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The Biden administration announced the new guidelines as it continued to work to get coronavirus tests to people regardless of their insurance status.WASHINGTON — Private insurers will soon have to cover the cost of eight at-home coronavirus tests per member per month, the Biden administration said Monday.People will be able to get the tests at their health plan’s “preferred” pharmacies and other retailers with no out-of-pocket costs, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. They can also buy the tests elsewhere and file claims for reimbursement, just as they often do for medical care.“Today’s action further removes financial barriers and expands access to Covid-19 tests for millions of people,” Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the Biden administration’s Medicare and Medicaid chief, said in a statement about the new guidelines.Roughly 150 million Americans, or about 45 percent of the population, are privately insured, mostly through their employers. Each enrolled dependent of the primary insurance holder counts as a member.At out-of-network facilities, insurers’ responsibility would be capped at $12 per test, meaning people could be responsible for any additional costs.But if a health plan does not establish a network of “preferred” retailers where patients can get tests covered upfront, it will be responsible for whatever claims its patients submit for their eight monthly rapid tests, with no limit on the price.Sabrina Corlette, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms, said the policy could save families hundreds of dollars a month.“I would love to see a more comprehensive national testing policy where these tests are free for everybody, regardless of insurance status,” she said. “Will it help everybody? No. It is definitely not the ideal way to lower barriers to Covid testing. But it is helpful.”Rapid at-home tests are typically sold in packs of two, ranging in cost from about $14 to $34. That can be prohibitively expensive, especially when tests are purchased in bulk.Other countries have spent more heavily on rapid testing. In Britain, citizens can use a government website to order free rapid tests for home use. Germany invested hundreds of millions of dollars to create a network of 15,000 rapid testing sites. The United States has instead focused public purchasing on vaccines, and efforts to encourage their uptake.Some local governments in the United States have invested heavily in rapid testing to counter the latest wave of cases. Washington, D.C., which has experienced a substantial surge in virus cases, now allows residents to pick up four free rapid tests daily at libraries across the city.The new Biden policy will not apply retroactively to at-home tests that Americans have already purchased. Tests ordered or administered by health providers will continue to be covered by insurance without any co-payment or deductible under a law requiring insurers to fully cover tests at doctor’s offices, public sites and other facilities.The administration is working on other efforts to get coronavirus tests to people regardless of their insurance status, including a plan to deliver 500 million free rapid tests to the homes of Americans who order them, starting later this month.That plan, along with the new rules for insurers announced Monday, is part of a broader effort by the Biden administration in recent weeks to catch up to skyrocketing demand for rapid tests, as virus cases have exploded around the nation with the arrival of the highly contagious Omicron variant.The administration has also announced plans to make tens of millions of free tests available for uninsured Americans at health clinics and other sites in underserved communities. And it has recently opened federally run test sites in hard-hit regions of the country.Matt Eyles, president of the health insurer trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a statement that insurance companies would “work as quickly as possible to implement this guidance.”“While there will likely be some hiccups in early days, we will work with the administration to swiftly address issues as they arise,” he said.Supplies of the tests at pharmacies and grocery stores all but dried up last month as Omicron descended, and manufacturers are racing to restock shelves, a scramble that has prompted some experts to criticize the administration for being caught flat-footed.The low availability could hinder the rollout of the reimbursement policy, said Lindsey Dawson, a policy analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation who has researched the availability of rapid tests.“If reimbursement exists but there aren’t tests to purchase,” she said, “that doesn’t help an individual consumer.”She added, “The policy could certainly drive demand, and could exacerbate the problem.”Ms. Dawson said prices have begun climbing at some major retailers, such as Walmart. That could mean significant upfront costs for families who have to file claims for reimbursement, she said.The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to KnowCard 1 of 3The latest Covid data in the U.S.

An international research team led by scientists at Georgetown University have demonstrated the power of artificial intelligence to predict which viruses could infect humans — like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that led to the COVID-19 pandemic — which animals host them, and where they could emerge.
Their ensemble of predictive models of likely reservoir hosts, published January 10 in Lancet Microbe (“Optimizing predictive models to prioritize viral discovery in zoonotic reservoirs”), was validated in an 18-month project to identify specific bat species likely to carry betacoronaviruses, the group that includes SARS-like viruses.
