Publisher Health

After voting to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor and Republican of Louisiana, is embracing “the gestalt” of Kennedy’s measles response.Perhaps no vote was as agonizing for Senator Bill Cassidy, the Louisiana Republican and medical doctor, than his vote to confirm Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as President Trump’s health secretary. Mr. Cassidy wondered aloud for days how Mr. Kennedy, the nation’s most vocal and powerful critic of vaccinations, might handle an infectious disease crisis.Now, as a measles outbreak rages in West Texas, Mr. Cassidy has found out. It all comes down, he said, to “the gestalt.”On Monday, days after the Texas outbreak killed an unvaccinated child, Mr. Cassidy, who chairs the Senate Health Committee, was clipping down a Capitol corridor when he was asked about Mr. Kennedy. He pointed to a Fox News Digital opinion piece in which Mr. Kennedy advised parents to consult their doctors about vaccination, while calling it a “personal” decision.“That Fox editorial was very much encouraging people to get vaccinated,” he said.Reminded that Mr. Kennedy had described it as a personal choice, Mr. Cassidy thought for a moment. “If you want to like, parse it down to the line, you can say, ‘Discuss with your doctor,’” Mr. Cassidy said. “He also said, ‘We’re making vaccinations available. We’re doing this for vaccination. We’re doing that for vaccination.’ So if you take the gestalt of it, the gestalt was, ‘Let’s get vaccinated!’”Mr. Cassidy’s assessment — that the whole of Mr. Kennedy’s message was more than the sum of its parts — reflects how the measles outbreak has put a spotlight on how Mr. Trump’s unorthodox choice to run the country’s top health agency has brought a once-fringe perspective into the political mainstream, creating discomfort for some Republicans.As the founder and chairman of his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, and later as a presidential candidate, Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly downplayed the benefits of vaccination. He has also repeatedly suggested that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine causes autism, despite extensive research that has found no link.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Some commercially insured patients stand to save $150 per month on Wegovy, a popular obesity medication. Patients on Medicare and Medicaid are not eligible.Novo Nordisk will cut the price of its blockbuster weight loss medication Wegovy to $499 per month for certain patients who pay using their own money instead of going through insurance, the drug maker said on Wednesday.The move could cause more patients to start taking the drug. But the impact stands to be limited, because the decision does not lower prices for patients who get their health insurance through government programs or for employers that are struggling with the huge costs of medications like Wegovy, which have revolutionized the treatment of obesity.To be eligible for the reduced price, patients must be uninsured or commercially insured on plans that don’t cover the drug. Previously, the drug maker had offered a coupon to such patients allowing them to get a month’s supply of the drug for $650; Wednesday’s move translates into savings of $150 per month for such patients.The new offering is not available to tens of millions of Americans who get their insurance through government programs like Medicare and Medicaid — a demographic that largely lacks insurance coverage for weight loss drugs like Wegovy. To get Novo Nordisk’s drug, these patients must generally pay $1,300 or more per month out of pocket at a pharmacy.Novo Nordisk will offer the discounted product through an online pharmacy that will send prescriptions to patients through the mail — a strategy that drug makers are increasingly using to take more control of the distribution of their products. Novo Nordisk’s competitor, Eli Lilly, has a similar offering for vials of its weight loss drug, Zepbound, for $499 per month or less.Novo Nordisk’s price reduction comes just weeks before the market for cheaper copycat versions of Wegovy is expected to contract substantially.For the past few years, patients seeking lower prices have turned to versions created through a drug-ingredient mixing process known as compounding, which is permitted by regulators when patented products are in short supply.Patients often pay about $150 per month out of pocket for compounded versions of Wegovy. An estimated two million patients got the drug this way over a recent one-year period.But last month the Food and Drug Administration declared the Wegovy shortage over and ordered compounders to wind down their operations by April or May. Novo Nordisk now has the opportunity to scoop up displaced patients who had been relying on compounding and increase sales of its official version of the drug.

