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Women who used chemical hair straightening products were at higher risk for uterine cancer compared to women who did not report using these products, according to a new study from the National Institutes of Health. The researchers found no associations with uterine cancer for other hair products that the women reported using, including hair dyes, bleach, highlights, or perms.
The study data includes 33,497 U.S. women ages 35-74 participating in the Sister Study, a study led by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of NIH, that seeks to identify risk factors for breast cancer and other health conditions. The women were followed for almost 11 years and during that time 378 uterine cancer cases were diagnosed.
The researchers found that women who reported frequent use of hair straightening products, defined as more than four times in the previous year, were more than twice as likely to go on to develop uterine cancer compared to those who did not use the products.
“We estimated that 1.64% of women who never used hair straighteners would go on to develop uterine cancer by the age of 70; but for frequent users, that risk goes up to 4.05%,” said Alexandra White, Ph.D., head of the NIEHS Environment and Cancer Epidemiology group and lead author on the new study. “This doubling rate is concerning. However, it is important to put this information into context — uterine cancer is a relatively rare type of cancer.”
Uterine cancer accounts for about 3% of all new cancer cases but is the most common cancer of the female reproductive system, with 65,950 estimated new cases in 2022. Studies show that incidence rates of uterine cancer have been rising in the United States, particularly among Black women.
Approximately 60% of the participants who reported using straighteners in the previous year were self-identified Black women, according to the study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Although, the study did not find that the relationship between straightener use and uterine cancer incidence was different by race, the adverse health effects may be greater for Black women due to higher prevalence of use.
“Because Black women use hair straightening or relaxer products more frequently and tend to initiate use at earlier ages than other races and ethnicities, these findings may be even more relevant for them,” said Che-Jung Chang, Ph.D., an author on the new study and a research fellow in the NIEHS Epidemiology Branch.
The findings are consistent with prior studies showing straighteners can increase the risk of hormone-related cancers in women.
The researchers did not collect information on brands or ingredients in the hair products the women used. However, in the paper they note that several chemicals that have been found in straighteners (such as parabens, bisphenol A, metals, and formaldehyde) could be contributing to the increased uterine cancer risk observed. Chemical exposure from hair product use, especially straighteners, could be more concerning than other personal care products due to increased absorption through the scalp which may be exacerbated by burns and lesions caused by straighteners.
“To our knowledge this is the first epidemiologic study that examined the relationship between straightener use and uterine cancer,” said White. “More research is needed to confirm these findings in different populations, to determine if hair products contribute to health disparities in uterine cancer, and to identify the specific chemicals that may be increasing the risk of cancers in women.”
This team previously found that permanent hair dye and straighteners may increase breast and ovarian cancer risk.

In a new study, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory find that the U.S. Atlantic Coast is becoming a breeding ground for rapidly intensifying hurricanes. Fueled by environmental conditions that beget increasingly severe storms — with climate change as a root contributor — the new research finds that hurricanes are growing wetter and strengthening faster near the already hurricane-battered coastline.
Looking at data that describe the past four decades of hurricane activity and the conditions that shaped them, researchers find the rates at which hurricanes strengthen near the U.S. Atlantic Coast have climbed since 1979. Looking into a future marked by continued fossil fuel reliance, the team finds this trend is likely to continue.
A warmer world, said climate scientist Karthik Balaguru, is poised to bring hurricanes that intensify quicker and, with them, a heightened risk of flooding to the U.S. Atlantic Coast. “Our findings have profound implications for coastal residents, decision- and policy-makers,” said Balaguru. “And this isn’t specific only to the Atlantic. It’s happening in several prominent coastal regions across the world.”
Balaguru’s team found that a unique coastal phenomenon lies at the heart of the bustling hurricane activity. A mix of environmental conditions caused by this phenomenon ultimately makes the coastline more conducive to hurricane development. The same mix of hurricane-favoring conditions doesn’t appear in the Gulf of Mexico, which the team explored. But they could form in many other regions, including those near the East Asian coastline and the northwest Arabian Sea.
The new study publishes in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, on Monday, Oct. 17.
When hurricanes rapidly intensify
Some storms, like Hurricane Ian, whose extensive damage is still being assessed but is among the strongest to approach the U.S. coast, can suddenly turn severe. Supercharged by hurricane-friendly conditions like a warmer sea surface or greater atmospheric humidity, they can rapidly intensify, jumping multiple categories sometimes in short order.

Targeted therapies specifically attach to and hinder cancer-causing proteins, but cancer cells can quickly evolve to thwart their action. A second drug class, immunotherapies, harnesses the immune system to attack cancer cells, but these agents often cannot “see” the disease-causing changes happening inside cancer cells, which look normal from the outside.
Now, a new study led by researchers from the Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone Health describes a strategy to overcome these limitations based on several insights. First, the research team recognized that certain targeted drugs called “covalent inhibitors” form stable attachments with the disease-related proteins they target inside cancer cells. They also knew that proteins once inside cells are naturally broken down and presented as small pieces (peptides) on cell surfaces by major histocompatibility complex (MHC) molecules. Once bound to MHC, peptides are recognized as foreign by the immune “surveillance” system if they are sufficiently different from the body’s naturally occurring proteins.
Although tumor cells usually develop ways to escape immune surveillance, the study authors reasoned that a cancer-related peptide target tightly bound to its covalent inhibitor could act as an MHC-displayed “flag” that could be recognized by immune proteins called antibodies. The team then engineered such antibodies and joined them to another antibody known to “recruit” T lymphocytes, the “killer cells” of the immune system, to form “bi-specific” antibodies that destroyed tumor cells.
“Even when genetic and other changes frustrate targeted therapies, they often still attach to their target proteins in cancer cells, and this attachment can be used to label those cells for immunotherapy attack,” says co-corresponding study author Shohei Koide, PhD, professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology and a member of Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone. “Further, our system, conceptually, has the potential to increase the efficacy of any cancer drug when attached to the drug’s disease-related target where the combination can be displayed by MHCs.”
