The treatment is for patients with small cell lung cancer, which afflicts about 35,000 people in the U.S. a year.The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved an innovative new treatment for patients with a form of lung cancer. It is to be used only by patients who have exhausted all other options to treat small cell lung cancer, and have a life expectancy of four to five months.The drug tarlatamab, or Imdelltra, made by the company Amgen, tripled patients’ life expectancy, giving them a median survival of 14 months after they took the drug. Forty percent of those who got the drug responded.After decades with no real advances in treatments for small cell lung cancer, tarlatamab offers the first real hope, said Dr. Anish Thomas, a lung cancer specialist at the federal National Cancer Institute who was not involved in the trial.“I feel it’s a light after a long time,” he added.Dr. Timothy Burns, a lung cancer specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, said that the drug “will be practice-changing.”(Dr. Burns was not an investigator in the study but has served on an Amgen advisory committee for a different drug.)The drug, though, has a side effect that can be serious — cytokine release syndrome. It’s an overreaction of the immune system that can result in symptoms like a rash, a rapid heartbeat and low blood pressure.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.

Using powerful technologies, scientists found staggering amounts of lead and other toxic substances in the composer’s hair that may have come from wine, or other sources.At 7 p.m. on May 7, 1824, Ludwig van Beethoven, then 53, strode onto the stage of the magnificent Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna to help conduct the world premiere of his Ninth Symphony, the last he would ever complete.That performance, whose 200th anniversary is on Tuesday, was unforgettable in many ways. But it was marked by an incident at the start of the second movement that revealed to the audience of about 1,800 people how deaf the revered composer had become.Ted Albrecht, a professor emeritus of musicology at Kent State University in Ohio and author of a recent book on the Ninth Symphony, described the scene.The movement began with loud kettledrums, and the crowd cheered wildly.But Beethoven was oblivious to the applause and his music. He stood with his back to the audience, beating time. At that moment, a soloist grasped his sleeve and turned him around to see the raucous adulation he could not hear.It was one more humiliation for a composer who had been mortified by his deafness since he had begun to lose his hearing in his twenties.But why had he gone deaf? And why was he plagued by unrelenting abdominal cramps, flatulence and diarrhea?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 company reported results of clinical trials involving Zepbound, an obesity drug in the same class as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy.The pharmaceutical manufacturer Eli Lilly announced on Wednesday that its obesity drug tirzepatide, or Zepbound, provided considerable relief to overweight or obese people who had obstructive sleep apnea, or episodes of stopped breathing during sleep.The results, from a pair of yearlong clinical trials, could offer a new treatment option for some 20 million Americans who have been diagnosed with moderate to severe obstructive sleep apnea. Most people with the condition do not realize they have it, according to the drug manufacturer. People with sleep apnea struggle to get enough sleep, and they face an increased risk for high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, strokes and dementia.The study’s findings have not been published in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Eli Lilly provided only a summary of its results — companies are required to announce such findings that can affect their stock price as soon as they get them. Dr. Daniel M. Skovronsky, Eli Lilly’s chief scientific officer, said the company was still analyzing the data and would provide detailed results at the American Diabetes Association’s 84th Scientific Sessions in June.But experts not affiliated with Eli Lilly or involved in its studies were encouraged by the summary.“That’s awesome,” said Dr. Henry Klar Yaggi, director of the Yale Centers for Sleep Medicine in New Haven, Conn.He added that the most common treatment, a CPAP machine that forces air into the airway, keeping it open during sleep, is effective. About 60 percent of patients who use continuous positive airway pressure continue to use it, he said.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 trial lasted only one year but offered embers of hope to some experts.In 1817, James Parkinson expressed a hope about the disease that is named after him. He thought that at some point there would be a discovery and “the progress of the disease may be stopped.”Now, nearly 200 years since Parkinson expressed his hope, and after four decades of unsuccessful clinical trials, a group of French researchers reports the first glimmer of success — a modest slowing of the disease in a one-year study.And the drug they used? A so-called GLP-1 receptor agonist, similar to the wildly popular drugs Ozempic, for diabetes, and Wegovy, for obesity.As many as half a million Americans have been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative brain illness second only to Alzheimer’s in prevalence.Symptoms include tremors, slowness and stiffness, and difficulty with balance. That can lead to difficulty walking, talking and swallowing. Many patients develop dementia.But there are drugs and treatments, like deep brain stimulation, that help, said Dr. David Standaert, a Parkinson’s expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.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.

