About The Study: In this study, 15% of King County, Washington children received measles, mumps, rubella, and varicella (MMRV) as their first measles-containing vaccine and varicella-containing vaccine dose, a proportion that remained stable over time. Compared with other children in this analysis, more children who received MMRV were from minoritized racial and ethnic groups; received a catch-up dose; were Vaccines for Children-eligible; and were vaccinated at safety-net clinics. This population might be at risk of not receiving recommended vaccines if options become limited.

About The Study: The 21st Century Cures Act mandated that patients have immediate access to clinical notes and other health information (i.e., open notes). At a large, integrated health system, open notes engagement increased rapidly following implementation and plateaued at 55% within 2 months, with substantial sociodemographic disparities in engagement. These disparities may be attributed to the digital divide. Language may be another barrier, as notes are not routinely translated despite multilingual portal interfaces.

A new study led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai found that although the overall number of radiation oncology clinics in the United States has appeared stable in recent years, many individual treatment centers have quietly closed while others have opened. The closures have disproportionately affected rural and freestanding practices, reducing access to lifesaving radiation therapy for patients to receive lifesaving cancer treatment close to home. 

Bradley A. Maron, MD, Senior Associate Dean for Precision Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM), has been named editor-in-chief of Circulation, the American Heart Association's flagship peer-reviewed journal and one of the world's leading scientific publications in cardiovascular medicine. In his new role, Dr. Maron will help shape the journal's editorial direction and its ongoing publication of rigorous, practice-changing science for clinicians and researchers worldwide.

Stool‑based microbiome testing is widely used in integrative medicine, but it provides only a distal luminal snapshot, not the full gut ecology. Interpreting taxonomic shifts as “dysbiosis” and aiming to restore an ideal composition oversimplifies biology—healthy individuals vary greatly, and functional redundancy decouples structure from output. This article argues that stool data should serve as a constraint map, not a therapeutic directive. Interventions must match system behaviour, and success should be judged by functional and host‑relevant outcomes, not taxonomic change. Stability is not non‑response, nor is persistence a marker of benefit. Staged interventions act as physiological probes, making response patterns clinically informative.

A new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the American Enterprise Institute found that insurance denials of first attempts to fill prescriptions for brand-name prescription drugs with no generic competitors increased more than two-thirds between 2018 and 2024.

A form of glioma, a type of brain cancer, tends to progress towards greater malignancy due to an increasing tendency of the glioma cells to transform into immature, stem-cell-like states, according to a study led by investigators at Weill Cornell Medicine, the New York Genome Center, Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham. The findings showcase the power of modern laboratory technology for illuminating cancer development and could inform future treatments and prognostic measures for gliomas.

Penn State College of Medicine received a five-year, $2.5 million grant from the Human Resources and Services Administration, an agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, to support a new street medicine program that will serve unsheltered populations in both urban and rural areas in southcentral Pennsylvania and to train the next generation of physicians in street medicine.