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  • Americans trust science more than peers around the world, survey shows

    Americans trust science more than peers around the world, survey shows

    Americans have more trust in science than most of the rest of the world, according to a new survey of people in 140 countries, a finding that may seem difficult to explain in a country deeply divided by issues such as the benefits and harms of vaccines. 

    According to the newest edition of the Wellcome Global Monitor, 52 percent of Americans report having “a lot” of trust in science. Across the globe, that number is a mere 26 percent. 

    Americans, in aggregate, are also more eager to get vaccines compared to peer nations; 45 percent of Americans say they would want to get vaccines recommended by a nurse or doctor “right away.” In Germany only 28 percent say the same. 

    And while the share of people globally who agree that science benefits most people in their society has dropped from 42 percent in 2018 to 37 percent in 2025, the share of Americans who agree with that statement has actually increased from 48 percent to 57 percent. 

    But the aggregate statistics don’t tell the whole story. STAT’s analysis of the Wellcome data demonstrates that while America may, in general, appreciate and trust science, it is also far more divided than peer nations. 

    Take the religious divide: According to STAT’s analysis there was, on average, a 5 percentage point gap between the percentage of religious  and non-religious people in high-income nations who said science benefits most people in their country. In the United States that gap was 24 percentage points.

    A similar divide — 19 percentage points — separates urban and rural Americans on the question of science’s benefits. The divide across other high-income nations is just three points. Education level divides Americans as well — just 47 percent of Americans without  four-year degrees reported believing  that science benefits most people, compared to 71 percent of college grads. 

    Wellcome, a British foundation focused on scientific research, funded the survey in 2018, 2020 and 2025. The most recent version was administered as part of the Gallup World Poll through a combination of in-person, telephone and online surveys of more than 140,000 adults. The global findings were weighted “to ensure that global estimates accurately reflect the relative populations of countries in the survey.” 

    The survey does not offer an explanation for why the United States appears to be outpacing its peers on trust. But at least some of Americans’ seeming polarization may be explained by Americans’ tendency toward extremes. 

    Americans are “more extreme responders to public opinion surveys,” said Matthew Motta, an associate professor at Boston University School of Public Health who is an expert on public opinion research. 

    For example, a smaller proportion of Germans than Americans said they would “not get vaccines at all.” Only 8 percent of Germans were completely anti-vaccine, compared to 13 percent of Americans. Instead, the vast majority of Germans said they would “prefer to think about it for some time.”  

    The survey also showed that Americans who historically have been less trusting are not necessarily souring on science and its benefits. STAT’s analysis finds that the proportion of Americans who identify as religious and who believe science benefits most people increased by four percentage points, from 46 percent in 2018 to 50 percent in 2025. Self-reported religious Americans are also more likely to report an eagerness to be vaccinated when compared to peer countries.

    A similar pattern plays out with Americans without  four-year degrees. The percentage of non-college grads who say science benefits most people increased by three percentage points over that seven-year period, and they too are more likely than residents of peer nations with similar education to want vaccines right away. 

    So  what is causing America’s growing divide over trust in science? The poll shows it is growing enthusiasm for science among highly educated, secular Americans. Both reported substantial increases in their appreciation of the benefits of science: 13 percentage points for college grads, and 15 percentage points for secular Americans over seven years, the Wellcome survey found. 

    In short, America is divided not because certain groups are souring on science, but because others are becoming more appreciative of its benefits. 

    That might seem like good news. But the divide nonetheless underscores that the benefits of science are not reaching a large swath of Americans in ways they can see and feel.

     “People are feeling left behind, they are not understanding how this benefits me,” said Brian Castrucci, president and CEO of the de Beaumont Foundation, which focuses on strengthening public health. 

    Some divisions facing Americans will be difficult to combat in a country as large and diverse as the United States. City dwellers with cancer who can access care at a top-rated university medical center will inevitably see science’s impact on their lives more than people in a rural area who might have to travel a great distance for even the most basic hospital care.  

    Wellcome found that trust in science is closely associated with confidence in a nation’s health care systems, which presents a problem for the United States as well. Just 40 percent of Americans reported a lot of confidence in U.S. hospitals and health clinics, the same proportion  as in Portugal and Uruguay. 