“If you want to find these viruses, you have to start by profiling their hosts — their ecology, their evolution, even the shape of their wings,” explains the study’s senior author, Colin Carlson, PhD, an assistant research professor in the Department of Microbiology & Immunology and a member of Georgetown’s Center for Global Health Science and Security at Georgetown University Medical Center. “Artificial intelligence lets us take data on bats and turn it into concrete predictions: where should we be looking for the next SARS?”
Despite global investments in disease surveillance, it remains difficult to identify and monitor wildlife reservoirs of viruses that could someday infect humans. Statistical models are increasingly being used to prioritize which wildlife species to sample in the field, but the predictions being generated from any one model can be highly uncertain. Scientists also rarely track the success or failure of their predictions after they make them, making it hard to learn and make better models in the future. Together, these limitations mean that there is high uncertainty in which models may be best suited to the task.
This new study suggests that the search for closely-related viruses could be non-trivial, with over 400 bat species around the world predicted to host betacoronaviruses, a large group of viruses that includes those responsible for SARS-CoV (the virus that caused the 2002-2004 outbreak of SARS) and SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19). Although the origin of SARS-CoV-2 remains uncertain, the spillover of other viruses from bats is a growing problem due to factors like agricultural expansion and climate change.
Greg Albery, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Georgetown’s Biology Department, says COVID-19 provided the impetus to expedite their research. “This is a really rare opportunity,” explains Albery. “Outside of a pandemic, we’d never learn this much about these viruses in this small a timeframe. A decade of research has been collapsed into about a year of publications, and it means we can actually show that these tools work.”
In the first quarter of 2020, the researcher team trained eight different statistical models that predicted which kinds of animals could host betacoronaviruses. Over more than a year, the team then tracked discovery of 40 new bat hosts of betacoronaviruses to validate initial predictions and dynamically update their models. The researchers found that models harnessing data on bat ecology and evolution performed extremely well at predicting new hosts. In contrast, cutting-edge models from network science that used high-level mathematics — but less biological data — performed roughly as well or worse than expected at random.

Marine life hitching a ride on ocean-crossing ships poses a threat to Antarctica’s pristine ecosystems, with the potential for invasive species to arrive from almost anywhere across the globe, say the authors of a new study.
New research by the University of Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey has traced the global movements of all ships entering Antarctic waters. It reveals that Antarctica is connected to all regions of the globe via an extensive network of ship activity. Fishing, tourism, research and supply ships are exposing Antarctica to invasive, non-native species that threaten the stability of its pristine environment.
The study is published today in the journal PNAS.
The researchers identified 1,581 ports with links to Antarctica, and say that all could be a potential source of non-native species. The species — including mussels, barnacles, crabs and algae — attach themselves to ships’ hulls, in a process termed ‘biofouling’. The finding suggests that they could arrive in Antarctic waters from almost anywhere across the globe.
“Invasive, non-native species are one of the biggest threats to Antarctica’s biodiversity — its native species have been isolated for the last 15-30 million years. They may also have economic impacts, via the disruption of fisheries,” said Professor David Aldridge in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge, senior author of the report.
The scientists say they are particularly concerned about the movement of species from pole to pole. These species are already cold-adapted, and may make the journey on tourist or research ships that spend the summer in the Arctic before travelling across the Atlantic for the Antarctic summer season.

A study published by researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago describes a new method for analyzing pyroptosis — the process of cell death that is usually caused by infections and results in excess inflammation in the body — and shows that process, long thought to be irreversible once initiated, can in fact be halted and controlled.
The discovery, which is reported in Nature Communications, means that scientists have a new way to study diseases that are related to malfunctioning cell death processes, like some cancers, and infections that can be complicated by out-of-control inflammation caused by the process. These infections include sepsis, for example, and acute respiratory distress syndrome, which is among the major complications of COVID-19 illness.
Pyroptosis is a series of biochemical reactions that uses gasdermin, a protein, to open large pores in the cell membrane and destabilize the cell. To understand more about this process, the UIC researchers designed an “optogenetic” gasdermin by genetically engineering the protein to respond to light.
“The cell death process plays an important role in the body, in both healthy states and unhealthy ones, but studying pyroptosis — which is a major type of cell death — has been challenging,” said Gary Mo, UIC assistant professor in the department of pharmacology and regenerative medicine and the department of biomedical engineering at the College of Medicine.
