Publisher Health

Getty ImagesFor the first time in almost a decade MPs are going to vote on giving terminally ill adults in England and Wales the right to have an assisted death. While it’s something that remains illegal in most countries, more than 300 million people now live in countries which have legalised assisted dying.

The drug, which is named MariTide and delivered in a monthly injection, is years from being sold, but caused an average of up to 20 percent weight loss in a small group of patients.The pharmaceutical manufacturer Amgen announced on Tuesday that an experimental obesity drug helped patients lose an average of up to 20 percent of their weight in a year. The drug, using the brand name MariTide, is given by injection once a month, compared with once a week for other obesity drugs like Wegovy and Mounjaro that are already on the market.The data came from a clinical trial involving nearly 600 people. It was a Phase 2 trial, testing effectiveness as well as safety. The drug still must go through additional clinical trial phases involving many more patients, and then receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration before being sold to patients. The company has yet to set a price for the drug.Amgen also did not provide detailed data — that will come in later in a peer-reviewed study and will be presented at a meeting, the company said. Instead, to meet requirements of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, it provided so called top-line data that could affect its stock price.Dr. Jeffrey Flier, a diabetes and obesity researcher at Harvard, said the results were “promising,” adding that MariTide “could be a future player in a highly competitive market.”Dr. Jay Bradner, the company’s chief scientific officer, noted a surprising effect of the drug: When the trial ended, many participants maintained their weight loss for as long as 150 days. That leaves open the possibility of less frequent injections or even of patients not staying on the drug permanently.Amgen also tested MariTide in a population with Type 2 diabetes, a group that tends to lose less weight with the new obesity drugs. On average they lost up to 17 percent of their initial weight.Some patients experienced side effects that included nausea that lasted an average of six days, and vomiting that persisted an average of one to two days. In each case, the averse effects resolved themselves.The Amgen drug differs in how it works from obesity drugs that are currently being sold, Wegovy by Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly. Those are GLP-1’s, which means they bind to a protein on the surface of cells that respond to the gut hormone GLP-1. But MariTide is an antibody, a type of drug that is long lasting in the body. Sticking out from the antibody are two peptides that also bind to GLP-1 receptors.The antibody itself blocks the effects of another gut hormone known as GIP. Dr. Bradner said the company decided to block GIP because it had genetic data from Iceland indicating that people who had a variant that stops GIP from working were naturally thinner.Why the drug is effective remains a mystery. Eli Lilly’s drugs — Mounjaro, for diabetes, and Zepbound, for obesity — activate GIP. So why would a drug like MariTide, which inhibits it, be so effective? The company is sponsoring studies in mice to try to figure that out.This is a developing story.

Last October, Christina Assi, a 28-year-old photojournalist for Agence France-Presse, took a selfie against the sunset and WhatsApped it to her mother. “Be careful,” her mother replied.Listen to this article, read by Emily Woo ZellerAssi and some colleagues had driven to the border in southern Lebanon to cover artillery clashes between Israel and Hezbollah. Wearing protective helmets and blue flak jackets that said “PRESS” in large white letters, they set up on an exposed hill a good distance away from the smears of smoke on the horizon. Drones buzzed overhead. Suddenly, a tank shell struck right next to Assi’s position, killing her friend and colleague Issam Abdallah, a 37-year-old videographer for Reuters. The force of the impact slammed Assi into the dirt and pelted her with shrapnel.“What happened?” she screamed. “What happened? I can’t feel my legs.” Nearly all of her right calf and half of her left calf had been blown off. Within a minute, another shell struck the Al-Jazeera car, and it erupted in gassy, billowing flames.By the time Assi arrived at the American University of Beirut Medical Center, it was past midnight, and doctors assessed her chance of survival at 50 percent. A hospital near the border had already staked a fixator, a long metal rod with steel prongs on either end, into her leg to stabilize the bone and help control the bleeding.Fady Haddad, the university’s head of vascular surgery, and his team painstakingly repaired and reconnected the damaged blood vessels, but 48 hours later, they had inexplicably clotted and failed. Haddad performed three more operations, but again and again the vessels failed. The reason became clear: Microbes were feasting on Assi’s necrotic flesh. Despite aggressive debridement — daily surgical scrapings of her wounds to clean out the infection — and expensive medications, the tissues in her leg grayed at the edges. The hospital’s microbiology lab identified three possible culprits: two bacteria and a fungus, a mucormycete mold. But as the infections kept worsening in spite of medication, one of Assi’s infectious-disease doctors, Souha Kanj, suspected there might be yet another fungal pathogen at play.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.

One in six of all private or NHS fertility treatments in the UK is accessed by single women or female couples, according to

