Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Aug. 24, 2026–Aug. 28, 2026.
Nearly 40,000 bottles of Clear Eyes Maximum Itchy Eye Relief eye drops recalled over sterility concerns
The New York Times (8/23, Diaz) reports Prestige Brand Holdings has issued “the voluntarily recall of 39,060 bottles of Clear Eyes Maximum Itchy Eye Relief eye drops because of a ‘lack of assurance of sterility,’ according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.” The Class II recall “began on July 29 and is continuing, involves 15-millimeter bottles with a lot code of 2552A and an expiration date of Sept. 30, 2027.”
NBC News (8/21, Weaver) reports, “No other eye drops were included in the recall and no injuries have been reported to date.” The eye drops “are sold over the counter nationwide at major retailers, including CVS and Walmart.”
Patient portal writing style may affect physician response
CNN (8/24, Haulund) reports a study published in JAMA Network Open “found that differences in writing style—such as whether a message started with a greeting or how it used punctuation—accounted for about half of the disparities in response rates for” patients from “historically marginalized groups, such as non-White patients, those without a college education and those who use Medicaid instead of commercial insurance.” Researchers “analyzed more than 3 million patient message threads from the Mass General Brigham electronic health record system” and “identified some writing style characteristics in messages that were more likely to get a response.”
At least one in four former NFL players who died in recent years had CTE
The Washington Post (8/25, Maese) reports, “At least 1 in 4 former NFL players who died in recent years had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated head impacts, according to the largest-ever study to estimate the disease’s prevalence among deceased professional football players.”
Reuters (8/25, Tennery) reports that “of the 878 former players who died” between 2016 and 2021, “235 donated their brains, researchers said, with 215 of those donated brains found to have CTE.
The Hill (8/25, Bhakta) reports, “The study also noted that late-stage CTE is more prevalent in donors with dementia as research continues to trace the exact causes of the disease.” The findings were published in The BMJ.
Exercise may be as good as a nap for the sleep-deprived
HealthDay (8/25, Thompson) reports a recent study found that “about 20 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise performed as well as a 90-minute nap in protecting the memory of people who’d gone 30 hours without sleep.” Sleep-deprived participants also “performed about 22% better on memory tests when they either worked out or napped, compared to those who did neither, researchers said.” The findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Unvaccinated COVID-19 infection increased risk of myocarditis, pericarditis, and mortality
The American Journal of Managed Care (8/27, McCrear) reports research indicates that “children and young adults who were unvaccinated and infected with COVID-19 were at an increased risk of developing myocarditis, pericarditis, and mortality when compared with those who were vaccinated against COVID-19 with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and not infected.” The study included “a total of 4,072,375 individuals aged 16–25, of whom 45.2% were male, with a mean age of 20.8 years. Participants were categorized into 4 mutually exclusive exposure cohorts based on EHR records: uninfected/unvaccinated, infected/unvaccinated, vaccinated/uninfected, and hybrid immunity, defined as those infected with SARS-CoV-2 before receiving their vaccination.” The data indicated that “the infected/unvaccinated group had the highest cumulative incidence of mortality (0.084%), pericarditis (0.035%), and myocarditis (0.116%) among the 4 cohorts.” Meanwhile, “the vaccinated/uninfected group had the lowest cumulative incidence of each.” The findings were published in Vaccine.
You may also be interested in: How to answer patients' questions about vaccinations.
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