Mo said that methods to examine the pyroptosis mechanisms at play in live cells are difficult to control because they are initiated by unpredictable pathogens, which in turn have disparate effects in different cells and people.
“Our optogenetic gasdermin allowed us to skip over the unpredictable pathogen behavior and the variable cellular response because it mimics at the molecular level what happens in the cell once pyroptosis is initiated,” Mo said.
The researchers applied this tool and used florescent imaging technology to precisely activate gasdermin in cell experiments and observe the pores under various circumstances. They discovered that certain conditions, like specific concentrations of calcium ions, for example, triggered the pores to close within only tens of seconds.
This automatic response to external circumstances provides evidence that pyroptosis dynamically self-regulates.
“This showed us that this form of cell death is not a one-way ticket. The process is actually programmed with a cancel button, an off-switch,” Mo said. “Understanding how to control this process unlocks new avenues for drug discovery, and now we can find drugs that work for both sides — it allows us to think about tuning, either boosting or limiting, this type of cell death in diseases, where we could previously only remove this important process.”
The research was funded with grants from the National Institutes of Health (P01HL060678, R01HL090152, R01HL152515, T32HL007820, P01HL151327).
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While the world has celebrated the arrival of highly effective vaccines against COVID-19, new work by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine and the University of Oxford shows that even unrelated vaccines could help reduce the burden of the pandemic. The study, published Jan. 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, crystallizes decades of evidence suggesting that the generalized immune-boosting properties of many vaccines can cross-protect patients against multiple pathogens.
Before COVID-19-specific vaccines became available, many public health experts and immunologists suggested immunizing vulnerable populations with other vaccines to provide some degree of protection.
“We know that unrelated vaccines have these heterologous effects, and a reasonable person could tell you that if you used them during a pandemic, it would benefit,” said Dr. Nathaniel Hupert, an associate professor of population health sciences at Weill Cornell Medicine and lead author on the new paper. However, it wasn’t clear how much such an intervention would help, which populations would be best to target or how much of the population would have to get the unrelated vaccines to have a meaningful effect.
To address those questions, Dr. Hupert and senior author Dr. Douglas Nixon, a professor of immunology in medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Weill Cornell Medicine, and their colleagues from Weill Cornell Medicine and the University of Oxford used the COVID-19 International Modeling Consortium (CoMo) system, a sophisticated computer modeling platform they’d built in response to the pandemic. “If you have a model that can be customized to a particular place and time in the context of an outbreak, you can start to experiment with different conditions of population immunity and see how things might have played out,” Dr. Hupert said.
Using the winter 2020-21 COVID-19 wave that struck the United States after holiday season reopenings, the investigators modeled the likely effects of a non-COVID-19 vaccine intervention at different times and targeting different populations. While they did not specify particular vaccines, the researchers chose values for cross-protection consistent with data from earlier studies on measles, influenza, tuberculosis and other immunizations. They found that an unrelated vaccine that provided just 5 percent protection against serious COVID-19, and was delivered to only a small portion of the population, would have caused a substantial reduction in caseloads and hospital usage.
“Surprisingly, we found a couple of really interesting emergent results from what we put in the mix,” Dr. Hupert said. While COVID-19 severity correlates tightly with age, an experimental scenario that modeled vaccinating everyone over the age of 20 was more effective than strategies targeting only the elderly. That could be because younger people tend to have more social contacts across age groups, making them more likely to spread the virus to more vulnerable populations. The timing of the vaccinations also mattered, with delivery during the rising phase of the wave of infections having the biggest impact.
“This modeling study shows the potential power of all vaccines in keeping the immunological system primed and healthy,” Dr. Nixon said, “and reinforces the need for everyone to keep their vaccination history up to date, particularly during a pandemic.”
Dr. Hupert sees the new findings as a “double win,” suggesting that even nations with difficulty distributing enough COVID-19-specific vaccines can intervene with routine immunizations against other pathogens and, in combination with non-pharmaceutical interventions such as face masks, could potentially blunt ongoing COVID-19 waves while also preventing other diseases.
And as vaccine-escaping variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus like Omicron sweep the globe, he notes that “each and every additional protective measure that we can muster across populations at risk — even small ones like those we modeled — will lead to fewer infections, which means fewer new variants, which may mean a quicker end to the pandemic.”