Published online October 17 in Cancer Discovery, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research, the new study tested the researchers’ approach on two FDA-approved, targeted drugs, sotorasib and osimertinib. Recently approved based on a study co-led by NYU Langone researchers, sotorasib works by attaching to an altered form of the protein KRAS called p.G12C, in which a glycine building block has been mistakenly replaced by a cysteine in its structure. This change causes the KRAS protein switch to become “stuck in the on mode” and signal for abnormal growth. Sotarasib effectively blocks this activated signal to start, but cancer cells rapidly become resistant.
In experiments with KRAS mutant cancer cells grown in a dish (cell cultures), the team’s HapImmuneTM antibodies recognized, recruited T cells, and led to the killing of treatment-resistant lung cancer cells, in which sotorasib attached to its target, KRAS p.G12C, and was displayed by MHCs. The team also developed bi-specific antibodies that bound to a peptide “flagged” with osimertinib, a drug that targets an altered form of epithelial growth factor receptor seen in other lung cancers, as well as prototypes that “saw” the drug ibrutinib when linked to its target, BTK, showing the technology’s “broad potential,” the researchers say.

Too much screen time can slow children’s recovery from concussions, but new research from UBC and the University of Calgary suggests that banning screen time is not the answer.
The researchers looked for links between the self-reported screen time of more than 700 children aged 8-16 in the first 7-10 days following an injury, and symptoms reported by them and their caregivers over the following six months.
The children whose concussion symptoms cleared up the fastest had engaged in a moderate amount of screen time. “We’ve been calling this the ‘Goldilocks’ group, because it appears that spending too little or too much time on screens isn’t ideal for concussion recovery,” said Dr. Molly Cairncross, an assistant professor at Simon Fraser University who conducted the research while a postdoctoral fellow working with associate professor Dr. Noah Silverberg in UBC’s psychology department. “Our findings show that the common recommendation to avoid smartphones, computers and televisions as much as possible may not be what’s best for kids.”
The study was part of a larger concussion project called Advancing Concussion Assessment in Pediatrics (A-CAP) led by psychology professor Dr. Keith Yeates at the University of Calgary and funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The data came from participants aged 8-16 who had suffered either a concussion or an orthopaedic injury, such as a sprained ankle or broken arm, and sought care at one of five emergency departments in Canada.
The purpose of including children who had orthopaedic injuries was to compare their recoveries with the group who had concussions.
Patients in the concussion group generally had relatively worse symptoms than their counterparts with orthopaedic injuries, but within the concussion group it was not simply a matter of symptoms worsening with more screen time. Children with minimal screen time recovered more slowly, too.

Researchers at Mount Sinai’s Tisch Cancer Institute have identified a new gene that is essential to colon cancer growth and found that inflammation in the external environment around the tumor can contribute to the growth of tumor cells. The scientists reported these findings in Nature Communications in October.
This is the first time that scientists have discovered that the environment around a colon cancer tumor can program what is known as a “super enhancer,” a complex area of DNA with a high concentration of transcriptional machinery that controls whether a cell is malignant.
This super enhancer — the largest 1-2% of all enhancers in the cell — regulates the gene PDZK1IP1, which was previously not identified as a cancer gene. Once researchers deleted PDZK1IP1, colon cancer growth slowed down, suggesting that PDZK1IP1 and its super enhancer could be targets for anti-cancer therapies.
“In the United States, colon cancer is the third most prevalent and second most deadly cancer,” said the study’s first author Royce Zhou, an MD/PhD student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This cancer is reliant on surgery for treatment, and immunotherapies that have revolutionized the treatment of advanced cancer have only worked for a small subset of colon cancer patients. That’s why there’s a great need for novel target identification.”
This study found that the super enhancer is activated by surrounding inflammation in the tumor microenvironment. The inflammation allows the cancer cells to survive in an environment they otherwise would not. Inflammatory bowel disease is a known risk for colon cancer; this finding could add to the understanding of the mechanism involved.
“What this means for most patients with colon cancer is that inflammation that’s occurring in the tumor is contributing to the tumor’s growth. This stresses the importance of understanding what we can do to curb the inflammatory effects in the colon through prevention or understanding what dietary effects might have on the microenvironment in the colon,” said senior author Ramon Parsons, MD, PhD, Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “In terms of treatment, we have genetic evidence that targeting this gene actually inhibits tumors. By understanding all these different components, we will have better tools to try to prevent the disease.”
This discovery was made possible by studying live tumor tissue and surrounding healthy tissue immediately after the surgeries of 15 colon cancer patients. Being able to prepare and analyze live cells allowed researchers to see the tumor microenvironment and the genetic and biologic drivers of colon cancer, Mr. Zhou said.
“We had live specimen live cells straight from the operating room that allowed us to immediately measure the epigenetic state of that tumor,” Dr. Parsons added. “Without that infrastructure here at Mount Sinai, we couldn’t have made this discovery.”
