The Senate is in session this week for Committee business and floor voting while the House of Representatives is on a District work break.
Roll Call notes that the Supreme Court completed its final oral arguments for the current term last week. The Court has dozens of opinions to issue over the next two months.
From the public health front —
The Wall Street Journal reports
- “U.S. Covid-19 hospitalizations and deaths are hovering near new lows, providing fresh evidence that even as the virus endures it has become less damaging in a population with strengthened immune defenses.
- “New subvariants are on the rise, and cutbacks in data reporting have clouded the view of recent trends. But the U.S. has broadly recorded declining numbers this year following a winter of less intense Covid-19 spread.
- “This is the first week I have been in the ICU and have not had a Covid-positive patient,” said Dr. Michelle Prickett, a pulmonary and critical-care specialist at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Federal data show the average number of adults with Covid-19 in intensive care beds hit new lows this month nationally, too.”
An expert writing Medpage Today suggests risk adjusting the start of breast cancer screening:
- “The USPSTF recommends age 50 as the start for screening, and adds that women ages 40 to 49 years make an individual decision about screening after discussing the risks and benefits with their primary care practitioners. However, many physicians are not equipped with necessary evidence-based information on how race and ethnicity may influence risk. In other words, guidelines get women to practitioners and practitioners get to the ambiguous guidelines; a vicious cycle that is harmful for Black women at high risk of breast cancer. Studies on race and ethnicity-adapted breast cancer screening provide the precise information that practitioners would need — but many aren’t aware of — for a race and ethnicity-tailored starting age of breast cancer screening.”
An expert writing in Medscape evaluates the utility of the entrenched body mass index measure and considers alternatives.
- “BMI is trash. Full stop.” This controversial tweet, which received thousands of likes and retweets, was cited in a recent Medscape perspective by one doctor on when physicians might stop using body mass index (BMI) to diagnose obesity.
- “Body mass index (BMI) has for years been the consensus default method for assessing whether a person is overweight or has obesity, and is still widely used as the gatekeeper metric for treatment eligibility for certain weight-loss agents and bariatric surgery.
- “But growing appreciation of the limitations of BMI is causing many clinicians to consider alternative measures of obesity that can better assess both the amount of adiposity as well as its body location, an important determinant of the cardiometabolic consequences of fat.”
From the U.S. healthcare front, NPR Shots and Fortune Well look at the growing use of hospital at home services from the patient’s perspective.