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

The research constitutes some of the first evidence that the condition is associated with modifications in the brain before childbirth.Postpartum depression affects about one in every seven women who give birth, but little is known about what happens in the brains of pregnant women who experience it. A new study begins to shed some light.Researchers scanned the brains of dozens of women in the weeks before and after childbirth and found that two brain areas involved in the processing and control of emotions increased in size in women who developed symptoms of postpartum depression.The results, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, constitute some of the first evidence that postpartum depression is associated with changes in the brain during pregnancy.Researchers found that women with symptoms of depression in the first month after giving birth also had increases in the volume of their amygdala, a brain area that plays a key role in emotional processing. Women who rated their childbirth experience as difficult or stressful — a perception that is often associated with postpartum depression — also showed increases in the volume of the hippocampus, a brain area that helps regulate emotions.“This is really the first step in trying to understand how does the brain change in people who have a normal course of pregnancy and then those who experience perinatal depression, and what can we do about it,” said Dr. Sheila Shanmugan, an assistant professor of psychiatry, obstetrics-gynecology and radiology at the University of Pennsylvania who was not involved in the study.“The big takeaways are about how there are these really profound brain changes during pregnancy and how now we’re seeing it in depression circuitry specifically,” she said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

The state’s insurance regulator has demanded detailed information about patients and their medications, raising privacy concerns.Florida’s insurance regulator has demanded an unusually intrusive trove of data on millions of prescription drugs filled in the state last year, including the names of patients taking the medications, their dates of birth and doctors they’ve seen.The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation in January sought this information from pharmacy benefit managers like UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx and CVS Health’s Caremark, companies that oversee prescription drugs for employers and government programs.It remained unclear why the state was ordering the submission of so much data. In a letter to one benefit manager reviewed by The New York Times, the regulator said the state required the data to review whether the benefit managers, known as P.B.M.s, were compliant with a 2023 state law aimed at lowering drug prices and reining in the managers.But the demand is sparking concerns about government overreach and patient privacy.“You don’t need such granular patient information for purposes of oversight,” said Sharona Hoffman, a health law and privacy expert at Case Western Reserve University. She added: “You have to worry: Is the government actually trying to get information about reproductive care or transgender care or mental health care?”Florida’s six-week abortion ban, enacted by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, and the state’s Republican-dominated legislature, requires that doctors who prescribe abortion pills dispense them in person, not through the mail. Another Florida law banned transgender transition care for minors and made it harder for adults to seek such care. Last year, a judge struck down key parts of that law, though it is still being enforced while the legal fight makes its way through the courts.The data requested by the state could, in theory, be used to determine whether physicians are complying with those laws.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

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Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health economist who came to prominence crusading against lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic, faced questioning from the Senate health committee on Wednesday morning as President Trump’s nominee to direct the National Institutes of Health.The agency, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, with a $48 billion budget and 27 separate institutes and centers, has been rocked lately by the Trump administration’s efforts to block government spending and shrink the federal work force. Hours before Wednesday’s hearing, the Department of Government Efficiency, the cost-cutting group led by Elon Musk, trumpeted the cancellation of N.I.H. grants.Dr. Bhattacharya, who has a medical degree and is a professor of medicine but has never practiced, has expressed an interest in restructuring the agency and reducing the power of “scientific bureaucrats” who he has said end up “dominating a field for a very long time.”His views on medicine and public health have at times put Dr. Bhattacharya at odds with many of the scientists whose research the N.I.H. oversees.While he has defended vaccines and has said he was dubious that they caused autism, Dr. Bhattacharya told an interviewer last year that he could not rule out a link. “I don’t know that for a fact,” he said. Extensive evidence shows no link between immunizations and autism.Dr. Bhattacharya became a go-to witness in court cases challenging Covid policies, including mask mandates. In several cases, judges said he was disregarding facts or was untrustworthy. His detractors note that while he has published studies on health policy issues — like drug prices and the link between different types of health insurance and H.I.V. deaths — he is not a scientist conducting biomedical research, the core mission of the agency.But supporters have said that Dr. Bhattacharya could bring needed reform to the N.I.H. and have defended some of his contrarian views on Covid.Dr. Bhattacharya burst into the news at the height of the pandemic in October 2020, when he co-wrote an anti-lockdown treatise, the Great Barrington Declaration, that argued for “focused protection” — a strategy that would focus on protecting the elderly and vulnerable while letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.The nation’s medical leadership, including Dr. Francis S. Collins and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, then director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, denounced the plan. Referring to Dr. Bhattacharya and his co-authors as “fringe epidemiologists,” Dr. Collins wrote in an email that “there needs to be a quick and devastating takedown of its premises.”Dr. Collins, who later stepped down as the N.I.H. director to pursue his laboratory research, retired last week in anticipation of Dr. Bhattacharya’s arrival.

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