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Materials provided by The Mount Sinai Hospital / Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

If there was one thing Gillian knew, it was that she did not want a hole punch anywhere near her genitals.So when, in 2018, a gynecologist recommended a vulval biopsy to check for signs of cancer, she hesitated. The doctor suspected that the whitish patch of skin that Gillian had found next to her clitoris was lichen sclerosus, a skin condition that is usually benign. To Gillian, a registered nurse, taking a chunk out of her most sensitive body part sounded a bit extreme.But in the end she consented. He was a doctor; she was a nurse. She assumed he was the authority on this part of the body. “I never worked in OB-GYN before,” said Gillian, who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her privacy. “I was pretty clueless.”For the biopsy, she was placed in stirrups and given a spinal epidural to numb the area. Afterward, to stem the bleeding, the doctor put one hand over the other and pressed hard against her vulva — the outer female genitalia, including the inner and outer labia, the opening to the vagina and the clitoris. Even through the anesthesia, she could feel the pressure against her pubic bone. She screamed.A month later, Gillian was in bed with her boyfriend when she realized that she could no longer reach orgasm. She could become aroused, but at the moment of no return, “it ended into nothing,” she recalled. “And that’s still how it is.”When she informed her gynecologist, she said, he speculated that she was experiencing numbness caused by scarring and that it would go away in time. It did not. Alarmed, Gillian began seeing one specialist after another in search of an explanation and, hopefully, a solution.That’s when she discovered that no one wanted to talk about her clitoris.Gillian at home. When she tried to inquire with medical professionals about her clitoris, “they looked at me like I was completely insane,” she said.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesAfter hearing about her injury, she said, one urologist compared her to a rape victim and said she must be having a trauma reaction to her biopsy. Next, according to her medical charts, a women’s health specialist diagnosed her with “perimenopause” and prescribed testosterone cream. Another gynecologist recommended an “O shot,” or vaginal rejuvenation procedure.When she tried to direct the conversation back to her clitoris, she was met with blank stares. “They looked at me like I was completely insane,” Gillian said. “I just kept on saying there’s something wrong with my clitoris, and they were, like — it was like they did everything but acknowledge the clitoris.”‘A side note at best’Some urologists compare the vulva to “a small town in the Midwest,” said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, a urologist and pioneer in the field of sexual medicine. Doctors tend to pass through it, barely looking up, on their way to their destination, the cervix and uterus. That’s where the real medical action happens: ultrasounds, Pap smears, IUD insertion, childbirth.If the vulva as a whole is an underappreciated city, the clitoris is a local roadside bar: little known, seldom considered, probably best avoided. “It’s completely ignored by pretty much everyone,” said Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual health specialist outside Washington, D.C. “There is no medical community that has taken ownership in the research, in the management, in the diagnosis of vulva-related conditions.”Asked what she learned in medical school about the clitoris, Dr. Rubin replied, “Nothing that sticks out to my memory. If it got any mention, it would be a side note at best.”Only years later, on a sexual-medicine fellowship with Dr. Goldstein, did she learn how to examine the vulva and the visible part of the clitoris, also known as the glans clitoris. The full clitoris, she learned, is a deep structure, made up largely of erectile tissue, that reaches into the pelvis and encircles the vagina.Today, Dr. Rubin has appointed herself Washington’s premier “clitorologist.” The joke, of course, is that few are vying for the title — out of embarrassment, a lack of knowledge or fear of breaching propriety with patients. “Doctors love to focus on what we know,” she said. “And we don’t like to show weakness, that we don’t know something.”Dr. Rachel Rubin, a urologist and sexual health specialist outside Washington, D.C., said doctors need to better understand the clitoris.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesA model of the pelvis in Dr. Rubin’s office. She was taught little about the clitoris in medical school, she said.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesThis near-universal avoidance has consequences for patients. In a 2018 study in the journal Sexual Medicine, Dr. Rubin, Dr. Goldstein and colleagues found that a failure to examine the vulva and clitoris led doctors to regularly overlook sexual health conditions. Among women visiting Dr. Goldstein’s clinic, nearly 1 in 4 had clitoral adhesions, which occur when the hood of the clitoris sticks to the glans and can lead to irritation, pain and decreased sexual pleasure.The authors concluded that all health providers for women should routinely examine the clitoris. But that was easier said than done, they wrote, as most providers “neither know how to examine nor feel comfortable examining the clitoris.”This oversight has the potential to harm women, as well as trans men and other people with vulvas. There have been documented injuries to the clitoris in procedures including pelvic mesh surgeries, episiotomies during childbirth and even hip surgeries. When performed poorly, a labiaplasty — a procedure to reduce the size of the labia minora, and one of the fastest-growing cosmetic surgeries worldwide — can also damage nerves, leading to genital pain and loss of sexual sensation.Many of these injuries could be prevented, Dr. Rubin said, if doctors just spent more time getting to know the clitoris. In January, she made this point to a roomful of mostly male doctors at the annual convention of military urologists in Palm Springs, Calif., during a lecture on female sexual health. Practical, animated and unflappable, she was voted as having the best lecture at the conference.This anatomy, she stresses, isn’t magic, just biology. “It’s not just this strange, mythical area that’s supposed to give you orgasms,” she said in her office in Rockville, Md., in early July, surrounded by penile prostheses, pelvis models and a large Hitachi wand. “You should know what is what and where things are coming from.”A tradition of neglectA thank-you card in Dr. Rubin’s office.Shuran Huang for The New York TimesSo why don’t we know? To Dr. Rubin, the reason is simple: The clitoris is intimately bound up in female pleasure and orgasm. And until very recently, those themes have not been high on medicine’s priority list, nor considered appropriate areas of medical pursuit.Even in fields like urology, where male sexual pleasure and orgasm are considered integral, women’s sexual health “is seen as hysteria, Pandora’s box, all psychosocial, not real medicine,” said Dr. Rubin, who is also the education chair of the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health. “Sexual health and quality of life is not something we focus on for women.” (In contrast, Viagra is one of the most lucrative pharmaceutical drugs in recent decades, bringing in tens of billions of dollars to Pfizer since being introduced in 1998.)Gynecology, for its part, is far more focused on fertility and preventing disease. “We don’t do a great job about talking about sex from a pleasure-based perspective,” said