“For the latest experiment, Microsoft tested an AI diagnostic system against 21 experienced physicians, using real-world case studies from 304 patients that were published in the New England Journal of Medicine, a leading medical journal.

The AI tool correctly diagnosed up to 85.5 per cent of cases – roughly four times more than the group of doctors from the United Kingdom and the United States, who had between five and 20 years of experience.

The model was also cheaper than human doctors, ordering fewer scans and tests to reach the correct diagnosis, the analysis found.”

From Euronews.

“In the nineteenth century, the invention of anesthesia was considered a gift from God. But post-operative pain relief has continued to rely on opioids, derivatives of opium, the addictive substance employed since ancient times. Although no other drug has managed to match the rapid, potent, and broadly effective relief delivered by opioids, their side effects have led to decades of addiction and overdose, leaving researchers keen to find a better solution.

This all changed in January 2025, when the FDA approved Vertex Pharmaceuticals’s Journavx (suzetrigine): the first non-opioid pain reliever suitable for treating post-surgery pain. Clinical trials found no signs of the problematic side effects associated with opioids: no drug abuse, tolerance, or withdrawal. But this was not an easy win: Vertex and other pharma companies spent decades searching for drugs like this to no avail.”

From Works in Progress.

“Deaths from heart attacks have plummeted in the US over the past 50 years, whereas deaths from chronic heart conditions have skyrocketed, probably due to people living longer.

‘We’ve made some really great progress in certain areas of heart disease mortality, but now we’re seeing this shift,’ says Sara King at Stanford University in California.

She and her colleagues collected data on heart disease deaths from 1970 to 2022 using the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database, which tracks all recorded fatalities in the country.

They found that in 2022, heart disease accounted for 24 per cent of all deaths in the US, down from 41 per cent in 1970. The decline is largely thanks to an almost 90 per cent decrease in heart attack deaths, which were once the deadliest form of heart disease…

Even so, heart disease remains the country’s top killer, mainly because deaths from other types of heart disease – mostly chronic conditions – have increased 81 per cent over the same period. For instance, fatalities from heart failure, arrhythmia and hypertensive heart disease have risen 146 per cent, 106 per cent and 450 per cent, respectively.

‘A lot of these conditions are conditions that come with age,’ says King. ‘To us, it seems like people that are now surviving these heart attacks are living longer and having more time to sort of develop these chronic heart conditions.'”

From New Scientist.

“‘What we’re seeing is a massive reduction in [fatal] overdose risk, among Gen Z in particular,’ said Nabarun Dasgupta, an addiction researcher at the University of North Carolina. ‘Ages 20 to 29 lowered the risk by 47%, cut it right in half.’

This stunning drop in drug deaths among people in the U.S. is being tracked in data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other federal agencies.

The latest available records found fentanyl and other drugs killed more than 31,000 people (see chart) under the age of 35 in 2021. By last year, that number had plummeted to roughly 16,690 fatal overdoses, according to provisional CDC data.”

From NPR.