{"id":388621,"date":"2026-04-08T20:05:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T20:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/388621\/"},"modified":"2026-04-08T20:05:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T20:05:11","slug":"cancer-treatments-maha-duchenne-morning-rounds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/388621\/","title":{"rendered":"Cancer treatments, MAHA, Duchenne: Morning Rounds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT\u2019s free newsletter Morning Rounds.\u00a0Sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Good morning. I\u2019ve got a couple fun programming notes for you. The \u201cFirst Opinion Podcast\u201d is back! This season will focus\u00a0on the intersection between culture and medicine, and opens with an episode on sports betting<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Also, to jazz things up around here, we\u2019re rolling out a new layout on certain stories, starting with this morning\u2019s great one by Jason Mast.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A 20-year quest and a Duchenne breakthrough<\/p>\n

Debra Miller\u2019s son Hawken was 7 years old when he was diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. A year later, she learned about a new approach to treatment for the disease, known as exon-skipping. She began devoting her time to supporting the research, raising money and even flying with Hawken to Europe to try getting him into clinical trials. But it never seemed to work out for her family, or for the drugmakers testing this approach. Exon-skipping sparked a civil war within the FDA, leading a top official to override reviewers who said companies had failed to develop anything more than a \u201cscientifically elegant placebo.\u201d<\/p>\n

Through all this, Miller and her son waited. He lost the ability to walk and made good with God. Then, at 27, he finally got into a trial for an exon-skipping drug, thanks in part to his mother\u2019s fundraising powers. The results, as Hawken put it, were miraculous. Read more<\/a> from STAT\u2019s Jason Mast, who beautifully lays out the science and the humanity behind this divisive class of medicines.<\/p>\n

What does MAHA look like these days?<\/p>\n

Like many others, I first learned about the Make America Healthy Again movement in October 2024 from STAT\u2019s Isabella Cueto, who wrote a prescient feature<\/a> on Casey and Calley Means. But the movement has changed a lot since those days. A new Politico poll<\/a> of more than 3,800 people has some interesting findings:<\/p>\n

Nearly three-quarters of adults who identify as MAGA supporters now also identify as MAHA backers. Half of respondents who voted for Trump in 2024 count themselves as MAHA.<\/p>\n

Forty-two percent of MAHA supporters say vaccines are a core issue for the movement.<\/p>\n

While there are a variety of ideas about where the movement should go, a majority of MAHA followers see these as core principles: removing ultra-processed foods from people\u2019s diets, artificial dyes from foods, reducing the impact of forever chemicals, restricting junk food purchases through SNAP, and limiting pesticide use.<\/p>\n

Some of the less popular views among MAHA supporters are interesting, too: 39% say making GLP-1s more affordable is a core principle. Another 35% say restricting abortion access is. Twenty-nine percent say banning cell phones from school is core to MAHA, while 28% say banning kids from social media is.<\/p>\n

Missed opportunities in cancer treatment<\/p>\n

Many cancer patients never receive genomic testing that could guide treatment, according to a study published yesterday in JAMA Network Open. That means they never learn if they could benefit from newer, more targeted therapies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that you\u2019re still seeing half of patients not getting genomic testing is extremely concerning,\u201d breast medical oncologist Igor Makhlin told STAT\u2019s Angus Chen. \u201cThere\u2019s increasing rates of testing over time, but not keeping up with standard of care, regardless.\u201d Read more<\/a> from Angus on why this might be happening.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How to deal with AI scribes and increasing costs\u00a0<\/p>\n

Health systems and insurers tell the story differently, but as STAT\u2019s Brittany Trang reports, they agree on the basic premise: AI scribes are driving up health care costs. What nobody seems to be able to agree on is what should be done about it.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a problem. Health economists warned that this \u201cAI coding arms race\u201d \u2014 fueled by AI scribes and autonomous coding tools maximizing codes on one side, and by insurer algorithms trying to minimize payments on the other \u2014 is a zero-sum game that could really hurt vulnerable providers, and in turn, vulnerable patients. Read more<\/a> from Brittany, who explains exactly how AI scribes drive up medical bills, the effect on the health care system overall, and what might happen next.<\/p>\n

10%<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the percentage of U.S. carbon emissions that health care is responsible for, which translates to around 5 million tons annually. Another big number: 30% of that waste comes from operating rooms. In a new First Opinion essay, two Stanford medical students write about what American hospitals can learn from India to reduce those numbers. They even traveled to the country to study the sustainability practices of hospitals there as part of a summer research project. Read more<\/a> on their findings, and how certain changes could be implemented in the U.S.<\/p>\n

What we\u2019re reading<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Get your daily dose of health and medicine every weekday with STAT\u2019s free newsletter Morning Rounds.\u00a0Sign up here.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":388622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[103,397,396,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-388621","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=388621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/388621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/388622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=388621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=388621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=388621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}