Dr. Frances Grimstad, a gynecologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. “We talk about it from a prevention standpoint. We’re trying to prevent S.T.I.s,” or sexually transmitted infections. “We’re trying to prevent pregnancy, unless you’re trying to get pregnant. We don’t talk about sexual pleasure.”Dr. Helen O’Connell, Australia’s first female urologist, recalled that in her own medical training, the clitoris barely made a cameo. In the 1985 edition of the medical textbook “Last’s Anatomy” that she studied, a cross-section of the female pelvis omitted the clitoris entirely, and aspects of the female genitals were described as “poorly developed” and a “failure” of male genital formation. Descriptions of the penis went on for pages. To her, this widespread medical disregard helped explain why her urology peers worked to preserve nerves in the penis during prostate surgeries but not during pelvic surgeries on women.Dr. O’Connell set out to investigate the full anatomy of the clitoris using microdissection and magnetic resonance imaging. In 2005, she published a comprehensive study showing that the outer nub of the clitoris — the part that can be seen and touched — was just the tip of the iceberg, equivalent to the head of the penis. The full organ extended far beneath the surface, comprising two teardrop-shaped bulbs, two arms and a shaft.By failing to appreciate this anatomy, she warned, surgeons working in this region risked damaging the sensitive nerves responsible for pleasure and orgasm, which run along the top of the shaft. In procedures like pelvic mesh surgeries or urethral surgeries, “things are potentially in the crossfire,” Dr. O’Connell said. “You always need to be thinking of what’s underneath, what’s hidden from view that you’re potentially altering.”Increasingly, women are speaking out about injuries they sustained to this area during routine procedures. One is Julie, a 44-year-old office manager in Essex, east of London, who lost her ability to orgasm in 2012 after a minimally invasive hip operation to address back pain. She shared her story publicly in The Telegraph last year, using only her first name to avoid discrimination by future employers.During a Zoom call in January, Julie described waking up from anesthesia to a searing pain around her clitoris. Her surgeon told her that it was just bruising and would fade. A few months later, she found that she could no longer orgasm. When she tried, “it was literally like someone had pulled a plug out of the socket,” she said. “Everything went dead.”It took two years of internet searching for her to realize that a cylindrical post placed between her legs during the operation had likely crushed her clitoral nerves. Use of the device, called a perineal post, is known to cause nerve damage, but this was not mentioned on her consent form.Julie compared her injury to losing the sense of taste or smell — a pleasure taken for granted but when lost changes everything. “It’s 10 years, and I still can’t believe it,” she said over Zoom. “And I haven’t come to terms with it.”Gillian is still trying to understand the cause of her own injury. Was it the biopsy? The crushing pressure her gynecologist applied afterward? Four years and 12 specialists later, she has resigned herself to the fact that she may never recover that sensation. “This changed my whole life,” she said. “The devastation from this is something you can never repair. Ever.”A new medical mapDr. Blair Peters, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon in Portland, Ore., is publishing a study on the clitoris.Leah Nash for The New York TimesJessica Pin, an activist, scoured OB/GYN textbooks to see what doctors were learning about the clitoris, only to discover little.Anastasiia Sapon for The New York TimesWhen Dr. Blair Peters, a 33-year-old plastic surgeon at Oregon Health & Science University, first began performing phalloplasties for trans men and nonbinary people, he was surprised to see how large the nerves of the clitoris were — about three millimeters in diameter, on average. (By comparison, the sensory nerve of the index finger is about one millimeter wide.)“When I went through medical school, we did not learn anything in particular about the clitoris beyond the fact that it exists, basically,” said Dr. Peters. As a result, he said, he developed “this subconscious bias that it’s not going to be this superapparent structure. But it is.”Dr. Peters is among a handful of young, social media-savvy doctors who, like Dr. Rubin, are helping expand medicine’s map of this terrain — and, in doing so, ensure that what happened to Julie and Gillian doesn’t happen again. As part of his efforts to improve sexual sensation for phalloplasty patients, Dr. Peters recently magnified clitoral nerves and counted up how many nerve fibers they contained. The number he found — embargoed until he presents his findings at a conference later this month — was “significantly more” than 8,000, the figure often cited, which is drawn from an outdated study on cows.In 2020, Victoria Gordon, a medical student at the Kansas City University of Medicine and Biosciences, led a study that sought to define a “danger zone” around the clitoris for plastic surgeons to avoid. During dissections of cadavers, she noticed that clitoral nerves sometimes branch out into fine tendrils, like roots, in ways that might be relevant to surgeons but were not previously described in the literature.She hoped that others in the plastic surgery field would follow up on this finding, which was published in a plastic surgery journal. “I’m just a fourth-year medical student, I don’t think I should have to tackle this project,” she said in late 2021. “But no one else is.”Doctors are not the only people urging medicine to recognize the full anatomy of the clitoris. In 2018, Gillian was searching online to make sense of her injury when she came across a Medium post by a woman in Dallas, Jessica Pin, whose situation sounded eerily like hers. Ms. Pin, now 36, had lost most of her clitoral sensation after undergoing a labiaplasty at age 18.After scouring the major obstetrical-gynecologicial textbooks, Ms. Pin learned that the nerves of the clitoris were rarely well represented, if at all — a key oversight that she believed left the clitoris at risk in a number of procedures. “This omission appears to be caused by sociocultural discomfort with the clitoris and a pervasive lack of regard for female sexual response,” she wrote on Medium.Gillian was intrigued. “She was the only one talking about this on the internet,” she said. She sent the woman a Facebook message.Ms. Pin eventually began a social media campaign to get OB-GYN textbooks and training standards updated to cover this anatomy. Gillian quietly helped her build followers, then joined Ms. Pin on Instagram, using the handle @nursevulvaadvocate. There, she found herself fielding hundreds of queries from around the world from people who had lost genital sensation as a result of medical procedures on or near the clitoris.Gillian tried to respond to everyone, she said, but could not offer the medical advice that many of them sought. After six months, she closed her account. Today her efforts are more local: She often drives to doctors’ offices to drop off posters of clitoral anatomy. In her work with older patients, she pays close attention to any genital concerns, from vulvar itching to pain after cancer surgery.Ms. Pin pressed on. In the past few years, she has lobbied several textbooks and anatomical resources to update their diagrams of the clitoris and its nerves. Her efforts have reached the front page of Reddit, racked up over 160,000 followers on TikTok and landed her a guest spot on the “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.” In 