Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Dec. 4, 2023

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Dec. 4, 2023–Dec. 8, 2023.

Reuters (12/7, Santhosh) reports the CDC “issued a health alert on Thursday to notify clinicians and health departments about a deadly type of the mpox virus spreading in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” The agency “said it was alerting about the possibility of a subtype of the mpox virus called Clade I in travelers who have been in DRC.” Furthermore, “Clade I has not yet been reported in the United States at this time, the CDC added.”

CNN (12/6) reports “about half of hypertension cases in middle-age and older adults are shared or ‘concordant’ within couples, a new study suggests, meaning if one spouse has high blood pressure, their partner does, too.” Among heterosexual couples in China, England, India and the United States, “the women who were married to men with high blood pressure were more likely to also have hypertension themselves than those whose husbands did not have high blood pressure, according to the study.” Furthermore, “the men who had wives with hypertension were more likely to have hypertension compared with the men whose wives did not have hypertension.” The findings were published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Healio (12/5, Buzby) reports “the presence of decayed, filled and missing teeth was associated with increased risk for stroke and death, especially among Black participants vs. white participants in the ARIC study, according to a subanalysis.” The researchers said that regular use of dental care “is associated with lower levels of dental caries, suggesting that it may be a means of lowering this risk for incident ischemic stroke.” The findings were published in Stroke.

MedPage Today (12/4, Lou) reports that researchers have found that “the link between childhood blood pressure (BP) and adult atherosclerosis appeared stable going all the way back to infancy, suggesting that efforts to prevent arterial thickening may be beneficial starting at the earliest life stage.” The investigators found “in the STRIP trial, there was a consistent contribution of hypertensive systolic BP across early life stages to carotid intima-media thickness...in young adulthood.” The study, which used ultrasonography, was published in JAMA Pediatrics.

Healio (12/1, Stulpin) reports, “When given together, Pfizer’s respiratory syncytial virus vaccine and the seasonal influenza vaccine generated robust immune responses and were well tolerated among older adults when coadministered, data from a recent study showed.” Additionally, “the study also showed that immune responses to both Pfizer’s RSV vaccine and the seasonal influenza vaccine were noninferior when the vaccines were given at the same time compared with when the vaccines were given 1 month apart.” The findings were published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

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