(BIRMINGHAM, Ala.) — The first baby has been born from a transplanted uterus, outside of a clinical trial, the University of Alabama at Birmingham announced Monday.
UAB said the birth occurred via a planned cesarean section in late May, and mom Mallory — who prefers to be identified only by her first name for privacy reasons — and her baby boy are healthy.
Mallory had been diagnosed over two decades ago with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome, a rare condition characterized by the absence of a uterus or an underdeveloped uterus and vagina, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“I had come to terms with knowing that, OK, I won’t be able to carry my own children; but for me, it always felt like something that was lacking,” Mallory said in a statement.
Mallory was accepted into and joined the uterus transplant program at UAB Medicine, and she and her husband Nick and their daughter had to relocate to Birmingham for over a year. She received a donated uterus from a deceased donor through the nonprofit Legacy of Hope.
Aside from a uterus transplant, Mallory also underwent an in vitro fertilization process before a high-risk pregnancy and delivery. The entire process took nearly 18 months, according to UAB.
Mallory’s son is the first baby born from UAB’s uterus transplant program — only one of four in the U.S. — and the university’s Comprehensive Transplant Institute.
“We are thrilled for Mallory and her husband, Nick, and humbled that they entrusted our UAB Medicine care team to guide them through this long, difficult — and exciting — journey of transplantation, pregnancy and childbirth,” Dr. Anupam Agarwal, UAB’s senior vice president for medicine, said in a statement.
“Our goal and dream for this program is to make this routine for women who want to experience pregnancy and childbirth but can’t for a variety of health reasons. We have the expertise and the multidisciplinary teams in place here to help make this reality. Their work with Mallory and our other transplant recipients and pregnancies to date has just been phenomenal,” Agarwal added.
With the arrival of their son, Mallory and Nick are now parents of two. The couple also have a daughter, whom they welcomed with the help of Mallory’s sister, who was their gestational surrogate.
(NEW YORK) — More than a dozen people across four states have been sickened in a salmonella outbreak linked to ground beef, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Sixteen people in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts have been sickened in the outbreak, the CDC said in an investigation notice published on Tuesday. Among those, six people have been hospitalized, it said.
All of the people who remembered the type of ground beef they ate and where they bought it reported eating 80% lean ground beef purchased from ShopRite locations in Connecticut, New Jersey and New York prior to getting sick, the CDC said. Illnesses started on dates ranging from April 27 to June 16, according to the CDC.
“Ground beef is the only common food people reported eating,” the CDC said. “Investigators are working to identify the source of the ground beef sick people ate.”
No recall has been issued and an investigation is ongoing, the CDC said.
The number of illnesses in the outbreak is likely “much higher,” as many people tend to recover from salmonella illnesses without medical care and are not tested for the bacteria, the CDC said.
Symptoms of salmonella infection include fever, diarrhea and stomach cramps and usually start six hours to six days after swallowing the bacteria. Most people recover without treatment within a week, the CDC said.
Raw, undercooked ground beef is a known source of salmonella. To avoid getting sick, ground beef should be cooked to an internal temperature of 160 degrees, according to the CDC’s Four Food Safety Steps.
Another step when shopping for ground beef, it should be separated from other foods and placed into individual plastic bags to avoid cross-contamination. It should also be stored in a leakproof container in a fridge or freezer.
The CDC also recommends any utensils, bowls and surfaces that come into contact with raw ground beef should be cleaned before being used to prepare other foods. You should also wash your hands for at least 20 seconds after preparing raw ground beef.
ABC News’ Youri Benadjaoud contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden’s administration plans to try to force private insurance companies to offer the same coverage for mental health services as they do for physical health services, improving upon a well-known hole in America’s health care system, according to the White House.
The new policy is part of a broader push by Biden to improve mental health care in the United States — an issue he raised during one of his State of the Union speeches. The proposed rule, which Biden is expected to announce on Tuesday afternoon, will attempt to enforce compliance from private insurers with a 2008 law that already requires equality between the way insurance companies cover mental health and physical health, but is hardly ever adhered to.
“That law was passed to ensure that mental health care was treated by our health care system, like physical care,” Biden’s domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden, told reporters during a recent telephone call. “Insurance couldn’t make you pay more for a visit to a mental health provider than your physician.”
“But in the years since, we’ve learned that insurers are evading the mandate of law,” she added. “Insurers make it difficult to access mental health coverage in-network, and then consumers are often forced to seek care out-of-network at significantly higher cost and pay out of pocket. Or — and this is this is also a real challenge — they defer care altogether.”