2019, she copublished a dissection study with her father, a plastic surgeon, on clitoral nerves.Yet her tactics are not without controversy. She has been embroiled in numerous social media disputes, and has been accused of harassment for her persistent and sometimes inappropriate efforts to reach gynecologists and anatomy textbook authors.Now, after four years of advocating, “I want to be done,” she said. “It would be amazing if doctors start picking up the cause and start talking about this.” The fact that a few medical professionals have, including Dr. Rubin, is “a really big deal,” she added.Giving the vulva its dueDr. Rubin, at left, with a patient. She begins exams by handing the patient a mirror to see the same anatomy that she is examining. Shuran Huang for The New York TimesEvery patient who enters Dr. Rubin’s office, regardless of age, is taken on a tour of their own vulva. Banished is the white sheet draped over a patient’s legs for the pelvic exam — a convention that Dr. Rubin believes helps keep women’s “private parts” shameful and hidden. Instead, Dr. Rubin starts by handing her patient a long-handled mirror to see the same anatomy that she will be examining.With a Q-tip, Dr. Rubin probes each part of the vulva for pain, pointing out the labia minora, labia majora and vaginal opening as her patient follows along. Then, she checks under the clitoral hood for adhesions or other skin conditions. The entire exam usually takes under five minutes. “We go at your pace,” she said recently in an exam with a 62-year-old woman, who was experiencing pain after sex. “You’re the boss of this show.”Dr. Rubin and her colleagues believe that their field is uniquely positioned to champion the clitoris and female pleasure. After all, said Dr. Barbara Chubak, a urologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, “urologists are all about the phallus” — which the clitoris technically is, as it arises from the same embryological structures and is made up of the same erectile tissues as the penis.“So by definition, clitoral anatomy could, and should, also be a urologic thing,” Dr. Rubin added.Moreover, urologists are perfectly comfortable waxing poetic about things that other providers are too squeamish to discuss. “Urology is all about peeing and all about sex,” Dr. Chubak said. “The stuff that people are embarrassed to talk about, urologists want to talk about. Clitoral medicine belongs with the urologists.”Still, it will take more than passionate “penis doctors,” Dr. Rubin said, to give the vulva its due; there must be a concerted movement, one that transcends medicine’s traditionally siloed specialties, to understand and map this anatomy. And for that to happen, other fields need to recognize female sexual pleasure as essential and worth preserving.“I truly believe we are just several decades behind on the female side,” Dr. Rubin said. “But we have to do the work. And we have to have people interested in doing the work.”

Published1 day agoSharecloseShare pageCopy linkAbout sharingImage source, Ramos familyBy Regan MorrisBBC News, Los AngelesTeen overdose deaths have never been higher in the US as young Americans are increasingly poisoned by the synthetic opiate fentanyl, even as fewer teens use drugs.More than 100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses last year – the vast majority were adults – but the fastest growing group to die of overdoses were teenagers. Melanie Ramos’ family knows this all too well. The 15-year-old girl died inside her school’s bathroom last month after taking a pill laced with fentanyl.Melanie and her friend thought they were taking Percocet, a pain medication that is sometimes abused. But the counterfeit pills were laced with fentanyl and she was poisoned.”She was a beautiful, sweet girl coming from hardworking parents,” her uncle Oscar said at a candlelight vigil on the steps of Bernstein High School, where friends and family prayed in Spanish and placed flowers on a shrine to Melanie.Fentanyl is typically smuggled into the United States by Mexican drug cartels. While it used to be laced into the hardest drugs like heroin, the cartels now mass-produce fentanyl pills in rainbow colours to mimic prescription pills and, some say, to target kids who are more willing to experiment with them.In Los Angeles a spate of overdose deaths from pills has authorities worried, and on Wednesday, the state of California seized 52lb (24kg) of fentanyl powder – enough to make a quarter of a million pills – as part of a state-wide operation led by the Justice department. But the problem extends across the US. In New York last week, authorities seized 15,000 rainbow coloured pills hidden in a Lego toy box.The US is an outlier when it comes to overdoses, with a death rate 20 times the global average – although Scotland is not far behind.”We are far and away the world leader in overdose death unfortunately,” said Joseph Friedman, a substance use researcher at the University of California Los Angeles.The overdose rate among school-aged children in the US doubled between 2019 and 2020 and then rose a further 20% last year, he said.”Teen drug use is becoming more dangerous but not more common,” Mr Friedman said, adding that fentanyl, not the stress of the pandemic was to blame: Teen drug use actually dropped sharply during the pandemic because it is usually a social activity.At a contentious meeting at Bernstein High School, where Melanie died, officials and police warned upset families and children that “one pill can kill”.Her death has prompted LA officials to stock the overdose reversal medication, Narcan, in every school.The medication, which commonly comes in the form of a nasal spray, can be used by anyone to reverse the effects of an overdose.Increasing access to Narcan is also part of a federal response to the opioid crisis announced this month by the Biden administration, which said it would inject $1.5bn (£1.3bn) to fund programmes and support law enforcement to go after drug traffickers.Experts say teens will experiment with drugs no matter what they are told or taught in schools, so overdose prevention is the only way to slow the growth in overdose deaths.Community Health Project Los Angeles workers provide free Narcan and fentanyl testing strips – so people can test drugs before getting high. They are glad schools will now keep Narcan on hand, and have urged parents and kids to carry it in their backpacks.Image source, Getty ImagesAt a recent training, drug and alcohol counsellor Sandra Mims demonstrated how to use the spray – one spritz up the nose, followed by a rub on the sternum. Then another spray 2-3 minutes later if the person overdosing did not respond.”Children start as young as 12,” Ms Mims said. “It’s so much more deadly now with fentanyl and the synthetic pills.”Nick Angelo, who has used opiates in the past but now works for the non-profit, saved three people with Narcan in a single week. But he sounded weary rather than heroic when talking about it.”When me and my friends were using opiates we didn’t have to worry that every single hit we took could be our last,” he said.More on this storyPharmacies ordered to pay $650m in US opioids suit18 AugustHelp stop American drug deaths, US asks China11 MayUS drug overdose deaths hit record levels17 November 2021