    Anti-science sentiment coming from America’s top political officials is likely playing a role too, several experts said. Diverging views on science among America’s political parties became apparent during the Tea Party movement of the 2010s and was amplified during Trump’s presidency, said Yotam Ophir, an associate professor of communication at the University at Buffalo. 

    But experts STAT spoke to underscored that this new data doesn’t just indicate the need for the sorts of systemic changes that can take decades to fulfill. Scientists need to hone their ability to discuss the benefits of science in people’s everyday lives, and to stop expecting the public to blindly trust them, several experts told STAT.  

    “What we need to do is be better communicators, not better debaters. We are not going to be able to lecture people into trusting us,” Castrucci said.

    Mark Henderson, Wellcome’s executive director of corporate affairs and engagement, said scientists who wish to take steps based on the report’s findings should “meet people where they are.”

    “Approach people on a level with understanding and engagement and respect, and you’re going to get a better outcome,” Henderson added. “It’s not rocket science, but it often surprises me how hard people in the scientific community find it to do that.”

  • The fall of Roe dramatically changed abortion access. This researcher used Reddit to capture how

    The fall of Roe dramatically changed abortion access. This researcher used Reddit to capture how

    Betsy Pleasants was studying one historic disruption to abortion access when a more seismic one emerged.

    In spring 2022, as a graduate student at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, Pleasants was researching the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on abortion services when a leaked draft opinion indicated that the U.S. Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade. The court finalized its decision that June, ending the nearly 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion and ushering in an era of rapid change and increased state restrictions.

    Working with her thesis committee, Pleasants, who is interested in expanding access to abortion and other reproductive health care, adapted her dissertation to study conversations on the social network Reddit. Her new focus was tracking emerging barriers to abortion access in real time and examining the role of online resources in connecting people with evidence-based health information and services.

    “When it became clear that Roe v. Wade was going to be overturned, we all agreed that we had to shift the project,” said Pleasants, now a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Women’s Health Research at the University of North Carolina. The Supreme Court decision “is something that required a response, and this project was positioned to offer timely insights into what this policy change means in people’s lives.”

    Pleasants and her colleagues plumbed thousands of posts from the Reddit forum r/abortion using natural language processing (NLP) — a type of computational analysis used to identify patterns in human language — alongside a qualitative close reading of a subset of posts. Through this dual approach, grounded in safeguards for user privacy, Pleasants is defining a framework for using artificial intelligence tools without losing sight of the context, complexity, and people behind the data.

    “We are in a complex policy moment for reproductive health,” said Pleasants, who was recently named a STAT Wunderkind. This type of research “is an act of documenting in an effort to work towards evidence-based policy change over time, and to advocate for the change that’s needed to promote access to reproductive health care.”

    Findings by Pleasants and her colleagues reaffirmed well-established barriers to access, including high costs and limited appointment availability, while also revealing lesser-known challenges, such as delays in receiving abortion medications by mail, low credibility of online ordering platforms, and concerns about the legal risks of seeking abortion or related medical care.

    “Embracing this opportunity and new methods was visionary,” said Ushma Upadhyay, professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, who mentored Pleasants during her doctoral research. “At the time, I didn’t know of any other studies using NLP to study online discourse on abortion. Most researchers will just take a random sample of a manageable number that they can analyze, and so this approach was really great because Betsy was able to get a more complete picture.”

    For scientists like Pleasants, the value of NLP goes beyond making large-scale research more efficient. It offers a broader view of how people communicate and behave at a scale that would otherwise be difficult to capture.

    “Computational research is like a stepping stool over a tall fence that lets you look at the other side and see everything that’s around you,” said Danny Valdez, associate professor of public health at the Indiana School of Public Health-Bloomington, who has employed NLP to study vaccine misinformation, addiction and recovery, and cancer care. “NLP, machine learning, and, increasingly, AI methods give you a 1,000-foot overview of how people communicate when they need help. You can learn a lot about the pulse of the nation, which helps us understand and inform where future policy could be headed.”

    A new model for studying online discourse

    Growing up in North Carolina, Pleasants got her first window into how people access health information, sparking an interest that would eventually shape her career. Even in Durham, a liberal core city of North Carolina’s Research Triangle, she recalled receiving abstinence-only sex education from a gym teacher. The contrast between the information she received at school and at home made her aware of how unevenly health knowledge and resources could be distributed.