The new rule will attempt to crack down on violations of this law by creating more reporting standards and also try to get more mental health professionals to offer in-network care as well as reduce the “red tape” to qualify for mental health coverage, according to senior White House officials.
After monitoring the way the current system works for the past few years, one official called it “incredibly disappointing” and largely not compliant with the 2008 law. Analyses showed that people can access nutritional counseling if they have diabetes, for example, but not if they have eating disorders.
The proposed policy, an official said, will “put a lot more teeth around how health plans have to actually measure parity.”
Exactly when it will be enacted was unclear, though officials said “sometime in the near future.” The policy will undergo a 60-day public comment period before implementation. The effectiveness of the rule will be under the watchful eyes of mental health advocates.
Tuesday’s announcement follows through on a pledge the president made during his State of the Union address in March 2022.
“Let’s get all Americans the mental health services they need,” Biden said at the time. “More people they can turn to for help, and full parity between physical and mental health care.”
Around the same time, the Biden administration began to move nearly $1.7 billion of mental health funding from the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which the president signed in June 2022, to schools and communities across the country. That included $240 million for programs increasing awareness of mental health support for school-aged kids, $80 million for grants for children’s mental health services and $60 million to train pediatric providers. In addition, that law had $150 million to help implement the 988 suicide and crisis lifeline, a hotline for people to contact when they’re in need.
It was all part of a major push by Biden to improve the nation’s mental health care, including $300 million in grants focused on mental health services that were part of his fiscal year 2022 budget.
In May, the U.S. surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, issued an advisory about the impact of social media usage on teenagers’ mental health — an issue Biden also highlighted in his State of the Union speech.
(NEW YORK) — As the U.S. Women’s National Team tries for a history-making third consecutive World Cup, the team’s focus will also be on a critically important cause, mental health.
The cause is a personal one for two of the team’s players, defender Naomi Girma and forward Sophia Smith, whose former teammate at Stanford University, Katie Meyer, died by suicide last year.
Girma and Smith have dedicated this year’s Women’s World Cup tournament to Meyer, a goalkeeper who helped Stanford win the national championship in 2019.
In an essay published last week on The Players Tribune, Girma described Meyer, who was 22 when she died, as both the “truest friend I ever had,” and “the last person you’d think would take her own life.”
“Her death shocked the entire Stanford campus, and the entire soccer world,” Girma wrote. “For me, and for the rest of her close friends, it left a void in our lives that is so deep that it’s impossible to put into words.”
In her essay, Girma announced that with Meyers as their inspiration, the USWNT is launching a new mental health initiative in partnership with Common Goal, a nonprofit organization focused on using soccer to help provide a “more sustainable and equitable future for all,” according to the organization’s website.
“We know first-hand how many people, especially student athletes, are struggling in silence, and we want to use our platform in this huge moment for something bigger than soccer,” Girma wrote. “It’s exactly what Katie would have done. But she never would have stopped there.”
As part of the initiative, Fox Sports, the broadcaster airing the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup in the U.S., will dedicate 1% of its coverage to “spotlighting the importance of mental health,” according to Common Goal and Girma.
Following the tournament, taking place this year in New Zealand and Australia, Common Goal said it plans to provide mental health training to youth sports coaches in under-resourced communities in the U.S.
“It’s long overdue that our soccer communities put mental health at the forefront when we discuss player care,” Lilli Barrett-O’Keefe, executive director of Common Goal USA, said in a statement. “We are determined to create a culture shift, at all levels of the game, following this summer’s World Cup. We are grateful for the players that are pushing this narrative forward and holding us all accountable to not only talk but act.”
Girma wrote that extending the mental health initiative beyond the World Cup is part of the team’s goal to do more than just raise mental health awareness.
“We want to make sure that young people have the tools to cope with depression, anxiety, stress, and the very bad days, when it feels like the weight of the world is on their shoulders, and it can never get better,” she wrote. “It can always get better.”
The USWNT’s effort to focus on mental health during their World Cup run comes amid a growing mental health crisis in the U.S., especially among young people.
Last year, nearly 24% of female high school students and nearly 12% of male students in the U.S. reported making a suicide plan, according to the latest results of the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, published last month by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although suicide is the 11th-leading cause of death overall in the United States, it is the third among U.S. high school students between the ages 14 and 18, accounting for one-fifth of all deaths among this age group, according to the report.
And while the past three years of the coronavirus pandemic put a spotlight on teens’ mental health struggles, particularly when it comes to suicide, the issue has been a concern for many years, data shows.
