingly everywhere and around the clock. Obesity researchers suspect that the current food environment has allowed many Americans to be as overweight as they possibly can be.But for the first time, there is an effective countervailing force — powerful new obesity drugs like Wegovy and Zepbound that allow people to ignore the siren call of high-calorie foods and large portion sizes.Those with views like Mr. Kennedy’s believe it is wrong to use pharmaceuticals to manage obesity and related issues that are tied to unhealthy lifestyle and to a ruinous food environment. The makers of obesity drugs, Mr. Kennedy told Greg Gutfeld on Fox News before the election, are “counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The drug, which is named MariTide and delivered in a monthly injection, is years from being sold, but caused an average of up to 20 percent weight loss in a small group of patients.The pharmaceutical manufacturer Amgen announced on Tuesday that an experimental obesity drug helped patients lose an average of up to 20 percent of their weight in a year. The drug, using the brand name MariTide, is given by injection once a month, compared with once a week for other obesity drugs like Wegovy and Mounjaro that are already on the market.The data came from a clinical trial involving nearly 600 people. It was a Phase 2 trial, testing effectiveness as well as safety. The drug still must go through additional clinical trial phases involving many more patients, and then receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration before being sold to patients. The company has yet to set a price for the drug.Amgen also did not provide detailed data — that will come in later in a peer-reviewed study and will be presented at a meeting, the company said. Instead, to meet requirements of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, it provided so called top-line data that could affect its stock price.Dr. Jeffrey Flier, a diabetes and obesity researcher at Harvard, said the results were “promising,” adding that MariTide “could be a future player in a highly competitive market.”Dr. Jay Bradner, the company’s chief scientific officer, noted a surprising effect of the drug: When the trial ended, many participants maintained their weight loss for as long as 150 days. That leaves open the possibility of less frequent injections or even of patients not staying on the drug permanently.Amgen also tested MariTide in a population with Type 2 diabetes, a group that tends to lose less weight with the new obesity drugs. On average they lost up to 17 percent of their initial weight.Some patients experienced side effects that included nausea that lasted an average of six days, and vomiting that persisted an average of one to two days. In each case, the averse effects resolved themselves.The Amgen drug differs in how it works from obesity drugs that are currently being sold, Wegovy by Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly. Those are GLP-1’s, which means they bind to a protein on the surface of cells that respond to the gut hormone GLP-1. But MariTide is an antibody, a type of drug that is long lasting in the body. Sticking out from the antibody are two peptides that also bind to GLP-1 receptors.The antibody itself blocks the effects of another gut hormone known as GIP. Dr. Bradner said the company decided to block GIP because it had genetic data from Iceland indicating that people who had a variant that stops GIP from working were naturally thinner.Why the drug is effective remains a mystery. Eli Lilly’s drugs — Mounjaro, for diabetes, and Zepbound, for obesity — activate GIP. So why would a drug like MariTide, which inhibits it, be so effective? The company is sponsoring studies in mice to try to figure that out.This is a developing story.