    “I saw peers and other people in the community navigating not having good sex education, not having access to desired health services, and stigma,” said Pleasants. “All of these things really shaped the capacity they had to make decisions for themselves about their reproductive health.”

    Those early observations would become a throughline in Pleasants’ career, from earning her undergraduate degree at the University of North Carolina to completing her master’s and doctorate at UC Berkeley, and ultimately returning to UNC for her postdoctoral research.

    Pleasants entered college with an eye on becoming a physician, but was instead drawn to medical anthropology and broader discussions of how history, politics, and culture have shaped, and continue to shape, the U.S. health care system.

    “A big question that came up for me was: ‘Do I want to work within that system or do I want to critically engage with it?’” said Pleasants. “So, I ended up on this trajectory of research with an interest in asking questions of how we offer health services, particularly for women, and seeking to understand how we can make that better for all people as much as possible.”

    Analyzing r/abortion while at Berkeley allowed Pleasants to capture perspectives often overlooked by conventional research methods. The platform’s relative anonymity gave people space to speak candidly about personal experiences they might hesitate to share elsewhere. And because most community members had not interacted with the health care system, their experiences would often be missed by practice-based analysis.

    “Following the reversal of Roe v. Wade, a lot of people were turning to Reddit for support,” said Upadhyay.

    Pleasants and her collaborators used NLP to analyze more than 7,000 posts from the months before, during, and after the leak of the Supreme Court’s draft decision, identifying 55 distinct topics. Human oversight was integral throughout, both to validate the computational approach and to guide deeper qualitative analysis. The team closely examined posts within the identified topics to understand not only what people were discussing, but how they were navigating their experiences.

    The research revealed a wide range of barriers to abortion care, from state bans, high costs, and long travel distances to stigma and lack of social support. It also surfaced emerging challenges, including delays receiving abortion medications by mail, uncertainty about the legitimacy of online services, and concerns about potential legal risks. The qualitative analysis provided further insight into the impacts of these barriers, including anxiety and isolation and, in some cases, the need to self-manage abortions.

    The emphasis on human supervision also extended to protecting the privacy of Reddit users. As NLP and AI tools become more widely integrated into public health research, their use has fueled broader discussion, both within the research community and among the public, about the ethical use of online data. Pleasants said the stakes are particularly high in reproductive health research.

    “We are studying issues that are, at minimum, sensitive and stigmatized, and in some cases even pose risks for prosecution,” she said. “This becomes even more complex when you’re working with publicly available data where people may not be aware that their posts could be used for research.”

    To protect Reddit users, the team employed a “heavy disguise” process, replacing potentially identifiable posts with composite quotations that combined and rephrased similar experiences. The researchers then tested these composites using online searches and plagiarism-detection tools to help ensure they could not be traced back to their original sources.

    Together, these practices have established a model for studying sensitive online discourse at scale.

    “As this technology keeps getting faster and faster and faster, you do have very talented and forward-thinking researchers like Betsy, who are slowing things down and looking at how to make this as rigorous and concrete as possible through a very firm qualitative lens,” said Valdez, who was not involved in Pleasants’ research, though both have received funding from the Society of Family Planning. “We need work like Betsy’s that’s already acknowledged the difficulties of social media mining … and to show very high regard for the content that people are leaving on social media.”

    Today, Pleasants said her research, which has now expanded to include contraception and misinformation online, has taken on greater urgency as shifting policies increasingly constrain access to reproductive health care. She noted that researchers, advocates, and clinicians in the field have long worked amid scrutiny and uncertainty.

    “The importance of the research doesn’t lessen just because policies make the work harder. Rather, the opposite seems true right now,” she said.

  • Breast cancer can behave differently in older women. This physician is making more tailored treatments a reality

    Breast cancer can behave differently in older women. This physician is making more tailored treatments a reality

    Of all the factors that can increase a person’s risk of breast cancer, age is among the most significant. Almost half of people diagnosed with breast cancer are at least 65, and about 20% are 75 or older. Despite these rates, older women are frequently excluded from clinical trials; one study of breast cancer trials found that only 9% of participants were 65 or older, leaving physicians with a poorer understanding of how drugs behave in older adults and fewer guidelines with which to treat them.

    There’s increasing evidence that these patients could benefit from more tailored treatments. Neil Carleton, a cancer biologist and first-year resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said that breast tumors can develop and grow differently in older patients than in younger ones because of hormone levels and inflammation. 