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Removing one type of T cell from donor blood used for stem cell grafts could greatly reduce a serious complication called graft-versus-host disease in patients with leukemia, according to a new study.
Published today in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study reports that only 7% of leukemia patients who received stem cell transplants depleted of naïve T cells developed chronic graft-versus-host disease, or GVHD, as compared to the 30% to 60% rate with standard of care treatment. About 70% of these patients developed the acute form of GVHD, but disease was typically mild and responsive to first-line corticosteroid agents.
“It’s quite remarkable that we were able to reduce chronic GVHD so dramatically with this graft engineering strategy,” said senior author Warren Shlomchik, M.D., director of the Hematopoietic Stem Cell Transplant and Cell Therapy program at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, and professor of medicine and immunology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. “It’s also striking that we saw almost no steroid-refractory acute graft-versus-host disease in our patients.”
For patients with leukemia and other blood diseases, transplantation of hematopoietic stem cells — progenitor cells that can turn into any type of blood cell — from a healthy donor can rebuild the body’s blood manufacturing system. But this life-saving treatment also comes with risks. Stem cell grafts, which are collected from either the bone marrow or circulating blood, contain T cells that can cause GVHD by attacking host tissues.
Acute GVHD typically occurs within 100 days after transplantation and tends to affect the skin, liver and gastrointestinal tract. Most patients respond to corticosteroid drugs, but a substantial fraction require additional immunosuppression. Chronic GVHD usually develops later than the acute form and can affect many organs. This persistent version of the disease can be more difficult to treat, often requiring prolonged immunosuppression and reducing patient quality of life or causing death.
Removing all T cells from a graft prior to transplantation can reduce GVHD, but this approach is a double-edged sword. Previous studies found that patients were at higher risk of leukemia relapse or death because T cells also are important for killing cancer cells and fighting infections.

In a first-of-its-kind surgery, a 57-year-old patient with terminal heart disease received a successful transplant of a genetically-modified pig heart and is still doing well three days later. It was the only currently available option for the patient. The historic surgery was conducted by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) faculty at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC), together known as the University of Maryland Medicine.
This organ transplant demonstrated for the first time that a genetically-modified animal heart can function like a human heart without immediate rejection by the body. The patient, David Bennett, a Maryland resident, is being carefully monitored over the next days and weeks to determine whether the transplant provides lifesaving benefits. He had been deemed ineligible for a conventional heart transplant at UMMC as well as at several other leading transplant centers that reviewed his medical records.
“It was either die or do this transplant. I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s my last choice,” said Mr. Bennett, the patient, a day before the surgery was conducted. He had been hospitalized and bedridden for the past few months. “I look forward to getting out of bed after I recover.”
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for the surgery on New Year’s Eve through its expanded access (compassionate use) provision. It is used when an experimental medical product, in this case the genetically-modified pig’s heart, is the only option available for a patient faced with a serious or life-threatening medical condition. The authorization to proceed was granted in the hope of saving the patient’s life.
“This was a breakthrough surgery and brings us one step closer to solving the organ shortage crisis. There are simply not enough donor human hearts available to meet the long list of potential recipients,” said Bartley P. Griffith, MD, who surgically transplanted the pig heart into the patient. Dr. Griffith is the Thomas E. and Alice Marie Hales Distinguished Professor in Transplant Surgery at UMSOM. “We are proceeding cautiously, but we are also optimistic that this first-in-the-world surgery will provide an important new option for patients in the future.”
Considered one of the world’s foremost experts on transplanting animal organs, known as xenotransplantation, Muhammad M. Mohiuddin, MD, Professor of Surgery at UMSOM, joined the UMSOM faculty five years ago and established the Cardiac Xenotransplantation Program with Dr. Griffith. Dr. Mohiuddin serves as the program’s Scientific/Program Director and Dr. Griffith as its Clinical Director.

A team of scientists, led by Scott Frey at the University of Missouri, have developed an innovative technique using small wearable sensors to gather data on how people — who have suffered from a traumatic hand amputation — use a prothesis versus a transplanted hand in everyday life. So far, the data shows people with a transplanted hand demonstrate a more balanced use of their hands than those who use a prothesis.