“In the decade prior to the pandemic, there was a 57% increase in the suicide rate among young people,” U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said in an April 30 interview with “GMA.” “And today, nearly half of high school students are telling us that they feel persistently sad or hopeless.”
Common risk factors for suicide include a history of depression and other mental illness, bullying, loss of relationships and social isolation, according to the CDC.
The USWNT’s willingness to spotlight mental health also comes as more and more professional athletes are willing to publicly talk about their mental health and the pressures they face.
At the Tokyo Summer Olympics, held in 2021 due to the pandemic, gymnastics superstar Simone Biles withdrew from three of her event finals, citing her mental health.
In an interview following the Olympics, Biles said she “learned a lot” about herself in the process.
“I wouldn’t change anything because everything happens for a reason,” she told New York Magazine. “And I learned a lot about myself — courage, resilience, how to say no and speak up for yourself.”
Just months prior to Biles’ experience in Tokyo, tennis star Naomi Osaka withdrew from two Grand Slam tournaments — the French Open and Wimbledon — in order to preserve her mental health.
Both Biles and Osaka have joined other athletes in continuing to speak out about mental health ever since.
Smith, the USWNT forward, said as the team moves forward in this year’s World Cup, she and her teammates are supporting each other’s mental health.
“I think a big thing is leaning on your teammates and knowing that we’re all in this together, whatever those emotions may be,” Smith said, according to ESPN.
If you or someone you know is experiencing suicidal thoughts, substance use or other mental health crises, please call or text 988. You will reach a trained crisis counselor for free, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can also go to 988lifeline.org or dial the current toll free number 800-273-8255 [TALK].
The Walt Disney Co. is the parent company of ABC News and ESPN.
(NEW YORK) — The amount of time that young people spend watching screens — instead of physical activity like sports, hikes or gardening — could be linked to health issues in adulthood, according to a new study.
Children and teenagers who spent more time watching television had less efficient oxygen use during exercise, higher blood pressure, and higher rates of obesity in mid-adulthood, even when accounting for sex, childhood body mass index and the family’s economic situation, the study published in Pediatrics says.
The researchers started tracking hundreds of children in New Zealand in 1973 and followed them until they turned 45 years old.
The study can’t prove that watching TV caused those health effects, says study author Dr. Bob Hancox. But there are possible reasons the two could be linked, he says. Kids who have more screen time might do less physical activity, because of the sedentary activity of sitting down and watching TV. They may also have poorer eating habits, due to seeing ads for junk foods, Hancox says.
“If you’re sitting watching TV, you’re not being active and therefore that increases your risk of being overweight and being less fit,” Hancox says.
The study started in the 1970s, when there were fewer screen time options than today. But experts say the findings still offer important information for how parents can guide screen time usage today.
“This really highlights the importance of critical development years. To emphasize – from a structural societal level, systems level, the need to set up programs, schooling, and support to allow parents to be successful in helping their children be more physically active,” says Dr. Veronica Johnson, an assistant professor of internal medicine and pediatrics focusing on obesity medicine at Northwestern Medicine.
Parents should pay close attention to children’s screen time, experts say. The American Academy of Pediatrics said that parents should limit unnecessary screen time, view screens with their child, and focus on content and communication around screen time to help children’s emotional, social, brain and identity development.
“Screen time is inevitable,” says Johnson. “It’s important to set some guidelines or expectations for your children as far as when you should be using the screens and how the screens should be utilized.”
Parents can also focus on the factors associated with screen time that could lead to problems later on, like diet and physical activity. The CDC recommends drinking water with fruit instead of sugary drinks, slicing up vegetables to use as quick snacks, and flavoring your meals with lemon juice, herbs, or no-salt spice blends instead of salt. The USDA’s MyPlate has recommendations for every age and activity level.
“Finding a meal plan that works for the individual is very personalized,” says Dr. Amanda Velazquez, director of obesity medicine at Cedars-Sinai. The best diet plan is the one that fits in with someone’s schedule, cultural preferences, and eating patterns — because that’s what they’ll be able to stick to, she says.
Families can increase their level of physical activity by spending time in parks, experts say, or incorporating activity into daily tasks. “Instead of driving, a parent can walk with their child to school or commute to work by foot. Some communities have sidewalks,” says Dr. Louis Aronne, director of the Center of Weight Management and Metabolic Clinical Research at Weill-Cornell Medical College, “Anything besides sitting on the couch or sitting in a room watching a screen.”
With screens involved in all parts of our lives, screen time does not always have to be a bad thing for children, experts say. Developmentally appropriate educational programs, talking to family over video chat and exercise videos have benefits for families.