    “It can be a very heterogeneous disease,” Carleton said. But “historically, we’ve kind of treated all breast cancer the same,” he added — in a way that’s “age-agnostic.” 

    Carleton, who was recently named a STAT Wunderkind, wants to change that. After an M.D.-Ph.D. spent studying how clinicians can better treat tumors in older adults, he is now working to ensure that these patients receive care that is right for them, whether that means dialing back treatment or increasing it.

    “We typically think an older adult may be a little bit more frail” or less able to tolerate standard surgeries and therapies, he said. “But I don’t even think it’s about that. I think it’s more about appropriately treating.”

    Crafting the ‘nudge’

    As an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon University, Carleton spent two summers working in a Johns Hopkins prostate cancer lab and was surprised to see surgeons making a point to attend the department’s journal club. On Wednesday mornings, as the urology group — basic scientists and physicians alike, in all stages of their careers — filed into the conference room to discuss scientific papers in the field, Carleton began to see how medicine and research were intertwined. 

    He’d been thinking about medical school since high school in Pittsburgh, when a formative biology teacher veered his lessons away from photosynthesis and toward anatomy, physiology, and new biotechnology — the kind of science that explained how human health really worked. The idea of a physician-scientist was completely new, and it felt like the right fit.

    “I knew you could be a doctor, and I knew you could do research. I had no idea that you could kind of do both,” Carleton said.

    When he started his M.D.-Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in 2018, Carleton began working in the lab of Adrian Lee and Steffi Oesterreich, a husband-and-wife team of breast cancer biologists who were enthusiastic about new ideas and had a robust track record of translational research. Lee remembers the intensity with which Carleton wanted to be involved in that kind of work. “We can go on doing basic research forever, but we would like to eventually impact patient care,” Lee said. “And you could tell that he wanted to do that.” 

    At the time, there were reports from surgeons and in the scientific literature that older women with breast cancer were being overtreated. The three started talking about the patients that would come to launch Carleton’s career and a body of work in Lee and Oesterreich’s lab. In 2020, under the guidance of Lee, Oesterreich, and surgeon Priscilla McAuliffe, Carleton set out to quantify how many patients were receiving a surgery called a sentinel lymph node biopsy. 

    When removing a tumor from a patient’s breast, surgeons sometimes make an incision in the armpit and take a small amount of lymph node tissue to see if the cancer has spread there. Though professional society guidelines recommended against performing this biopsy on women 70 or older with early-stage cancer, other groups had reported that it was still being done.

    In data from the university medical center, Carleton found that about 65% of patients were still receiving biopsies. Rates actually continued to increase after the Society of Surgical Oncology adopted the guidelines in 2016, even though patients who received the biopsy were not more likely to survive or avoid recurrence. But “it can be very hard for surgeons to stop doing a surgery that’s kind of been ingrained in the paradigm for a while,” Carleton said.

    How, then, could he and his colleagues convince surgeons to reconsider? They designed a “nudge” within the electronic health record — a pop-up that would appear in a provider’s schedule for a qualifying patient that would remind them to consider omitting the biopsy. They implemented the nudge in eight clinics across the community and, in a clinical trial, tracked biopsy rates. The year after the nudge, they decreased by almost half.

    McAuliffe, now a breast cancer surgeon and clinical investigator at Emory University, said that surgeons encounter a lot of extraneous information in the electronic health record — but the nudge was simple. “I think that it reminded them without being a burden to them,” she said.

    One surgeon, when surveyed, said that the nudge “did exactly what its job was,” urging physicians to think about biology rather than reflexively recommending the biopsy. “I had to keep in mind that complete care doesn’t always equate with better care,” they said.

    The science behind a paradox

    While in the clinic, Carleton began studying a years-old question in the lab. Most breast cancer cases in older women are estrogen-receptor positive (ER+), meaning that tumor cells have receptors that bind to estrogen and trigger cancer growth. By 85, 91% of women with breast cancer have ER+ disease, even though postmenopausal women have lower levels of circulating estrogen. Carleton wanted to know how those tumors managed, seemingly paradoxically, to thrive.

    Looking at the gene expression in tissue from patients and healthy controls, Carleton and his colleagues found that the patients produced more of an enzyme involved in converting estrone — a form of estrogen that circulates in the bloodstream in postmenopausal women — to estradiol, its more potent version, within the tumor’s environment. 