Frey is the Miller Family Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Psychological Sciences, and also has a joint appointment in the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.
“Most activities performed by a typical adult involve a fairly evenly balanced reliance on both hands,” Frey said. “Over the course of a normal day, roughly 55% of people’s activities involve the dominant hand and 45% involve the non-dominant hand. Now we have evidence that shows experienced prosthesis users rely on their prosthetic hand during about 20% of daily activities and use their uninjured limb for the remaining 80%. Hand transplant recipients exhibit a more balanced pattern of limb use that is closer to what we see in healthy adults, although not quite at the 55%/45% split.”
Nevertheless, Frey also noted that a hand transplant comes with significant risks, such as developing certain infections and cancers from the lifetime use of immunosuppressants needed to help keep the body from rejecting the new hand.
Frey said the findings from this study could help physicians and other medical professionals personalize treatment options to meet a patient’s individual needs based on their daily routine.
“We can bring people into a clinic or laboratory setting, and measure how they are doing with a prosthetic or hand transplant, but these observations are typically made under optimal and artificial conditions, and therefore might not accurately show us how people are truly functioning during their everyday lives,” Frey said. “These sensors, which continuously record movements over multiple days while people go about their lives, have the ability to revolutionize treatments by providing real world data that will help us develop personalized approaches to treat traumatic hand loss.”
While military personnel can experience a traumatic hand loss in both combat and non-combat situations, Frey said these injuries can also occur in civilian populations with work-related or recreational accidents, such as with farming equipment or fireworks. The study collected data continuously over three days as participants went about their normal lives. They wore four different sensors — two on the wrists of the prosthetic or transplanted hand as well as on the uninjured limb, and one on each the upper arms.
Frey said their technique could also lead to new ways for medical professionals to evaluate the effectiveness of treatments and personalized care for a variety of neurological diseases that affect hand use, including multiple sclerosis and stroke. Frey’s own mother had multiple sclerosis, and watching her condition deteriorate continues to motivate his work into furthering knowledge of the neural mechanisms and cognitive processes that are responsible for complex behaviors.
In addition to possible applications in other areas of medicine, including neurology, Frey’s approach is currently being used to investigate patterns of recovery in individuals with severe upper limb injuries who are at increased risk of developing chronic one-handedness through learned disuse of the injured limb. That project, scheduled to be completed in fall 2024, is being supported by a $1.5 million grant from the United States Department of Defense Restoring Warfighters with Neuromusculoskeletal Injuries Research Award, and includes collaborators from the schools of medicine at Johns Hopkins University, Ohio State University and Washington University in St. Louis.
Funding was provided by a grant from the Department of Defense (MR140043). Co-authors include Binal Motawar, Kelli Buchanan, Carmen Cirstea and Sean Morrow at MU; Christina Kaufman at University of Louisville; and Phil Stevens at Hanger Clinic in Salt Lake City, Utah.
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Results of a new study by researchers at Case Western Reserve University represent a step toward improving our understanding of Crohn’s disease and the factors that cause its intestinal inflammation.
Crohn’s disease is a type of inflammatory bowel disease that can lead to chronic inflammation of the entire digestive tract. Symptoms include diarrhea, pain and cramping, fatigue, weight loss and more. There is no cure for Crohn’s disease, but patients can alleviate symptoms with current treatment options.
New treatment options for Crohn’s disease patients may be on the horizon thanks to the research linking a common fungal pathogen to inflammatory bowel disease.
The study recently appeared in Cellular and Molecular Gastroenterology and Hepatology.
This new research from the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine focuses on the role of the fungus, Candida tropicalis (C. tropicalis), in triggering chronic inflammation within the gut microbiome. The gut microbiome is a complex ecosystem of fungus and bacteria found within the digestive tract.
Researchers introduced the fungus into animal models and induced colitis (inflammation of only the large intestine) through a chemical compound. The models infected with C. tropicalis showed severe inflammation and significant imbalance of the gut microbiome with changes in bacteria levels.
Researchers say the findings show that this imbalance of fungi and bacteria can create a predisposition to inflammatory bowel disease. Past studies have shown that people with Crohn’s disease have higher levels of C. tropicalis when compared to healthy individuals.
Understanding the impact of C. tropicalis on a person’s health will play a role in developing treatments for Crohn’s disease.
