A new UK drug approval pathway, designed to speed up the availability of new medicines, benefits industry over patients and the NHS, argues an expert in The BMJ today.

A weekly dose of semaglutide (2.4 mg) leads to a clinically significant reduction in body mass index (BMI) and related health outcomes in young adults with severe obesity who are treatment resistant following hospital-based non-pharmacological obesity care during childhood, according to a randomised controlled trial being presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO) in Istanbul, Turkey (12-15 May).

 

New research presented at this year’s European Congress on Obesity (ECO 2026) in Istanbul, Turkey (12-15 May) shows that people who gain the highest amount of weight across adulthood are at greatly increased risk of certain obesity related cancers. The study is by Associate Professor Anton Nilsson and Associate Professor Tanja Stocks, Department of Translational Medicine, Lund University, Malmö, Sweden, and colleagues.

A new global analysis by Tulane University found that high blood pressure remains a stubborn and deadly silent epidemic whose burden on public health systems has only increased in the past 20 years, particularly in countries least equipped to address it. Hypertension — the world’s leading preventable cause of premature death — now affects about 1.7 billion adults. Nearly 90% of the increase in adults with hypertension has occurred in low- and middle-income countries.  

A new interdisciplinary review published in The Quarterly Review of Biology argues that red meat, once an essential component of human evolution, has become a significant threat to human health and planetary sustainability. Juston Jaco, Kalyan Banda, Ajit Varki, and Pascal Gagneux, synthesize roughly three million years of hominin dietary history alongside modern epidemiological and molecular data to posit that the food source that likely shaped our species is now contributing to its undoing.

In ten years, levels of this type of pollution in São Paulo, Brazil, reached more than four times the limit recommended by the World Health Organization.