Physician-backed insights to optimize your health and reduce long-term risks.
For almost every blood test your doctor orders, you can eat breakfast first. A new analysis of 9.7 million outpatient results in JAMA Internal Medicine found that only a handful of common lab values shift enough with fasting to change your care. The list is short and predictable: glucose, triglycerides, lipase, GGT, and a few others. Long water-only fasts also have real costs, especially if you take insulin or a sulfonylurea.
The two moves worth making at the dinner table while you're on antibiotics are to cut the added sugar and to lean on fiber-rich plants and fermented foods. A new Nature study makes the sugar part specific. In hospitalized blood-cancer patients on antibiotics, more sugar in the two days before a dose was tied to a further drop in gut bacterial diversity beyond what the drug itself did. The food that feeds your beneficial bacteria does the opposite. These are small changes, but the balance of upside to effort makes them one of the few useful things you can do at home while a course runs.
Any bite, scratch, or saliva contact with a bat, raccoon, skunk, fox, or a stray cat or dog counts as a rabies exposure. So does waking up to a bat in the room, even without a visible mark. Wash the wound hard with soap under running water for 15 minutes, then go to an emergency room the same day. The vaccine-plus-immune-globulin series started before symptoms begin almost always works. A squirrel, mouse, or vaccinated pet you know generally does not count.
Juvmo (tavapadon) is a once-daily Parkinson's pill, and if an older dopamine agonist has caused you or a family member trouble, it's worth asking your neurologist about. It's the first new class of dopamine drug for Parkinson's in decades. In three phase 3 trials it delivered the motor benefit you'd expect from an agonist, with very low rates of the compulsive gambling, sudden sleep, and leg swelling that push so many patients off pramipexole and ropinirole. It's the first agonist in a long time that most patients might be able to stay on.
A six-month wet AMD shot is close but not here yet. Zenkuda, a new anti-VEGF drug from Kodiak Sciences, matched Eylea for vision gains in a Phase 3 trial with more than half of patients dosed only every six months. The results come from a company press release and haven't been peer reviewed, and the drug isn't FDA-approved yet. But for anyone worn out by the frequent injections of wet AMD care, this is the first Phase 3 result showing a majority of patients can hold their vision on a shot every six months.
If you have a fever or real pain in pregnancy, acetaminophen at the lowest dose that works, for as short a time as you need, is still the safest treatment. The strongest evidence to date does not show it raises your child's risk of autism or ADHD. The FDA's September 2025 warning set off the alarm, but the largest sibling-matched studies and a BMJ umbrella review published since do not back the causal link it flagged. The higher risk older cohorts saw seems to track with something families share.
About 1 in 9 older adults who used cannabis in the past year meet clinical criteria for a use disorder. The pattern is recognizable at home: near-daily smoking, hours a day preoccupied with it, cravings, and needing more for the same effect. Most cases are still mild, which is when cutting back and evidence-based behavioral therapy work best.
Emcitate (tiratricol) is now the first FDA-approved drug for MCT8 deficiency. It's a daily oral tablet that lowers the toxic T3 flooding the heart, muscles, and liver of a boy born with this X-linked disease, and in trials it slowed the wasting and tachycardia that have driven early death. It doesn't cure the severe brain and motor disability that defines the syndrome, but it changes what families can do about the body-wide part of the disease. The earlier a family reaches diagnosis and starts dosing, the more of that benefit stays with the child.
Ischemic strokes in adults under 55 are rising because the vascular damage of middle age is arriving earlier. High blood pressure, extra weight, elevated blood sugar, and smoking now show up in people's 30s and 40s. The useful part is that the same levers likely work harder in a younger body. Addressing them together is linked to roughly 70% to 80% lower stroke risk, and the benefit is likely largest when you start in your 30s or 40s.