“Our findings provide a scientific rationale for eliminating C. tropicalis fungal infection of the gut,” said Fabio Cominelli, professor of medicine and pathology and associate dean for program development at the Case Western Reserve School of Medicine. “The next step in our research is to study other fungal organisms within the gut and then antifungal therapies in patients with this devastating condition. Remission is very difficult to obtain in Crohn’s disease patients.”
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Consuming more than 7 grams ( >1/2 tablespoon) of olive oil per day is associated with lower risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, cancer mortality, neurodegenerative disease mortality and respiratory disease mortality, according to a study publishing today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. The study found that replacing about 10 grams/day of margarine, butter, mayonnaise and dairy fat with the equivalent amount of olive oil is associated with lower risk of mortality as well.
“Our findings support current dietary recommendations to increase the intake of olive oil and other unsaturated vegetable oils,” said Marta Guasch-Ferré, PhD, a senior research scientist at the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the study’s lead author. “Clinicians should be counseling patients to replace certain fats, such as margarine and butter, with olive oil to improve their health. Our study helps make more specific recommendations that will be easier for patients to understand and hopefully implement into their diets.”
Using participants from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, researchers analyzed 60,582 women and 31,801 men who were free of cardiovascular disease and cancer at the study baseline in 1990. During 28 years of follow-up, diet was assessed by a questionnaire every four years. The questionnaire asked how often, on average, they consumed specific foods, types of fats and oils, as well as which brand or type of oils they used for cooking and added at the table in the previous year.
Olive oil consumption was calculated from the sum of three items in the questionnaire: olive oil used for salad dressings, olive oil added to food or bread, and olive oil used for baking and frying at home. One tablespoon was equivalent to 13.5 grams of olive oil. The consumption of other vegetable oils was calculated based on the participants reported oil brand and type of fat used for cooking at home. Margarine and butter consumption was based on the reported frequency of stick, tub or soft margarine consumption, and the amount of margarine or butter added from baking and frying at home. Intakes of dairy and other fats and nutrients were also calculated. The researchers found olive oil consumption increased from 1.6 grams/day in 1990 to about 4 grams/day in 2010, while margarine consumption decreased from about 12 grams/day in 1990 to about 4 grams/day in 2010. The intake of other fats remained stable.
Olive oil consumption was categorized as follows: Never or 0 to ≤4.5 grams/day ( >0 to ≤1 teaspoon) >4.5 to ≤7 grams/day ( >1 teaspoon to ≤1/2 tablespoon) >7 grams/day ( >1/2 tablespoon)Over the course of 28 years, there were 36,856 deaths with 22,768 occurring in the Nurses’ Health Study and 14,076 in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study. Participants with higher olive oil consumption were often more physically active, had Southern European or Mediterranean ancestry, were less likely to smoke and had a greater consumption of fruits and vegetables compared to those with lower olive oil consumption. The average consumption of total olive oil in the highest category was about 9 grams/day at baseline and included 5% of the study participants.
When researchers compared those who rarely or never consumed olive oil, those in the highest consumption category had 19% lower risk of cardiovascular mortality, 17% lower risk of cancer mortality, 29% lower risk of neurodegenerative mortality and 18% lower risk of respiratory mortality. The study also found substituting 10 grams/day of other fats, such as margarine, butter, mayonnaise and dairy fat, with olive oil was associated with 8-34% lower risk of total and cause-specific mortality. They found no significant associations when substituting olive oil for other vegetable oils.
“It’s possible that higher olive oil consumption is a marker of an overall healthier diet and higher socioeconomic status. However, even after adjusting for these and other social economic status factors, our results remained largely the same,” Guasch-Ferré said. “Our study cohort was predominantly a non-Hispanic white population of health professionals, which should minimize potentially confounding socioeconomic factors, but may limit generalizability as this population may be more likely to lead a healthy lifestyle.”
In an accompanying editorial, Susanna C. Larsson, PhD, associate professor of epidemiology at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, said, “The current study and previous studies have found that consumption of olive oil may have health benefits. However, several questions remain. Are the associations causal or spurious? Is olive oil consumption protective for certain cardiovascular diseases, such as stroke and atrial fibrillation, only or also for other major diseases and causes of death? What is the amount of olive oil required for a protective effect? More research is needed to address these questions.”