“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.

“Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, researchers in Australia report how they analysed data from 62,437 people aged 70 and over, collected from three long-running surveys covering the US, England and parts of Europe.

The team used an algorithm that took into account participants’ responses to a host of different metrics, from the difficulties they had with everyday activities to their scores on cognitive tests, to determine whether they were likely to have dementia.

They then split the participants into eight different cohorts, representing different generations. Participants were also split into six age groups.

As expected, the researchers found the prevalence of dementia increased by age among all birth cohorts, and in each of the three regions: UK, US and Europe. However, at a given age, people in more recent generations were less likely to have dementia compared with those in earlier generations.

‘For example, in the US, among people aged 81 to 85, 25.1% of those born between 1890–1913 had dementia, compared to 15.5% of those born between 1939–1943,’ said Lenzen, adding similar trends were seen in Europe and England, although less pronounced in the latter.”

From The Guardian.