Pamela C. Ronald, PhD
Distinguished Professor in the Department of
Plant Pathology and the Genome Center
University of California, Davis
Michael Rosbash, PhD
Peter Gruber Professor of Neuroscience
Brandeis University
Sara Rosenbaum, JD
Professor Emerita Health Law and Policy
George Washington University
Irwin Rosenberg, MD
University Professor Emeritus in Medicine and
Nutrition
Tufts University
Steven A. Rosenberg, MD, PhD
Chief, Surgery Branch
National Cancer Institute
Mendel Rosenblum, PhD
Cheriton Family Professor of Engineering
Stanford University
Linda Rosenstock, MD, MPH
Dean Emeritus and Professor
University of California, Los Angeles
Linda Rosenstock, MD, MPH
Dean Emeritus and Professor
UCLA
Meredith Rosenthal, PhD
Professor of Health Economics and Policy
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
David K. Rosner, PhD
Ronald Lauterstein Professor
Columbia University
Lainie Friedman Ross, MD, PhD
Dean’s Professor and Chair, Department of
Health Humanities and Bioethics, Director,
Paul M Schyve MD Center for Bioethics
University of Rochester
Cornelius Rosse, MD, DSC
Professor Emeritus
University of Washington, School of Medicine
Peter J. Rossky, PhD
Professor
Rice University
Alvin E. Roth, PhD
Professor
Stanford University
James A. Roth, DVM, PhD
Distinguished Professor
Iowa State University
Lucia B. Rothman-Denes, PhD
Haig P. Papazian Distinguished Service
Professor, Department of Molecular Genetics
and Cell Biology
University of Chicago
Martine F Roussel, PhD
Professor
St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital
Ali Rowhani-Rahbar, MD, MPH, PhD
Professor
University of Washington
Diane Rowland, ScD
Executive Vice President Emerita
Kaiser Family Foundation
John L. Rubenstein, MD, PhD
Professor of Psychiatry
University of California, San Francisco
Ronitt A. Rubinfeld, PhD
Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science
MIT
David R. Rubinow, MD
Chair Emeritus and Professor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Alexander Rudensky, PhD
Chairman, Immunology Program, Lloyd Old
Chair in Clinical Investigation, Investigator,
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center
Joan V. Ruderman, PhD
Nelson Professor of Cell Biology (Emeritus)
Harvard Medical School
Roberta L. Rudnick, PhD
Distinguished Professor
University of California, Santa Barbara
David W. Russell, PhD
Emeritus Professor of Molecular Genetics
University of Texas Southwestern Medical
Center
58

The government has agreed a new funding package with pharmacy negotiators in England, leading some pharmacies to call off protests that were planned for later this week.

44 minutes ago

17 minutes ago

The Eli Lilly drug caused a major drop in the blood levels of Lp(a), but further research is needed to show that it will prevent heart attacks and strokes.As many as one in five people — an estimated 64 million in the United States — have elevated levels of a tiny particle in their blood. It can greatly increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes.But few know about it, and almost no doctors test for it, because there was not much to be done. Diet does not help. Neither does exercise. There have been no drugs.But in the near future, that may change.On Sunday, cardiologists announced that an experimental drug made by Eli Lilly, lepodisiran, could lower levels of the particle, Lp(a), by 94 percent with a single injection. The effects lasted for six months and there were no significant side effects.But it is not yet confirmed that reducing Lp(a) levels also reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes. That awaits large clinical trials that are now underway.The Lilly research was presented Sunday at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology and simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine. At least four other companies are also testing innovative drugs that block the body’s production of Lp(a), a mix of lipids and a protein.Dr. David Maron, a preventive cardiologist at Stanford not involved in the Lilly research, said the evidence of profound and long-lasting reduction in lipoprotein levels with lepodisiran was “thrilling.”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.

Women across England will be able to get the morning-after pill for free from pharmacies from later this year, the government has said.

1 day ago

Your average daily heart rate is a useful metric; so is your daily step count. Combining the two might be even better.Many people use a smartwatch to monitor their cardiovascular health, often by counting the number of steps they take over the course of their day, or recording their average daily heart rate. Now, researchers are proposing an enhanced metric, which combines the two using basic math: Divide your average daily heart rate by your daily average number of steps.The resulting ratio — the daily heart rate per step, or DHRPS — provides insight into how efficiently the heart is working, according to a study conducted by researchers at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association.The study found that people whose hearts work less efficiently, by this metric, were more prone to various diseases, including Type II diabetes, hypertension, heart failure, stroke, coronary atherosclerosis and myocardial infarction.“It’s a measure of inefficiency,” said Zhanlin Chen, a third-year medical student at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University and lead author of the new study; his coauthors included several Feinberg faculty physicians. “It looks at how badly your heart is doing,” he added. “You’re just going to have to do a tiny bit of math.”Some experts said they saw wisdom in DHRPS as a metric. Dr. Peter Aziz, a pediatric cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, said it appeared to be an advance on the information provided by daily steps or average heart rate alone.“What is probably more important for cardio fitness is what your heart does for the amount of work it has to do,” he said. “This is a reasonable way to measure that.”The metric does not look at heart rate during exercise. But, Dr. Aziz said, it still provided an overall sense of efficiency that, importantly, was shown by researchers to have an association with disease.The size of the study added validity to the findings, Dr. Aziz said. The scientists mapped Fitbit data from nearly 7,000 Smartwatch users against electronic medical records.Mr. Chen said that a simple way to grasp the value of the new metric was to compare two hypothetical individuals. Both take 10,000 steps a day, but one has an average daily resting heart rate of 80 — in the middle of the healthy range — while the other’s daily resting heart rate is 120.The first person would have a DHRPS of 0.008, the second 0.012. The higher the ratio, the stronger the signaling of cardiac risk.In the study, the 6,947 participants were divided into three groups based on their ratios; those with the highest showed a stronger association with disease than other participants did. The D.H.R.P.S. metric was also better at revealing disease risk than were step counts or heart rates alone, the study found.“We designed this metric to be low-cost and to use data we’re already collecting,” Mr. Chen said. “People who want to be in charge of their own health can do a little bit of math to figure this out.”

22 minutes ago

The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, Dr. Peter Marks, abruptly resigned Friday, saying in a searing letter that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s aggressive stance on vaccines was irresponsible and posed a danger to the public.“It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies,” Dr. Marks wrote to Sara Brenner, the agency’s acting commissioner.Dr. Marks resigned under pressure, according to a person familiar with the matter who said an official with the Department of Health and Human Services told Dr. Marks on Friday that he could either resign or be fired.Hours earlier in West Virginia, Mr. Kennedy asserted that Covid did not kill healthy people, contrary to research showing that 30 percent of those who died early in the pandemic did not have underlying conditions. Mr. Kennedy has also extolled the value of vitamin A as a treatment during a major measles outbreak in Texas, while downplaying the value of vaccines. On Thursday, he announced that he was creating a new office to study vaccine injuries.Dr. Marks noted in his letter that measles, “which killed more than 100,000 unvaccinated children last year in Africa and Asia,” because of complications, “had been eliminated from our shores.”He added that he had been willing to address Mr. Kennedy’s concerns about vaccine safety and transparency with a series of public meetings and by working with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, but was rebuffed.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.