Most people, study after study shows, don’t take the medicines prescribed for them. It doesn’t matter what they are — statins, high blood pressure drugs, drugs to lower blood sugar, asthma drugs. Either patients never start taking them, or they stop.It’s a problem that doctors call nonadherence — the common human tendency to resist medical treatment — and it leads to countless deaths and billions of dollars of preventable medical costs each year.But that resistance may be overcome by the blockbuster obesity drugs Wegovy and Zepbound, which have astounded the world with the way they help people lose weight and keep it off. Though it’s still early days, and there is a paucity of data on compliance with the new drugs, doctors say they are noticing another astounding effect: Patients seem to take them faithfully, week in and week out.Some patients may have to get over an initial reluctance to start. A national survey showed that when people were told they would gain weight back if they stopped taking the drugs, most lost interest in starting them.In one small study, patients stopped refilling prescriptions for months at a time, perhaps because of side effects, lack of availability, or insurance and cost issues.But anecdotally, doctors and patients say, those who begin taking the drugs are continuing.“I don’t intend to ever stop taking this medicine,” said Kimberly DelRosso of Pembroke, Mass., who takes Wegovy.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.

Although it is not known what type of cancer Princess Catherine has, oncologists say that what she described in her public statement that was released on Friday — discovering a cancer during another procedure, in this case a “major abdominal surgery” — is all too common.“Unfortunately, so much of the cancer we diagnose is unexpected,” said Dr. Elena Ratner, a gynecologic oncologist at Yale Cancer Center who has diagnosed many patients with ovarian cancer, uterine cancer and cancers of the lining of the uterus.Without speculating on Catherine’s procedure, Dr. Ratner described situations where women will go in for surgery for endometriosis, a condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus is found elsewhere in the abdomen. Often, Dr. Ratner says, the assumption is that the endometriosis has appeared on an ovary and caused a benign ovarian cyst. But one to two weeks later, when the supposedly benign tissue has been studied, pathologists report that they found cancer.In the statement, Princess Catherine said she was is getting “a course of preventive chemotherapy.”That, too, is common. In medical settings it is usually called adjuvant chemotherapy.Dr. Eric Winer, director of the Yale Cancer Center, said that with adjuvant chemotherapy, “the hope is that this will prevent further problems,” and avoid a recurrence of the cancer.It also means that “you removed everything” that was visible with surgery, said Dr. Michael Birrer, director of the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. “You can’t see the cancer,” he added because microscopic cancer cells may be left behind. The chemotherapy is a way to attack microscopic disease, he explained.Other parts of Catherine’s statement also hit home for Dr. Ratner, particularly her concern for her family.“William and I have been doing everything we can to process and manage this privately for the sake of our young family,” the statement said.And, “it has taken us time to explain everything to George, Charlotte, and Louis in a way that is appropriate for them, and to reassure them that I will be okay.”Those are sentiments that Dr. Ratner hears on a regular basis and reveal, she says, “how hard it is for women to be diagnosed with cancer.”“I see this day in and day out,” she said. “Women always say, ‘Will I be there for my kids? What will happen with my kids?’”“They don’t say, ‘What will happen to me?’”

A number of case studies published after recent total solar eclipses highlight the importance of safe viewing.A young woman visited New York Eye & Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai Hospital shortly after the eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017. She told Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, an ophthalmologist, that she had a black area in her vision, and then drew a crescent shape for him on a piece of paper.When Dr. Deobhakta examined her eyes, he was astonished. He saw a burn on her retina that was exactly the same shape. It was “almost like a branding,” he said.She had looked at the sun during the eclipse without any protection. The burn was an image of the sun’s corona, its halo-like outer rim.With every eclipse, ophthalmologists see patients who looked at the sun and complain afterward that their vision is distorted: They see small black spots, their eyes are watery and sensitive to light. Usually, the symptoms resolve, although it may take several weeks to a year.But the woman’s retinal burns, which Dr. Deobhakta and colleagues described in a medical case write-up, would not heal. Her retina was permanently scarred and a sign of the severity of injuries that can follow looking at an eclipse without proper precautions.With the coming eclipse in April, ophthalmologists advise people to be careful and not assume that short glances at the sun are safe. Damage can occur, they say, in less than a minute.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.

