Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Nov. 24, 2025–Nov. 28, 2025.
Experts raise concerns over new flu variant
The AP (11/21, Stobbe, Forster) reported that the U.S. flu season has started, and while it is unclear if it “will be as bad as last winter’s,” some health experts are worried as CDC “data posted Friday shows a new version of the virus has emerged.” Most flu activity has been attributed to “a new version of the type A H3N2 virus that historically has caused the most hospitalizations and deaths in older people. That type is responsible for most flu infections so far this year, and more than half have been a new subclade K variant that is different from the strain this year’s flu shots were built to fight.” Data “suggests current vaccines may still be somewhat effective against the new version of the flu,” but “some scientists and medical professionals are more worried about disappointing vaccination rates, a main reason why flu hospitalizations and deaths were unusually bad during last year’s flu season–one of the deadliest this century.”
You may also be interested in: How to answer patients' questions about vaccinations
Researchers compare interventions for burnout in health care professionals
HealthDay (11/21, Gotkine) reported, “Mindfulness-based interventions may reduce burnout among nurses and midwives and among a mixture of health care professionals (HCPs), but professional coaching appears to be most effective for reducing burnout among physicians, according to a review.” Investigators came to this conclusion after examining “the effectiveness of all interventions to mitigate burnout among HCPs in a review of 93 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and six cluster RCTs evaluating individual-level interventions (9,330 participants).” The findings were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Editor’s Note: The AMA is the leader in physician well-being, providing real-world solutions to combat burnout at the system level. To learn how the AMA is leading change, click here.
CDC data show surge in whooping cough cases
ABC News (11/24, Benadjaoud, Kekatos) reports new CDC data show that over “25,000 cases of whooping cough have been recorded in the U.S. so far this year.” This marks the second consecutive year with higher than usual cases, as around 33,000 cases were reported at the same time last year. In contrast, CDC data show about 18,600 whooping cough cases were recorded in 2019. Excluding 2024, “the last time whooping cough cases were this high was in 2014 when more than 32,900 cases were recorded, according to the CDC. Meanwhile, doctors’ visits for pertussis are trending down from the peak seen in winter of last year but still remain elevated compared to years prior, data from Epic Research shows.”
Patients with obstructive sleep apnea have increased Parkinson’s disease risk, study suggests
The New York Times (11/24, Legaspi) reports a new study links “obstructive sleep apnea...with Parkinson’s disease.” The research team “found about 14% of the participants had been diagnosed with sleep apnea between 1999 and 2022, according to their medical records. When the researchers looked at their health six years after those diagnoses, they found that the veterans with sleep apnea were nearly twice as likely to have developed Parkinson’s disease compared with those who had not been diagnosed with sleep apnea. This held even after controlling for other factors that could influence the development of sleep apnea or Parkinson’s disease.” Researchers noted that “those who started using CPAP machines within two years of their diagnoses were about 30% less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than those who didn’t use the treatment.” The study was published in JAMA Neurology.
You may also be interested in: How to recognize the signs of sleep apnea
Study identifies four turning points between brain phases in a lifetime
NBC News (11/25, Bush) reports researchers say that for the first time they have “identified four distinct turning points between...phases in an average brain: at ages 9, 32, 66 and 83. During each epoch between those years, our brains show markedly different characteristics in brain architecture, they say.” The study results, “published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that human cognition does not simply increase with age until a peak, then decline. In fact, the phase from ages 9 to 32 is the only time in life when our neural networks are becoming increasingly efficient, according to the research.” They observed that “during the adulthood phase, from 32 to 66, the average person’s brain architecture essentially stabilizes without major changes, at a time when researchers think people are generally plateauing in intelligence and personality. And in the years after the last turning point–83 and beyond–the brain becomes increasingly reliant on individual regions as connections between them begin to wither away.”
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