“Watching something with high-quality educational content that is engaging or FaceTiming with grandparents is going to have a different level of engagement and stimulation versus passively watching television shows in the background,” says Velazquez.
Screens have also evolved over time, from having two channels that did not have 24-hour programming to now we have many different screens at all times of the day, Hancox says. “It’s the dose that makes a difference. The dose of TV and screen time we’re having at the moment, from a physical health and probably mental health point of view is clearly a bad thing when we’re doing too much.”
Barrington Hwang, M.D., is a child and adolescent psychiatry fellow at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
(NEW YORK) — In recent years, Ozempic and other similar drugs, called GLP-1 agonists, have grown in popularity for weight loss. However, doctors are now cautioning people against taking these medications before undergoing surgery or a procedure that requires them to be sedated.
The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) said in a recent statement that people who take the GLP-1 agonists every day should stop the medication on the day of the surgery. If the person takes the medicine weekly, they should hold it a week before the surgery.
The new guidance was issued after “many reports from medical literature and anesthesia leaders about people who fasted but still vomited either going to sleep or waking up from anesthesia,” said Dr. Ronald L. Harter, MD, fellow and incoming president of the ASA and Professor of Anesthesiology at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
“This was very concerning and something we needed to address and communicate to the public like we are doing right now,” Harter said.
Anesthesiologists are doctors who help ensure patients are sedated during surgical procedures. For decades, anesthesiologists have discouraged eating or drinking before surgery so that the stomach is empty, reducing the chance of vomiting during the procedure, which can be dangerous.
“This is really a fairly unique situation where you have a relatively new class of drugs that are very, very quickly being taken up by and are being used by a fairly significant portion of the population,” Harter said. “One of the potential side effects of these medications is to delay gastric emptying, which has a unique risk or potential for aspiration for patients undergoing anesthesia. It was a combination of all those factors that really prompted us to give guidance, really to our anesthesiologist and to our patients who are on these medications.”
“This drug reduces gastric emptying of food and slows down the absorption of calories,” says Dr. Louis J. Aronne, M.D., director of the Comprehensive Weight Control Center and Sanford I. Weill professor of metabolic research at Weill-Cornell Medical College in New York City.
The drug also has adverse side effects such as diarrhea and vomiting, “but because these medications are titrated, meaning that the dose is increased gradually, we find a rate at which we can cease that side effect,” according to Aronne.
Aronne says he is familiar with GLP-1 agonists, stating that he has been following similar management guidance released by the ASA even before the statement was officially issued.
He says that people who are taking this medication can safely temporarily stop. If a person is taking this medication for weight management, as the medication wears off, the person will start finding themselves hungrier, and the process of weight loss will stop. “That’s not going to happen very quickly. It literally takes a month before we see things,” Aronne says.
If the person is taking the medication for diabetes, they may need to switch to another medication but safely with consultation with a doctor before the surgery, he says.
Alina Mitina, DO, is an emergency medicine chief resident at St. John’s Riverside and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
(NEW YORK) — The death of a 30-year-old mom who battled ovarian cancer for eight years has put a spotlight on the deadly disease, and its impact on young women.
Haley Odlozil’s death was announced last week on social media by her husband, Taylor Odlozil.
“It is with unbelievable sadness that I tell all of you my sweet Haley has passed away,” he wrote in a post shared on Instagram and TikTok. “I cannot begin to describe the amount of heart ache & grief myself & our entire family is experiencing.”
According to her obituary, Haley Oldozil, a Texas native, passed away on July 14.
He continued, “One thing I can tell you, she suffered greatly fighting this disease that slowly tore her body apart for the last 8 years. The thought of her being completely healed in a body with no pain & no scars in heaven makes me so incredibly happy for her but so overwhelmingly sad Im not there to see it.”
The Odlozils, parents of a 4-year-old son, said previously they shared Haley’s battle with ovarian cancer with their over 2 million followers on social media to raise awareness of the disease, which originates in a woman’s ovaries or in the nearby areas of the fallopian tubes and the peritoneum, the tissue that lines the abdominal wall, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Ovarian cancer is the second most common gynecologic cancer in the U.S., and it causes more deaths “than any other cancer of the female reproductive system,” according to the CDC.
“Obviously this is not easy to be very vocal and have your whole life, especially your death, splattered across the camera, but all the people who have been impacted by it and who have reached out to us, we really appreciate it,” Haley Oldozil said in a TikTok video from March. “That’s the reason why we’re being so transparent about everything, to bring awareness to ovarian cancer and help people see that please be thankful for each day.”