If you ate breakfast sausage at a restaurant in California, Florida, Michigan, or Nevada in the past week and feel fine, you're almost certainly past the risk from this recall. USDA pulled one lot of Fontanini Item 393 breakfast pork sausage links after two customers reported clear hard plastic in it. The Class I label on the recall describes the worst that could happen to someone who eats it. The product only went to foodservice, so it never reached a grocery shelf or a home freezer.
Camzyos (mavacamten), a daily pill, eased the blocked outflow from the heart in teenagers with symptomatic obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), much as it does in adults. In the trial that got it approved, no adolescent's pumping function fell below the safety threshold. If the next conversation at your teen's HCM clinic has been about septal myectomy or alcohol ablation, the pill is now an FDA-approved alternative to raise. The approval rests on one small trial that lasted 28 weeks, so how teens do on the drug over years is still unknown.
Survodutide's first Phase 3 trial in type 2 diabetes posted up to 13% weight loss in people who stayed on the drug. On paper, that makes it competitive. But the comparisons are cross-trial, far more patients stopped the drug for side effects than on placebo, and no regulator has approved it anywhere. For now, an approved drug like semaglutide or tirzepatide is the one that can help you this year.
Nearly half of dementia is tied to things you can act on, and most of the strongest levers are midlife ones you already know how to measure: your blood pressure, your LDL cholesterol, your hearing, how much you move. The World Health Organization (WHO) now ranks dementia as the fifth leading cause of death globally, mostly because populations are aging, and per-person risk hasn't been rising. What you can do before symptoms show up is clearer than it used to be.
If you're a close contact of a mumps case at SDSU, or on any campus where public health has declared an outbreak and is offering boosters, take the third MMR shot. It's free, well tolerated, and cuts your short-term risk by about three quarters. Your two childhood doses are still doing their main job, which is keeping breakthrough cases mild. What they're no longer reliably doing is blocking infection. Mumps antibodies fade faster than the measles and rubella parts of the vaccine, and most undergraduates got their second dose around kindergarten.
The FDA has approved Autus, a synthetic pulmonary heart valve that can spare children some of the repeat open-heart surgeries a fixed valve requires. It's sewn in once during open-heart surgery, and as the child grows, a cardiologist can thread a balloon catheter up to it and widen it without opening the chest. It tops out around an adult valve size, so it carries a child through the growing years, and how well it holds up over many years is still being tracked.
If your chlorthalidone bottle shows lot RISA24001, RISB24002, or RISA24002 with an April 2027 expiration, it is on the FDA recall list and should be swapped this week. Any other bottle is fine. The problem is that the tablets may not fully dissolve, so they can act weaker than the label says. Don't stop taking the pill while you sort this out, because interrupting blood pressure therapy is linked to a measured increase in stroke and heart attack risk.
The practical defense against Florida's dengue outbreak is unchanged and effective: a daytime-active repellent on exposed skin, screens on your windows and doors, and no standing water around the house. Most infections stay mild, but a defined minority (older adults, people with diabetes, pregnant women, those who have had dengue before) face sharply higher odds of severe disease. The state is in the middle of the largest continental US dengue outbreak since the 1940s, and no dengue vaccine is available to residents here.
Most of the infections behind the '1 in 8 cancers' headline are preventable or treatable. Four pathogens account for the bulk: Helicobacter pylori, human papillomavirus (HPV), and the hepatitis B and C viruses. For each one, there's a specific action with real human evidence behind it: a vaccine, a stool or blood test, a short course of pills. For you, the useful question is which of the four applies, and whether you've acted on it.
Pirtobrutinib (Jaypirca) is now approved as a first-line daily pill for adults with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) or small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL), as long as the cancer doesn't carry a 17p chromosome deletion. The FDA cleared it on October 2, 2026. The trial behind the approval showed striking disease control versus chemotherapy, and a separate head-to-head against ibrutinib found it at least as effective and easier on the heart. But no trial has yet tested it against the two second-generation BTK pills most oncologists now reach for first.
Diet drinks seem to help you lose weight about as well as water does. In the longest head-to-head trial yet, people on diet drinks and people on water lost about the same amount over two years, with no clear winner.