Many patients are reluctant to undergo colonoscopies or conduct at-home fecal tests. Doctors see potential in another screening method.Early detection of colon cancer can prevent a majority of deaths from this disease, possibly as much as 73 percent of them. But just 50 to 75 percent of middle-aged and older adults who should be screened regularly are being tested.One reason, doctors say, is that the screening methods put many people off.There are two options for people of average risk: a colonoscopy every 10 years or a fecal test every one to three years, depending on the type of test.Or, as Dr. Folasade P. May, a gastroenterologist at UCLA Health puts it, “either you take this horrible laxative and then a doctor puts an instrument up your behind, or you have to manipulate your own poop.”But something much simpler is on the horizon: a blood test. Gastroenterologists say such tests could become part of the routine blood work that doctors order when, for example, a person comes in for an annual physical exam.“I think this is going to start taking off,” said Dr. John M. Carethers, a gastroenterologist and the vice chancellor for health sciences at the University of California, San Diego.About 53,000 Americans are expected to die from colorectal cancer this year. It is the second-most common cause of cancer-related deaths in the United States, and while the death rate in older adults has fallen, it has increased in people under age 55.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.

A federal investigator said that President Biden had “poor memory” and “diminished faculties.” But such a diagnosis would require close medical assessment, experts said.A lengthy report by the Department of Justice on President Biden’s handling of classified documents contained some astonishing assessments of his well-being and mental health.Mr. Biden, 81, was an “elderly man with a poor memory” and “diminished faculties” who “did not remember when he was vice president,” the special counsel Robert K. Hur said.In conversations recorded in 2017, Mr. Biden was “often painfully slow” and “struggling to remember events and straining at times to read and relay his own notebook entries.” So impaired was Mr. Biden that a jury was unlikely to convict him, Mr. Hur said.Republicans were quick to pounce, some calling the president unfit for office and demanding his removal.But while the report disparaged Mr. Biden’s mental health, medical experts on Friday noted that its judgments were not based on science and that its methods bore no resemblance to those that doctors use to assess possible cognitive impairment.In its simplest form, the issue is one that doctors and family members have been dealing with for decades: How do you know when an episode of confusion or a memory lapse is part of a serious decline?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 Buckingham Palace released little information on Charles’s diagnosis, some cancer experts not involved in his care have seen the illness detected during other routine medical procedures.A patient checks into the hospital for a routine procedure to treat an enlarged prostate. And, unexpectedly, a test done in the hospital — perhaps a blood test or an X-ray or an examination of the urethra and the bladder — finds a cancer.Apparently, something like that happened to King Charles III. When the British monarch was treated for an enlarged prostate in January, doctors found a cancer that the palace said is not prostate cancer. Charles started treatment Monday. The palace did not disclose what had led to the king’s diagnosis.While some prostate specialists like Dr. Peter Albertsen at the University of Connecticut called such situations “pretty rare,” other doctors said they were not unheard of.Dr. Otis Brawley, an oncologist at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore, said a man had come in for routine prostate surveillance to monitor a low-risk cancer. One of Dr. Brawley’s residents ordered a chest X-ray “for no reason,” he said. But to the surprise of Dr. Brawley, the X-ray detected a lung cancer.Some cancers demand immediate treatment, while for others, treatment can wait, oncologists said. The palace did not describe the severity of Charles’s diagnosis, nor what treatment he was receiving.Some blood cancers are among those that need immediate treatment, Dr. Brawley said.“We even have a few leukemias and lymphomas where we want to start therapy less than 24 hours after suspicion,” he said. He said he doubted Charles had one of the most aggressive blood cancers, acute myeloid leukemia, nor Burkett’s lymphoma. But if he did, treatment would could not be put off.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.