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Good morning. Amid all the tasks that demand to be addressed each day, are you having trouble finding your sense of wonder and awe re: the moon mission? I am too. Reading this and this yesterday helped me access it.
A new target for aneurysm drugs wins STAT Madness
An abdominal aortic aneurysm occurs when part of the lower wall of the body’s main artery weakens, creating a bulging, enlarged area in the blood vessel. Most of these aneurysms are asymptomatic, but they become deadly if they rupture. Treatment options are limited, with no available medications. But researchers from the University of Michigan Frankel Cardiovascular Center have identified a driving force behind the condition, opening up a potential target for new therapies.
That study is the 2026 STAT Madness winner. The competition stacked 64 teams against each other in a month-long, bracket-style tournament and celebration of biomedical research.
Read more from STAT contributor Brianna Abbott on the popular vote winner. And STAT’s Amanda Erickson, who edits this very newsletter, has a dispatch on the research our editors chose as the best discovery of 2025. Hint: It has to do with how the brain flushes waste.
If you cap insulin at $35 a month, people with type 2 diabetes stick to treatment
Looks like capping monthly spending on insulin at $35 has been a win, win, win, and almost a draw five years after it was first rolled out for Medicare patients with type 2 diabetes. A new study out Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine tracked 4.8 million people’s records before and after the ceiling was put in place. The researchers found that out-of-pocket spending fell significantly, while insulin use went up. Blood sugar levels averaged over two to three months also declined, but there was a small increase in severe hypoglycemia events when blood sugar dropped too low.
Those results were clearer than what’s happened with some state programs, the study’s authors noted. And they didn’t look at spending on other drugs, like GLP-1s.
The impetus for the monthly spending limit was a tripling of insulin’s price from 2002 to 2013, an editorial in JAMA Internal Medicine reminds us. But there’s more: Our former colleague Rachel Cohrs Zhang traced how President Biden and then-former President Trump were fighting over who deserved credit for making insulin more affordable. Turns out it was a pharma giant’s idea. Here’s her origin story from June 2024. — Elizabeth Cooney
More evidence abortion meds are safe OTC
While some Republicans in Congress push to ban the abortion drug mifepristone and investigate pill manufacturers, evidence that it’s safe to dispense the medications (mifepristone and misoprostol combined) over-the-counter continues to grow. After 20 years of an in-person dispensing requirement, the drugs have been available through virtual doctors’ appointments since the pandemic began. In a study published yesterday in JAMA Internal Medicine, researchers went in-person to clinics and tested people’s ability to self-assess their eligibility to take abortion meds.
Nearly 170 people at clinics in three states were shown a prototype over-the-counter package and drug facts label. Most (88%) correctly assessed their eligibility for the medication. Among those who didn’t, excluding oneself from eligibility was more common than inappropriately opting in. Still, larger studies will likely be needed to satisfy the FDA’s standards for making a drug over-the-counter, physician Sonya Borrero argued in an accompanying commentary, adding that the evaluation process could be influenced by the way reproductive care has been politicized.
How one quest to fight prejudice in biology classrooms ended
Less than a decade after getting his Ph.D. in science education, Brian Donovan had done something remarkable. He’d begun to develop a new approach to high school genetics education that, rather than simply outlining the basics, emphasized the complexities of human genetic variation — and mobilized a coalition of teachers, researchers, and geneticists to consider it. “What I really wanted was to take a sledgehammer to prejudice,” he told STAT’s Megan Molteni. “I was naive enough to think that we could teach genetics and actually make a real dent in this problem.”
On a single day last April, years of painstaking, thorough work was ground to a halt. Donovan lost both of his National Science Foundation grants as part of the Trump administration’s mass cancellation of awards determined to “no longer effectuate administration priorities.” Now, he’s preparing to apply for nursing school. In her latest story, Megan details all that science education will lose without Donovan’s research efforts. Read more.
Half of U.S. adults are aerobically active enough
A little less than half — okay, 47.2% to be exact — of American adults met federal guidelines for aerobic physical activity in 2024, according to new data analysis from the National Center for Health Statistics. That includes about 52% of men and 42% of women. Some of the other demographic breakdowns seem to highlight structural and societal inequalities: people without disabilities, with more money, in younger age groups, and who were white or Asian were more likely to be more active than their peers.
These numbers are much higher than they were for 2020, which, to be fair, was a unique year for all of us when it came to physical movement. That year, just a quarter of adults met the guidelines for aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities together. (Wondering how you stack up? Guidelines recommend at least 2.5 hours of moderate aerobic activity — or an hour and 15 minutes of vigorous activity — per week.)
How insurance works against addiction recovery
As an addiction medicine physician, John Fomeche has seen firsthand that financial stability isn’t secondary to treatment for many patients — it’s a key part of the treatment itself. In a new First Opinion essay, he recalls speaking with a patient who had done everything that clinicians ask patients in recovery to do. But her progress was jeopardized when her insurance premium tripled, making continued support much more perilous.
“This is the part of addiction medicine we rarely name out loud: Relapse is often engineered far upstream from individual choice,” Fomeche writes. Read more on the real consequences to opaque changes like premium hikes, formulary shifts, and prior authorization barriers.
What we’re reading
Medical supplies are stuck in Dubai, as clinics around the world face shortages, NPR
Health insurers score major win with higher 2027 Medicare Advantage rates, STAT
These women had their breasts removed to thwart cancer. Then came the pain, KFF Health News