Haley Oldozil shared previously with her followers that she was diagnosed with advanced stage ovarian cancer in late 2015, shortly before her wedding.
She said the diagnosis came after a long struggle with symptoms including weight gain, fatigue, pain during intercourse and lower back pain, as well as a lump in her abdomen. After visiting multiple doctors and undergoing many tests over the years, Haley Oldozil said that in the fall of 2015, she asked for an ultrasound.
“By the time they did an ultrasound they found a mass in my abdomen and by the time they did a CT scan, I got a call from my gynecologist saying, ‘You have an appointment with an oncologist today. You need to go today,'” she said in a video shared last December on TikTok. “That’s when our whole entire world was shattered. Two months before our wedding. I went in and she said, ‘You have advanced ovarian cancer.'”
Ovarian cancer can often be hard to diagnose because there is currently no reliable way to screen for the disease.
While early signs of ovarian cancer can be vague, the main symptoms are abdominal pain or pelvic pain, bloating and an increase in urination, according to Dr. Jennifer Ashton, ABC News chief medical correspondent and a board-certified OB-GYN.
“If these symptoms or others last for more than half the month you want to alert a gynecologist and, again, talk about the fact that it could possibly be ovarian cancer,” Ashton said previously on Good Morning America, after Christiane Amanpour, chief international anchor for CNN, announced her own ovarian cancer diagnosis.
In some cases, targeted use of pelvic scans and sonograms or a CA-125 blood test may be used to detect ovarian cancer, but additional testing is “not one size fits all and it is not recommended for all women,” explained Ashton.
Treatment for ovarian cancer usually involves a combination of surgery and chemotherapy, according to the CDC.
During her eight-year battle with the disease, Haley Oldozil underwent both surgery and chemotherapy, the impacts of which she shared with her followers.
The Oldozils shared on social media that they learned earlier this year that Haley had run out of treatment options.
With a diagnosis in her 20s, Haley Oldozil was part of a small but present minority of women who are diagnosed with ovarian cancer at a younger age.
Around 13% of all cases of ovarian cancer in the U.S. from 2016 to 2020 occurred in women under the age of 45, according to the National Cancer Institute. Just over 4% of cases occurred in women between the ages of 20 to 34.
The most common age of diagnosis for ovarian cancer is between 55 and 64 years of age, according to the institute.
A woman’s risk for developing ovarian cancer at a younger age increases if they have a family history of breast, ovarian, uterine or colorectal cancer, or have a specific genetic mutation like the BRCA1 or BRCA2 genes.
In addition, other risk factors for ovarian cancer include being middle age or older, having a close family member who has had ovarian cancer, having endometriosis, having never given birth and having breast, uterine or colorectal cancer, according to the CDC.
While there is no known way to prevent ovarian cancer, the CDC notes there are things associated with lowering the risk of getting ovarian cancer, including using birth control for five or more years, having given birth, breastfeeding, having had a hysterectomy, having had your ovaries removed and having had a tubal litigation.
(NEW YORK) — Artificial intelligence, or AI, is continuing to expand into many areas of our lives and one of those is cancer detection.
Researchers are using machine-learning to build tools in the realm of cancer detection and diagnosing, potentially catching tumors or lesions that doctors could miss.
AI is also being used to help treat patients or communicate with patients about the complexities surrounding their cancer treatments.
Despite the advancements that have been made, experts warn that there are drawbacks such as real fears that cancers could be over diagnosed and that there are biases when it comes to detecting cancers in white patients versus of patients of color.
“If you’re on the lookout for something, then, if you look in enough places, you’ll start to see it,” Dr. Brittany Fasy, an associate professor of computational topology at Montana State University, told ABC News. “So, I think how and when to use computer-assisted diagnosis is an important conversation that needs to happen between clinicians doing the diagnosis, the researchers developing the methods to assist them, and the patients who it affects the most.”
At MIT and Mass General Cancer Center, a team developed and tested an AI tool known as Sybil. Sybil was trained on low-dose chest computed tomography scans, which is recommended for those between ages 50 and 80 who either have a significant history of smoking or currently smoke.
For patients undergoing screening for lung cancer, Sybil was able to look at an image and accurately predict the risk of a patient developing lung cancer within six years.
Lung cancer is the number one leading cause of cancer death among men and women in the U.S. and around the world, but researchers said it’s a cancer not often talked about due to the stigma of it being considered a self-inflicted cancer.