Only about 15 million doses of the new shots have been administered so far, and many Americans appear to be unaware of or simply uninterested in them.BALTIMORE — The new coronavirus booster shots have found a modest number of takers at one of this city’s few remaining public vaccination sites, with nine doses given on one recent day and 15 on another.More than a month after the retooled shots were rolled out, only about 5 percent of Baltimore residents have received one, a figure that reflects the slow uptake nationally. In a city with stark health disparities, local officials see a reason to be worried.“The fact that we’ve been getting it so often is making it uninteresting to people,” Rebecca Dineen, the city’s Covid-19 vaccine coordinator, said of the rounds of coronavirus shots.The anemic turnout underscores yet another test of the Biden administration’s pandemic strategy, as federal and local officials contend with dwindling public patience and diminishing funds for the virus response.Only about 15 million doses of the new shots have been administered nationally since their introduction at the beginning of September, representing less than one in 10 people who are eligible, and there are signs that many Americans are unaware of or simply uninterested in them. In a Kaiser Family Foundation survey last month, half of adults said they had heard little or nothing about the shots.Once defined by supply shortages and mass vaccination sites, the nation’s ever-expanding inoculation campaign has lately been characterized by apathy, with potentially serious health consequences for the most vulnerable Americans should another Covid wave sweep the country this winter.The tepid response to the shots, public health experts say, is more than just a marketing dilemma. Many Americans have recently had a coronavirus infection, drawing out the timeline for when they might seek another booster or causing them to skip one altogether. Others are wary of continual boosting or side effects that might keep them from going to school or work.The turnout for the new shots, for which children as young as age 5 became eligible this week, could fall far short of the response to the initial booster campaign that the federal government undertook around a year ago, when administration officials say there was less fatigue around vaccination and the pandemic more broadly. Around 110 million people received at least one dose of the original booster formulation before the new shots were authorized at the end of August.Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the White House Covid-19 coordinator, said in an interview that the early turnout for the updated boosters amounted to a “good start” and that uptake was likely to steadily increase this fall. Many Americans, he said, were treating the new vaccines like flu shots, considering receiving one as the weather turned colder.“We did not have an internal number in our heads, or at least I didn’t have one in mind, of what we were going to achieve,” Dr. Jha said. “My kind of mental model was that it would really start ramping up once we got into October.”Read More on the Coronavirus PandemicUpdated Boosters for Kids: The Food and Drug Administration broadened access to updated Covid booster shots to include children as young as 5.Long Covid: A study of tens of thousands of people in Scotland found that one in 20 who had been sick with Covid reported not recovering at all, and another four in 10 said they had not fully recovered many months later.A Persistent Variant: Ten months have passed since Omicron’s debut. Since then it has displayed a remarkable capacity to evolve new tricks.‘Anti-Vax’ Capital No More: Vaccine skeptics once found a home in Marin County, Calif. Now, the pandemic has made them unwelcome, as Covid vaccine rates soar there.Administration officials made an expensive bet on the new campaign at a fraught moment in congressional funding negotiations, buying over 170 million doses with billions in repurposed funds — enough to vaccinate most of the roughly 225 million Americans who have had an initial round of vaccination.One senior official said the purchase was modeled on how the federal government typically buys flu vaccines, with enough doses to reach any American at tens of thousands of sites while limiting how many go to waste. Around 80 percent of doses in recent weeks were given at retail pharmacies, Dr. Jha said, an increase from earlier Covid-19 vaccination campaigns.While many Americans still have substantial protection from past vaccinations and infections, federal officials have pointed to analyses that show the new boosters could still save thousands of lives. Vaccine experts say they expect the shots to deliver an initial burst of antibodies and a broadened immune response. The Covid vaccines were redesigned to target Omicron subvariants on the assumption that more current formulations would provide better and more durable protection.Yet researchers are still working to determine how well the shots protect people and how long those defenses last. The data that federal regulators gathered from the manufacturers of the boosters, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, is still preliminary, leaving experts to speculate about the additional benefits the new vaccines may offer, including its influence on transmission or longer-lasting symptoms of Covid-19.Federal officials are not expected to have early data from Pfizer and Moderna on what kind of short-term antibody responses the new vaccines induced in trial participants until later this fall.Health officials and providers already know whom they need to reach with the new shots, as Americans over 75 have represented a majority of deaths from Covid-19 in recent months. Around half of those vaccinated with the new boosters so far are seniors, Dr. Jha said.Dr. Ashish K. Jha, the White House Covid-19 coordinator, said many Americans were treating the new vaccines like flu shots, considering receiving one as the weather turned colder.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWhite House officials say they have tried to publicize the new shots with federal ad campaigns, clinics at state and county fairs and partnerships with local leaders. The administration is targeting older Americans with outreach from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, while the White House is working with CVS and Walgreens to increase booster awareness, Dr. Jha said.“When you walk into CVS, you see signs for the flu shot,” he said, adding, “We want to make sure that that is getting tied into their outreach on Covid-19 vaccines as well.”Dr. Swati Gaur, the medical director for two long-term care facilities in Georgia, said the challenge had shifted from getting a supply of vaccine doses to waging a piecemeal persuasion campaign to coax seniors into taking them.In one recent encounter, she said, she spoke with a resident at one of her facilities who had grown tired of getting vaccinated against the virus after four shots and refused a fifth. She walked him through the potential benefits, and he agreed to get the shot.Dr. Gaur said it was critical that employees at long-term care facilities calling families and asking for consent to vaccinate knew how to have similar conversations.Biden administration officials have offered sometimes competing ideas of the urgency of the booster campaign for younger, healthier people. Federal regulators scrambled to make the updated shots available ahead of schedule late in the summer, opting for that approach instead of offering second booster doses of the original vaccine formulation to all adults. With case counts lower, some top officials have recently offered a more relaxed timeline, turning to an October theme.Dr. Jha encouraged Americans to get the new shots by Halloween so their immunity would be bolstered by Thanksgiving. “What we’ve been trying to do is give advice that simplifies it,” he said, adding, “The idea is that you don’t have to sort of think too hard about are you eligible or are you not eligible.”Some experts have warned that attempts to simplify messaging could backfire.Dr. Walid F. Gellad, a drug safety expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said that efforts to reach all age groups had diluted attention to those who most need enhanced protection. When experts over the past year have questioned whether younger, healthier Americans need boosting, he said, “to those listening only halfheartedly, it will just sound like criticism of the booster, even though it was criticism of the booster in those age groups.”With the new shots, more Americans are making guesswork out of the timing. Acting on expert advice, some of those who have recently had the virus are waiting three or more months to get boosted, while others are timing the shot for the holidays or travel, or another uptick in cases.Amanda First, 32, a lawyer in New York, said that after having a mild case of Covid in July, she was not in a hurry to get the next vaccine dose. But she got one of the new boosters this month so that she would have more protection when spending time with family during the holidays.