Researchers from UC San Diego have found that pharmacists and female pharmacy technicians are more likely to die by suicide. Findings emphasize need for more mental health support for health care workers.

A new UCLA study reveals that a widely used federal hospital safety metric is fundamentally flawed when applied to emergency stroke care, potentially creating incentives that may discourage hospitals from performing lifesaving procedures for the sickest patients.

Self-administered injectable contraceptives have been available in the United States for more than two decades, yet a new study has found only about a quarter of reproductive health experts prescribe it — and many are unaware it’s even an option. 

The Rice Brain Institute has announced the awardees of its first funding initiative, a seed grant program that is a collaborative effort between the university and four institutional partners in the Texas Medical Center.

Food-based interventions to support healthy dietary patterns span a continuum from health promotion to disease prevention, treatment, and reversal with variations in intensity and therapeutic dosing.

After rising for decades in the United States, opioid overdose deaths have been declining dramatically since 2023, with the annual rate of fentanyl overdose deaths dropping by more than a third by the end of 2024. What’s behind this sudden decline? In this Policy Forum, Kasey Vangelov and colleagues evaluate the evidence for an international supply shock in fentanyl in 2023 and conclude that it could be responsible for the steep decline in overdose deaths. Studying the ups and downs of an illegal drug economy is difficult, but the researchers use data from several sources, including a spike in U.S.-based Reddit users’ reports of a fentanyl drought in mid-to-late 2023. Fentanyl seized during this period shows a concurrent decline in purity and seizures themselves fell during the period, despite being an intense focus of law enforcement. In Canada, supply indicators of fentanyl precursors from China declined at the same time. Together, this evidence indicates that supply disruption may be behind the drop off in fentanyl deaths. “The incentive to restore the illicit fentanyl trade will persist as long as there is demand for the drug …” Vangelov et al. write, adding that “…it may be wise to use the current drought as an opportunity to ramp up the prevention and treatment programs that have evidence of decreasing demand.”

IDH-mutant glioma, caused by abnormalities in a specific gene (IDH), is the most common malignant brain tumor among young adults under the age of 50. It is a refractory brain cancer that is difficult to treat due to its high recurrence rate. Until now, treatment has focused primarily on removing the visible tumor mass. However, a Korean research team has discovered for the first time that normal brain cells acquire the initial IDH mutation and spread out through the cortex long before a visible tumor mass harboring additional cancer mutations forms, opening a new path for early diagnosis and treatment to suppress recurrence.

A new study suggests that the connection between coronary artery calcification — a measure of calcium buildup in the arteries — and bone mineral density may be driven in part by shared genetic factors, rather than one directly causing the other. By highlighting the biological pathways that influence both vascular and bone health, the findings provide researchers with new directions for understanding age-related changes in the heart and skeleton.