“The incidence of lung cancer and people who have never smoked is rising and so lung cancer is really a disease that could affect anyone, anyone with lungs, which essentially means anyone is at risk for getting lung cancer,” Dr. Lecia Sequist, program director of the Cancer Early Detection and Diagnostics Clinic at the Mass General Cancer Center, told ABC News.
She said the goal with AI tools like Sybil is to detect cancer when it’s early and is more treatable rather than in the late stages.
“We’re not doing a good job of screening for lung cancer and like with other screening tests, the reason it’s important to do screening is to find cancers when they’re early stage and still curable,” Sequist said. “If you find a lung cancer, when it’s stage I or II, the patient can have surgery, and then has a high chance of being cancer free up to that point.”
That was the similar goal of an AI tool built and studied by investigators at Harvard Medical School, the University of Copenhagen and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Solely using patients’ medical records, the tool was able to identify those at the highest risk of pancreatic cancer up to three years before an actual diagnosis.
“Most pancreatic cancers just present much too late and therefore, patients have a very, very bad survival, which is why we’re working on this,” Dr. Chris Sander, study co-senior investigator and professor in residence of cell biology at Harvard Medical School, told ABC News. “Less than 20% survival, but if you see it, then the five-year survival goes up to 50%. If you see it, you can cut it out.”
He added that tools like this also have an economic benefit because if cancers are caught early, patients don’t have to potentially risk struggling to pay for late-stage cancer treatment.
“The more we can do gradually to move cancer treatment to an earlier stage where it’s detected earlier and treated earlier, that would be a major change in the way we deal with the cancer problem,” Sander said.
How AI could be used
Sequist says that the U.S. is not doing a good job of screening people for lung cancer, even those who are traditionally at risk, like smokers.
She would like to use a tool like Sybil to make lung cancer screenings available for everyone like colon cancer screening are, with people recommended to get colonoscopies at age 45.
“What I imagine Sybil being able to do for lung cancer screening is really make lung cancer screening something that everyone could qualify for and then Sybil is used to help us understand who is at high risk and who’s not,” she said.
Sequist continued, “I mean, that’s how we screen for other cancers. It’s only lung cancer, that we have all these barriers up around, ‘Well, you have to have smoked this much, or else you can’t access this test’ and so it can be very off-putting to people who are just trying to, do the best for their health.”
AI could also help patients undergoing cancer treatment. Penn Medicine developed an AI chatbot named Penny that exchanged text messages with patients to help guide them through their complex cancer treatment regimens and reduce the risk of mistakes.
Results showed about more than 90% of messages were accurately interpreted by the tool and there was at least a 70% adherence rate of participants taking their medications. However, Sander said people should not worry that AI is going to replace humans in the medical field.
“AI will be used in decision support. The AI tools will run and provide information and maybe make recommendations to the physicians, but the physician will be the ultimate decider,” he said. “So, this is decision support for the human expert, who is trained with ethical standards, and then together with patients, the physicians will make a decision as to what to do in particular.”
Drawbacks and pitfalls
For all the progress that has been made when it comes to AI cancer detection and treatment, there are also things to consider.
While AI has become advanced at detecting possible skin cancers, it is also heavily biased. Research has shown that AI systems for diagnosing skin cancer risk being less accurate for people with darker skin.
Dr. Adewole Adamson, an assistant professor in the department of internal medicine at the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School, told ABC News that, historically, the medical field has not done a good job gathering images of skin conditions, including cancer, in diverse skin.
“If you train an algorithm on a data set that inherently in itself is biased and does not have within it enough examples of cancer or whatever skin manifestation of disease, it will not be able to then accurately make that diagnosis once it’s fully trained,” he said.
This could mean that people with darker skin who have skin cancer could slip through the cracks or, conversely, every skin abnormality on people with darker skin is seen as a sign of skin cancer.
Adamson has been working to get a wider array of data sets to help make AI tools for skin cancer detection more accurate for all patients.
“The problem is this is the canary in the coal mine” he said. “If you’re going to already start building algorithms in dermatology that are biased, then it just only emboldens you to continue down that road, without actually equity being a fundamental part of building an algorithm, which I think is important if you’re going to unleash it on the general population.”
Additionally, Adamson says we need to be careful about making sure we are not overdiagnosing cancer.
A study partly conducted by Google in 2020 trained AI to spot breast cancer in mammogram scans. Researchers said the tool was able to do so at the level of — and even better than — a board-certified radiologist. However, past research has shown not every tumor in a person with cancer will become deadly and there are many people with cancers that don’t lead to death, Adamson explained.