“I’m cautiously optimistic it will provide me protection,” she said of the new shot. “But I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m reinfected.”Melvin Battle waiting to receive his booster shot in Baltimore. “It’s something that needed to be done,” he said.Rosem Morton for The New York TimesMunro Wood, a 33-year-old web developer near St. Louis, said he received his first booster in June but had grown tired of the idea of regular Covid-19 shots. He was still undecided on whether to get the new dose.“Annual or even biannual boosters are uncomfortable enough that they don’t overcome the risk-reward threshold for me,” he said, adding, “If another, much worse variant comes out and starts spreading as rapidly as the initial Omicron wave, I’ll probably perk up and pay more attention.”Baltimore’s initial vaccine rollout included extensive advertising and grass-roots work, and three-quarters of residents have now received at least one vaccine dose.Ms. Dineen, the city’s Covid-19 vaccine coordinator, said that city officials were still prioritizing getting first and second doses to vulnerable people in poorly vaccinated neighborhoods, where canvassers continue to go door-to-door with the shots.Those at the city clinic one day this month were the vaccine-dedicated. “It’s something that needed to be done,” Melvin Battle, a city employee, said, noting that “winter’s coming along.”Paula Ladson-Gillis, another city employee, said she knew a dose of one of the new vaccines might not prevent her from getting Covid-19, but it would at least help to keep her from getting very ill.“I know plenty of people are relaxed — I’m not one of them,” Ms. Ladson-Gillis said. “And that even says more to me why I want to get it, because too many people are not getting it.”

Mother and daughter, they developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which has helped millions of people discover if they are introverts or extroverts or thinkers or feelers.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.In the pivotal early months of World War II, as Hitler’s armies tore through Europe, a part-time crime writer and mother of two in Swarthmore, Pa., came across a Reader’s Digest article with the headline, “Fitting the Worker to the Job.”The article struck a chord. Isabel Briggs Myers had by then volunteered as an aircraft spotter for the Civil Air Patrol and as a nurse with the Red Cross. She had thought long and deeply about the importance of matching the right people with the right jobs, a crucial process in the run-up to U.S. intervention in Europe.She sensed the need for what she referred to as a “people sorting instrument” and wrote to the one person who she knew would instantly understand: her mother, Katherine Cook Briggs, a self-educated magazine writer with a passion for the ideas of Karl Jung, the Swiss psychologist and mentee of Freud.Briggs seized on the idea, and mother and daughter threw themselves into the task, fashioning questions intended to identify people as introverts or extroverts, thinkers or feelers, among other categories, while drawing on Jung’s psychological typology.The resulting questionnaire, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or M.B.T.I., would become one of the most widely used personality assessments in the world, now a standard at hundreds of corporations and universities and in government. More than two million people take the Myers-Briggs personality test each year.Briggs with her daughter, Isabel, in the early 1900s. They ultimately developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (M.B.T.I.), a personality test that has been widely used around the world.via Myers Briggs Family The enduring popularity of the Myers-Briggs test is rooted not in science — personality tests are notoriously poor predictors of behavior — but in the two women’s ingenuity, commercial instincts and timing. Mid-20th century America was beginning to feel its industrial power and needed measurements for a growing management class. The Rorschach inkblot test was in use, as were the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a 567-item questionnaire, and the Thematic Apperception Test, developed by the Harvard psychologist Henry Murray.But the Myers-Briggs test had an intrinsic thematic quality that the others lacked. Most existing tests concluded that each personality category had a positive and a negative: An extrovert was good, an introvert was bad, for instance. But Myers felt that each personality type had strengths and weaknesses. Rather than build a test that favored one over another, hers was judgment-free. She and her mother described their personality types in terms of strengths and “gifts” and how those could clarify whether a person was the right “fit” for a job, a career or even a social affair. It felt simultaneously analytic and supportive, giving people a language to describe their best selves.“We sometimes say that Isabel was the first positive psychologist,” Elizabeth Styron, chairwoman of the nonprofit Center for Applications of Psychological Types, an M.B.T.I. research center, said in a phone interview, referring to a branch of psychology that took off in the 1980s. “It’s about what’s right with a person, not what’s wrong with a person.”The mother-daughter team became a creative sales force as well. Myers tweaked and promoted her product while searching for guinea pigs. Her son’s high school class took the test, as did incoming students to the George Washington University medical school. Soon dozens of medical schools around the country were added to her list. She wrote all the questions (for instance “Do you prefer to a) eat to live, or b) live to eat?”) and scored all the tests by hand.All the while she pushed back against skepticism and sexism. Critics pointed out that neither Briggs nor Myers had a background or advanced degree in psychology; they were merely amateur “housewives” with an unusual hobby. And, the critics said, their personality indicator had no scientific foundation, no peer-reviewed research to validate it. Some said it was little more effective than reading someone’s horoscope.Myers kept going nonetheless, and in 1956 she started working with Henry Chauncey, the president of the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, to publish the M.B.T.I. The tool posited that the four dimensions of personality produced a total of 16 possible types, all noted with initials.The first dimension is whether an individual is an introvert (I) or extrovert (E). The second is how a person perceives the world, either through “sensing” (S) or through “intuition” (N). A third focused on how an individual makes decisions, either in a “thinking” (T) manner or a “feeling” (F) manner. The final dimension is based on how a person deals with the outside world, either “judging” (J) or “perceiving” (P). Judging is a structured, organized approach, while perceiving means someone has an adaptable, flexible, spontaneous relationship with the outside world.Myers herself was a proud I.N.F.P., which she described as someone with a “great faithfulness to duty and obligations” who did not pass judgment on others. Her mother was an I.N.F.J.Myers with her granddaughter Kathleen in her Swarthmore, Pa., living room where she developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.James A. Hughes Jr.The test was considered fun, and in subsequent years more institutions began using it. By the 1980s, the M.B.T.I. was available in 29 languages and used in 115 countries by a wide range of businesses, academic institutions and organizations like the U.S. military, the Marriott Corporation, JetBlue and Nokia for recruiting, job placement and even pairing roommates at college.Katharine Elizabeth Cook was born on Jan. 3, 1875, in East Lansing, Mich., to Albert and Mary (Baldwin) Cook. Her parents encouraged her to read, think broadly about the world and pursue avenues that were generally unavailable to women at the time.At 13, Katharine entered Michigan Agricultural College (now Michigan State University), where she was one of nine women among almost 100 men. At 16, she graduated second in her class. Her father, a professor of zoology and entomology at the school, taught the then-disputed theory of evolution and passed on his iconoclastic outlook to his daughter. Katharine, who became a freelance writer for women’s magazines, often considered how to balance societal expectations of her gender with her intellectual ambitions.She was a “woman ahead of her time, caught in a restraining net woven of sexism, cultural conditioning and her own brilliance,” Frances Wright Saunders wrote in “Katharine and Isabel: Mother’s Light, Daughter’s Journey” (1991).In 1896, Katharine married a former classmate, Lyman Briggs, an engineer and physicist, and set aside her career aspirations in favor of domestic life.After the birth of her daughter, Isabel McKelvey Briggs, on Oct. 18, 1897, Briggs turned her living room into a “cosmic laboratory of baby training,” Merve Emre wrote in “The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing” (2018). There she home-schooled Isabel and kept detailed records of her observations in a notebook.Myers, center, with her grandchildren, Douglas and Kathleen.James A. Hughes Jr.She also wrote essays about child-rearing for The Ladies’ Home Journal and other publications, referring to Isabel as Suzanne and using a pseudonym for herself, Elizabeth Childe. In 1911, she began writing what would become a book-length manuscript, “The Education of Suzanne.”Briggs’s discovery of Jung in 1923 gave her a structure with which to expand her ideas. She studied his work, corresponded with him and even met him when he visited America. She honed what she called a “personality paint box,” in which she assigned shades of color to each personality type, and in a 1926 article in The New Republic she explained how readers could use the box to learn about themselves.Her concept, which she detailed on a set of 3-by-5-inch file cards, was the earliest iteration of what would become the M.B.T.I.Isabel went on to Swarthmore College and graduated at the top of her class. She married Clarence Myers, a lawyer; the couple had a son and daughter, and Isabel became as devoted a mother as her own had been. She also wrote novels, entering her first, “Murder Yet to Come,” in a contest sponsored by New McClure’s magazine in 1929 and winning. She invested her $7,500 grand prize in the stock market but lost it all in the Wall Street Crash later that year.Nonetheless, “Murder Yet to Come,” which was published the next year, became a best seller. Isabel Myers published a second mystery, “Give Me Death,” in 1934 as well as a play, “Death Calls for Margin,” a murder mystery set in Philadelphia after the 1929 stock market crash. Neither was very successful.Myers’s devotion to the test deepened when she began working for the Pennsylvania Company for Banking and Trusts as an apprentice to the personnel director, Edward N. Hay, whose knowledge of job performance ratings would inform her framing of her personality test. In 1943, her husband helped her file for a copyright .In 1975, she signed a contract with a California-based publisher, Consulting Psychologists Press (now the Myers-Briggs Company), which made the M.B.T.I. its best-selling product.Briggs died at 93 on July 10, 1968. Myers died at 82 on May 5, 1980.For all its appeal to managers, the Myers-Briggs test has become a target for researchers and cultural historians. A 2021 documentary suggested that it was dangerous to use such personality tests on a widespread scale. The film, “Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests,” posits that test givers may be influenced by systemic unconscious bias and yet are given undue say in who is worthy of a job position.Emre, the Oxford University professor, who is also an executive producer of the film, said in an email that “institutions that use type enable structural racism and other forms of discrimination to persist.”For Myers’s part, she took pains to ensure that her work was inclusive, her granddaughter Kathleen Hughes, a journalist, said, as evidenced by the title of the book that Myers wrote with her son, Peter B. Myers — “Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type” (1980).Myers would say “that she hoped the indicator could help prevent another Hitler,” Hughes recalled, “by giving as many people as possible a greater understanding and respect for individual differences.”

Neurons that sense pain protect the gut from inflammation and associated tissue damage by regulating the microbial community living in the intestines, according to a study from researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The researchers, whose report appears Oct. 14 in Cell, found in a preclinical model that pain-sensing neurons in the gut secrete a molecule called substance P, which appears to protect against gut inflammation and related tissue damage by boosting the population of beneficial microbes in the gut. The researchers also found that these pain-sensing nerves are diminished in number, with significant disruptions to their pain-signaling genes, in people who have inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
“These findings reshape our thinking about chronic inflammatory disease, and open up a whole new approach to therapeutic intervention,” said study senior author Dr. David Artis, director of the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, director of the Friedman Center for Nutrition and Inflammation and the Michael Kors Professor of Immunology at Weill Cornell Medicine.
The study’s first author, Dr. Wen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher in the Artis laboratory, added, “Defining a previously unknown sensory function for these specific neurons in influencing the microbiota adds a new level of understanding to host-microbiota interactions.”
IBD covers two distinct disorders, Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and is believed to affect several million people in the United States. Typically it is treated with drugs that directly target elements of the immune system. Scientists now appreciate that gut-dwelling bacteria and other microbes also help regulate gut inflammation.
As Dr. Artis’s laboratory and others have shown in recent years, the nervous system, which is “wired” into most organs, appears to be yet another powerful regulator of the immune system at the body’s barrier surfaces. In the new study, Dr. Artis and his team specifically examined pain neurons that innervate — extend their nerve endings into — the gut.