And it’s on the rise among middle-aged drinkers.The holidays offer an excuse to gather with loved ones, let loose and indulge: Plates loaded with comfort foods. Unapologetic napping. All the pie.And, for some, plenty of alcohol.But heavy drinking is not limited to the holiday season. Nor is it mainly the pastime of college students.Overall binge drinking rates are now equivalent among young adults and those in midlife. That’s because young people, especially young men, are bingeing less — while middle-aged adults are throwing back more alcohol in a single session than they previously did.We’ve long been warned about the risks of binge drinking, usually defined as having four or five drinks in a two-hour span. And now researchers are increasingly focused on a more dangerous pattern of alcohol use that they call high-intensity drinking: consuming eight or more drinks in a row for women and 10 or more drinks in a row for men.High-intensity drinking is even riskier than binge drinking, and it’s on the rise among certain segments of the population.How does high-intensity drinking differ from binge drinking?The definition of binge drinking stems from the work of Henry Wechsler, a social psychologist at Harvard University who in 1993 tracked alcohol use among college students across the country. He found that young women who reported consuming at least four drinks in a night and men who consumed at least five experienced the most drinking-related problems.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 proposed rule could give millions of Americans access to the new drugs; it would also put pressure on the federal budget.The Biden administration, in one of its last major policy directives, will propose that Medicare and Medicaid cover obesity medications, a costly and probably popular move that the Trump administration would need to endorse to become official.The proposal would extend access of the drugs to millions of Americans who aren’t covered now.The new obesity drugs, including Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly, have been shown to improve health in numerous ways, but legislation passed 20 years ago prevents Medicare from covering drugs for “weight loss.”The new proposal sidesteps that restriction, specifying that the drugs would be covered to treat the disease of obesity and prevent its related conditions.“We don’t want to see people having to wait until they have these additional diseases before they get treatment,” said Chiquita Brooks-LaSure, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or C.M.S., noting the growing medical consensus that obesity is a chronic health condition.The classification would also mean that every state Medicaid program would be required to cover the drugs starting in 2026. Currently, only a handful do.C.M.S. estimates that around 3.4 million more patients in Medicare would become eligible for obesity drugs, and around four million patients in Medicaid would gain coverage, costing the programs billions of dollars. Medicare covers Americans 65 and older; Medicaid covers poor and disabled Americans.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.

Getty ImagesJudges at the Supreme Court are considering how women are defined in law in a landmark case brought by Scottish campaigners.

The family of a woman who suffered a severe brain injury while on holiday say they were faced with having to accept her return to the UK against medical advice or her travel insurance policy would be cancelled.

Cassava Sciences said that its drug did not significantly reduce cognitive decline in 1,900 people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease.Cassava Sciences, a small biotechnology company based in Austin, Texas, announced it would stop the advanced clinical trial for an experimental Alzheimer’s drug, ending a long-contested bid for regulatory approval.The company announced on Monday that the drug, simufilam, did not significantly reduce cognitive decline in people with mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease in the trial, which enrolled more than 1,900 patients.“The results are disappointing for patients and their families who are living with this disease and physicians who have been looking for novel treatment options,” the company’s chief executive, Richard J. Barry, said in a statement.These results were unsurprising to many dementia researchers, who had questioned why the trial had been allowed to proceed in the first place, since much of the drug’s underlying science had been called into question.Studies that once seemed to support the drug have been retracted from scientific journals. A consultant researcher who helped conduct some of the drug’s foundational studies was charged with fraud by a federal grand jury for allegedly falsifying data to obtain research grants.In September, the company settled with the Securities and Exchange Commission over allegations that Cassava had made misleading statements about the results of earlier clinical trial data. However, the company neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing.Even so, the company forged ahead with its Phase 3 clinical trial — typically the last evaluation before the Food and Drug Administration decides whether to approve a medication for public use — and maintained that there was still research and clinical results that suggested the drug could prove valuable.Hopes in the drug’s efficacy were dashed by Monday’s results, though the company said the trial still showed the drug was safe.Cassava’s future now appears to be in flux, as simufilam was the company’s only drug in clinical trials.Following the company’s investor call Monday morning, Cassava’s stock price dropped more than 80 percent, a blow to the company’s loyal investors, who once valued the company at more than $5 billion.

In the days after Daphna Cardinale delivered her second child, she experienced a rare sense of calm and wonder. The feeling was a relief after so much worrying: She and her husband, Alexander, had tried for three years to conceive before turning to in vitro fertilization, and Daphna, once pregnant, had frequent and painful early contractions. But now, miraculously, here was their baby, their perfect baby, May, with black hair plastered on her head. (May is a nickname that her parents requested to protect her privacy.)Listen to this article, read by Julia WhelanBecause everything about May felt like an unexpected gift, Daphna was not surprised to find that she was an easy newborn: a good eater, a strong sleeper. The couple settled May into her lavender bedroom in their home in a suburb of Los Angeles. Daphna, on leave from her work as a therapist, was grateful for the bounty of two children, overjoyed that she could deliver to her older daughter, Olivia, then 5, the sister she had begged for since she could speak in full sentences.Alexander, a singer and songwriter, wanted to share his wife’s happiness, but instead he was preoccupied by a concern that he was reluctant to voice: May did not look to him like a member of their family. She certainly did not resemble him, a man of Italian descent with fair hair and light brown eyes, or Daphna, a redhead with Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. Alexander often turns to dark humor to mask a simmering anxiety, and in the days after the birth, he started to joke that their I.V.F. clinic had made a mistake. Later he would explain that the jokes were a kind of superstition, a way of warding off something threatening: If you say the horrible thing out loud, it won’t happen. But friends and family members were also commenting to him on the striking difference in appearance — Alexander’s mother, for example, told him, out of Daphna’s earshot, that she would have guessed that at least one of May’s parents was Asian.Alexander would convince himself that everything was fine, only to be walloped once again by the suspicion that May was not his genetic child. Daphna, who was accustomed to calming Alexander’s worries, quickly tired of his nervous jokes about the clinic. Looking back, she realized that her consciousness was working on two levels, that her mind was laboring not to see what was fairly obvious. She often sought reassurance from a baby photo of herself that her mother sent her, in which she closely resembled May. But occasionally, when Daphna looked in the mirror, she would see her own face and think it looked strange — as if there were something wrong with her.Daphna Cardinale with May at the hospital.From the Cardinale familyAlexander Cardinale at the hospital with Olivia and May.From the Cardinale familyWe 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.