“The problem with finding cancer, particularly finding early cancer, is that we have difficulty picking out which cancer is extra destined to progress and grow and metastasize and kill patients versus those cancers that would never be destined to grow progress, and actually harm patients,” he said.
“The point of cancer detection is not to find more cancer, it is to find more cancer that can potentially kill people and prevent that,” he continued. “It’s the prevention of cancer death, not finding more cancer.”
Adamson said his critiques do not mean he’s against AI being a useful tool but that these are considerations researchers needs to have before the technology is utilized broadly.
“This doesn’t mean that this technology isn’t promising, isn’t really powerful, isn’t something that is going to be important in the future,” Adamson continued. “It just needs to be responsibly developed and deployed.”
(NEW YORK) — With the Women’s World Cup kicking off this week, the focus of the sports world turns to soccer — the most popular sport in the world and one continuing to grow in the United States. However, new research is calling attention to one of the risks of the game, heading the ball, which studies find may be linked to brain problems later in life.
The newly released study, published in the journal JAMA Network Open, found that professional male soccer players who headed the ball more frequently during their career were more likely to develop memory issues. The study builds on prior studies from Scotland and France that also showed a link between playing soccer and the development of dementia.
The research was done on professional male athletes, but can guide how athletes at all levels approach the sport, Dr. Joel Salinas, an assistant professor of neurology at NYU Langone and chief medical officer of Isaac Clinic, an online memory clinic, told ABC News. It may be especially important for children, he says. “If you have a child, especially a child whose brain is still in the early developing phases, maybe hold off on how often you head the ball.”
The new study included over 400 retired professional male soccer players that were an average of 63 years old. The athletes played soccer for an average of 14 years. Those that reported heading a soccer ball six to 15 times a game were found to have a 2.71 increased risk for memory issues, such as those seen with dementia. Players who reported heading the ball greater than 15 times a game were found to have a 3.53 increased risk of memory issues, the highest among all studied players.
The researchers said that may be because repeated headers can cause sub-concussive injuries, which are low-grade injuries that don’t lead to the symptoms of a concussion but can build up over time and cause problems later in life.
“I think information like this is increasingly valuable for players and their parents,” says Dr. Leah Croll, an assistant professor of neurology at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University.
Croll says she thinks research such as this will continue to shape the rules and regulations of the game at every level.
“Some leagues have introduced policies where they restrict heading the ball for this reason, and that may be something that becomes increasingly prevalent as we learn more and more about the risk of dementia and minor traumatic brain injuries earlier in life,” she says.
For example, the U.S. Soccer Federation, the governing body for soccer in the U.S., banned heading for players 10 and under in 2015.
This new study revealed that certain positions on the field had more significant risks for the development of memory issues when compared to others. Goalkeepers had the lowest risk, while defenders had the highest risk of developing memory issues. That may be because defenders head the ball more frequently than other positions on the field, the researchers said in the study.
Most research studies on headers and risk to the brain have been done on male athletes, which is a significant limitation to the data, and reflects longstanding gaps in sports medicine research around female athletes. Additionally, experts believe that female athletes face similar risks — or maybe higher risks, according to some research — from heading the ball. “There is some research to suggest that women might be more likely to have concussions and might have more severe symptoms from concussions, but we just don’t have enough information to say anything definitive at this point,” Croll says.
There’s still more to learn about headers and dementia risks, including the risks to athletes who may not play soccer for as many years as the professionals. But for now, experts say athletes at all ages should learn proper heading technique and take a break from playing if they’re having any concussion-like symptoms after headers, including headaches, dizziness, or confusion.
Despite the mounting evidence linking head impacts to the development of issues with the brain, Croll says there is a lot left to understand, especially around how we can help people who have already developed issues. “Looking into treatments could potentially be a very, very exciting future direction,” she says.
Alexander Garcia, D.O., is an internal medicine resident at Cooper University Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
(NEW YORK) — The virus lab at the heart of the contentious debate around COVID-19’s origins has been cut off from U.S. funding opportunities for likely violating National Institutes of Health’s biosafety rules, according to a memo shared with ABC News.
The Department of Health and Human Services has suspended the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s access to federal funding, and proposed banning them longer-term after the lab failed to provide sufficient documentation on their biosafety protocols and security measures, despite repeated requests from the NIH for their lab notebooks, files, financials and other records of their research, the memo, signed by an HHS official, states. According to the memo, “immediate action is necessary to protect the public interest.”
Because of the WIV’s “disregard” of NIH’s numerous requests to “provide the required materials” to back up the research in their grant progress reports, the “NIH’s conclusion that WIV research likely violated protocols of the NIH regarding biosafety is undisputed,” the memo states.
