Read AMA Morning Rounds®’ most popular stories in medicine and public health from the week of Sept. 21, 2026–Sept. 25, 2026.
More REM sleep linked to lower risk of 83 diseases
HealthDay (9/18) reports, “Getting enough sleep is important for your health—but the type of sleep you get may matter, too.” Researchers “tracked more than 95,000 adults who wore wrist monitors for seven days and nights, measuring REM, deep sleep and light sleep.” Then, “over the next nine years, they checked health records for links to more than 1,000 different diseases.” The researchers found that “more REM sleep was linked to a lower risk of 83 diseases, including heart failure, dementia, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis.” The findings were published in PLOS Medicine.
You may also be interested in: Want to improve sleep quality? Here's what to know.
Wildfire smoke may pose greater health risk than other sources of air pollution
HealthDay (9/21, Thompson) reports, “Wildfire smoke might pose a greater health risk to humans than other sources of air pollution, two new Mount Sinai studies say.” In one study, published in The Lancet Oncology, “researchers analyzed data from more than 414,000 seniors 65 and older with lung cancer.” Data “showed that while any exposure to particle pollution increased a lung cancer patient’s risk of death, wildfire smoke was particularly toxic to them. The more smoky days and the longer the smoke exposure, the poorer the survival rates.” The second study, published in Nature Communications, “analyzed records for more than 57 million heart-related hospitalizations and nearly 33 million lung-related hospitalizations across 20 U.S. states between 2006 and 2019.” Researchers found that “long-term exposure to wildfire smoke was associated with increased risks for hospitalization across a broad range of conditions, including heart failure, heart disease, high blood pressure, asthma, pneumonia and COPD.”
Americans drinking less for the first time since pandemic
NBC News (9/21, Sullivan) reports, “Americans are drinking less for the first time since the pandemic, but alcohol use remains higher than it was before 2020,” a study published in Annals of Internal Medicine shows. The dip “in drinking rates, though modest at roughly 1%, is welcome news after heavy alcohol use spiked sharply during the pandemic.” Researchers reviewed National Health Interview Survey data and found that “while both heavy and occasional drinking declined among Gen Z and millennials from 2022 to 2024, drinking increased in people ages 50 to 64.” In addition, “men reported a larger decline in drinking than women did from 2022 to 2024—2.4% compared with 1.1%—but heavy drinking declined by 9% among women compared with 7.7% among men.”
First-of-a-kind cancer blood test endorsed by FDA panel
The AP (9/23, Perrone, Neergaard) reports an FDA advisory panel on Wednesday “voted 7-2, with one abstention,” to endorse Grail’s Galleria blood test, which is “designed to spot signs of various cancers in apparently healthy people while warning that it’s far from clear how well the technology works.” The FDA advisors voted “the DNA-based test offers more potential benefits than risks, such as causing false assurances or raising false alarms,” although they also “raised many questions about the technology that need more study.”
Bloomberg (9/23, Silva, Langreth) reports Galleri “identifies fragments of DNA that tumor cells release into the bloodstream, flagging potential cancers and predicting where in the body they may be located. The goal is to diagnose tumors sooner, when they can be successfully treated.”
Stroke incidence nearly doubled among young adults from 1993 to 2020
Healio (9/24, Arrajj) reports, “The stroke incidence rate among young adults nearly doubled from 1993 to 2020 while decreasing among older adults, according to research.” During “that same time, researchers saw an increase in the percentage of patients with stroke who had substance use as well as conditions associated with vascular risk, such as hypertension, diabetes and atrial fibrillation,” according to one of the researchers. Investigators “examined hospitalized stroke cases in five counties across Southern Ohio and Northern Kentucky and across six study periods” and found the stroke incident rate among young adults “rose from 33.9 cases per 100,000 person-years in the 1993 to 1994 study period to 62.18 cases per 100,000 person-years in the 2020 study period (P = .04).” The findings were published in Neurology.
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