Top news stories from AMA Morning Rounds®: Week of Jan. 1, 2024

Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of  Jan. 1, 2024–Jan. 5, 2024.

Reuters (1/4, Leo) reports, “Eli Lilly and Co on Thursday launched a website to enable people to directly order from the drugmaker including its weight-loss medicine Zepbound as well as connect people with obesity and other conditions with telehealth companies.” The service, known as LillyDirect, “comes on the back on extraordinary demand seen over the last year for powerful weight-loss drugs such as Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy.” The company “said its direct-to-consumer service will also be available for patients with diabetes and migraine, with the website’s pharmacy page listing migraine drug Emgality [galcanezumab], insulin and similar products for home delivery.”

NBC News (1/4, Lovelace, Vespa, Herzberg) reports the new website “joins a growing list of platforms like Weight Watchers and Ro offering weight loss drugs through telehealth, but is the first of its kind from a pharmaceutical company.”

CNN (1/3, McPhillips) reports, “People who have more interrupted sleep in their 30s and 40s are more than twice as likely to have memory and thinking problems a decade later, according to a...study.” Investigators found that “overall, people experiencing more sleep fragmentation, or with greater share of their sleeping hours spent moving, were more likely to receive poor cognitive scores on all of the tests more than a decade later.” The study indicated that “of the 175 people with the most disrupted sleep, 44 had poor cognitive performance 10 years later, compared with 10 of the 176 people with the least disrupted sleep.” The findings were published in Neurology.

CNN (1/2, Goodman) reports that a “groundbreaking surgery” in which a newborn received the world’s first partial heart transplant in 2022 has reached another milestone: The tissue used to fix the infant’s heart has grown. Researchers “have been working to make growing heart valves a reality through tissue engineering, germinating them from cells in a lab.” However, “that approach has worked in animals, but it has not yet panned out in humans.” The findings were published in JAMA.

HealthDay (1/1, Thompson) reports that the American Medical Association has released ten recommendations to help Americans improve their health in 2024. The recommendations include maintaining scheduled health screenings, increasing physical activity and eating healthier. “It is quite common after the holidays to think about all you’ve eaten or your reduced physical activity and get discouraged,” said AMA President Jesse M. Ehrenfeld, MD, MPH. “But the good news is you don’t have to make major health changes in one fell swoop.”

Editor’s note: Please read the AMA’s full list of recommendations.

MedPage Today (12/29, Monaco) reported, “Adding salt to food, even just sometimes, was significantly associated with a higher risk for chronic kidney disease (CKD), a large prospective cohort study showed.” Investigators found that among “U.K. Biobank participants, those who said they always added extra salt to their food had an 11% higher risk for developing CKD compared with those who never or only rarely added salt.” The data indicated that “who usually or sometimes added salt had a 7%...and 4%...higher CKD risk, respectively.” The findings were published in JAMA Network Open.

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