“As such, there is risk that WIV not only previously violated, but is currently violating, and will continue to violate, protocols of the NIH on biosafety,” the memo states.
The WIV received NIH funding through its partnership with EcoHealth Alliance, a nonprofit and longtime collaborator with the WIV on coronavirus research.
The WIV hasn’t received any federal funding from NIH since the summer of 2020, according to HHS. Still, their continued noncompliance has shown that they “lack the present responsibility to participate” in federal funding programs altogether, the memo states.
This move now makes the WIV ineligible for future federal awards from any U.S. agency, including new contracts, grants and other transactions.
The WIV has 30 days to respond to the notice. If they don’t respond, proceedings will begin to ban them longer term.
An HHS spokesperson tells ABC News they have yet to receive a response from the WIV.
There is “adequate evidence in the record” to ban them longer term, and “immediate action is necessary to protect the public interest,” the memo said.
HHS sent a letter to the WIV’s director general informing the institution of their suspension and possible long-term federal funding ban. The Monday-dated letter, shared with ABC News and signed by an HHS official, was sent via email, fax and UPS. The suspension was effective immediately, the letter said.
This suspension is a temporary action, but meanwhile, “immediate action is necessary to protect the integrity of federal procurement and non-procurement activities,” the letter to WIV’s director general said.
The WIV’s “affiliation with, or relationship to, any organization doing business” with the U.S. government “will be carefully examined to determine the impact of those ties on the responsibility of that organization” on their work with the government.
How long a long-term ban would last is not definitive: HHS’ letter to WIV’s director general noted longer-term funding bans are “generally” no more than three years. It could, however, be shorter or longer as “circumstances warrant” based on mitigating or aggravating factors and the seriousness of the situation.
An HHS spokesperson said in a statement to ABC News that this move comes after a lengthy review, noting the agency “took action” on cutting the WIV’s funding access “after a monthslong review conducted by the Biden administration. The move was undertaken due to WIV’s failure to provide documentation on WIV’s research requested by NIH related to concerns that WIV violated NIH’s biosafety protocols. In short, HHS finds ‘that WIV is not compliant with federal regulations and is not presently responsible.’”
“This formal process began in September 2022, with new information continuing to be provided to the HHS official in charge until June 2023,” the statement continued. “Throughout this time, WIV did not receive any federal funding from NIH and has not received any federal funding from NIH since July 2020.”
It’s not the first time this lab has come under scrutiny for its lack of cooperation and questionable biosafety standards.
Renowned for its massive collection of, and advanced research on, bat coronaviruses, the WIV has been central to one of the leading COVID-19 origin theories — that an accidental research-related incident at the lab could have first unleashed the virus on the world and sparked the pandemic.
The nine-page memo outlines nearly 10 years of correspondence with EcoHealth regarding their grant and research at the WIV which then informed the suspension, and which span before, during and after the pandemic. It makes no referendum on where the pandemic began in the decision to cut funding — whether a lab leak or a natural animal spillover — however the ongoing mystery over COVID-19’s origins exposed urgent questions over biosafety and transparency that have are core to the issues behind the WIV’s suspension now.
Since the pandemic’s inception, as Beijing and the WIV have stonewalled numerous investigations and COVID-19’s origins remained unresolved, the lab has become a symbol of the still-inscrutable source of the virus that has killed nearly seven million people worldwide, per the World Health Organization.
The Biden administration has focused on the lab in their probe into COVID-19’s origins, and the White House, the U.S. intelligence community, and many in the international public health community have consistently and vociferously criticized Beijing and WIV for stonewalling their investigations.
The WIV has also become highly politicized and used as a polemic cudgel, with GOP members using NIH’s funding to WIV to attack, among others, former National Institute of Health Director Dr. Anthony Fauci.
In their summary on potential links between the WIV and COVID-19’s origins declassified last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted that while they didn’t know of a specific biosafety incident that spurred the pandemic, they concluded the WIV did not always use adequate safety precautions for the risky research they were carrying out — which could increase the risk of “accidental exposure” to viruses.
In January, a report from HHS’ inspector general found that “despite identifying potential risks associated with research being performed under the EcoHealth awards, NIH did not effectively monitor or take timely action to address” their compliance with research requirements.
“WIV’s lack of cooperation with the international community following the COVID-19 outbreak—consistent with the response from China—limited EcoHealth’s ability to monitor its subrecipient, and greater transparency is needed about information from WIV,” OIG’s report read.