    Scientists had known for 20 years that tumors made their own estrogen but didn’t know how it was done, Lee said. The enzyme Carleton identified was more than a mechanistic insight — it created a druggable target. In 3D models the lab made from patient cells, inhibiting the enzyme blocked estrogen conversion.

    Currently, doctors often treat postmenopausal women with ER+ tumors with inhibitors of a different enzyme. The drugs cause side effects like fatigue and joint pain, which lead many patients to stop treatment prematurely. Though the work is still early, Carleton hopes that drugs targeting the process they identified, administered through a gel or patch, could treat or even prevent breast cancer with fewer side effects. “I think it opens up possible therapeutic interventions,” he said.

    ‘Refining what we do’

    When looking through patient data early in his degree, Carleton noticed that some women ages 70 and older were forgoing surgery — not only the biopsy, but also a procedure to remove the main tumor in the breast. In this group, only 3% died of breast cancer after six years, and about 91% had their tumors controlled with primary endocrine therapy, which blocks estrogen receptors on ER+ breast cancer to prevent its growth. 

    If you could identify those patients for whom endocrine therapy might be enough treatment and monitor them, both the patient and their surgeon might be more comfortable with scaling back surgery, Lee said. “Precision medicine doesn’t mean doing more,” he said. “It means refining what we do, and sometimes refining what we mean we do means doing less.”

    While others might have missed the dozens of patients that hadn’t had any surgery among the thousands that did, Lee said, Carleton has a knack for noticing small details. And in September 2021, he uncovered a way to potentially track disease in patients who might not need surgery.

    Sitting in a talk at a local conference, Carleton learned about circulating tumor DNA (ctDNA), which cancer cells release into the bloodstream and can be measured to survey tumor growth. Natera, a molecular diagnostics company, had designed an assay that seemed perfect for older patients who’d declined surgery in favor of endocrine therapy: It required only a blood sample and could be done through a mobile blood-drawing service that came to their homes. Carleton and Lee approached Natera and, in the months afterward, designed a clinical trial to test whether they could use ctDNA to watch and identify patients at risk of progression.

    “It’s not an easy trial to recruit to — to say to someone, ‘Hey, you have breast cancer, but we’re not going to cut it out,’” Lee said. 

    But Carleton “has an amazing ability to kind of get the message across and encourage people,” Lee said, and put in hours with patients and physicians to earn their trust. Carleton was surprised by how many older adults were thrilled to join a trial that would guide not only their care, but the treatment of others going forward. “I think it was kind of one of the first times they were even approached to join a study,” he said.

    Over the next few years, the team studied patients who decided against surgery with Natera’s assay and ultrasound imaging. Patients with detectable ctDNA at six months were 30 times more likely to progress in their disease during the study, suggesting ctDNA was a marker of potential progression. And indeed, no patients with undetectable ctDNA before endocrine therapy progressed.

    The ‘closer’

    Today, as a first-year resident in Boston, Carleton spends most of his time treating patients. But he stays engaged with research: with the students in Lee and Oesterreich’s lab continuing to study the estrogen-converting enzyme, and with projects like designing a larger ctDNA trial. Lee and Oesterreich, with whom he still has regular check-ins, call him a “closer” — someone who takes on projects and sees them through to completion, synthesizing complex data from basic science and clinical practice into an understandable whole. “He has the complete package,” Lee said.

    Ultimately, Carleton hopes this work can help patients receive care without frequent trips to the clinic — turning breast cancer “into more of a chronic disease,” he said, where a patient might just take a daily pill and have regular imaging or ctDNA tests.

    Of course, Carleton said, not every patient will want that, and people with aggressive disease may need every intense treatment, test, and appointment. But better tools can help doctors identify: Who can be the patient they send home?

  • STAT+: In small trial, optogenetics restores some vision lost to retinitis pigmentosa

    STAT+: In small trial, optogenetics restores some vision lost to retinitis pigmentosa

    Nobel-recognized technology is being explored for safety and clinical potential

    Optogenetics involves genetically engineering specific brain cells to increase their sensitivity to light.CAROL AND MIKE WERNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

    Annalisa (Nalis) Merelli is focused on boys’ and men’s health: She looks into reproductive health, trending treatments, screening approaches, mental health, and everything in between.

    Retinitis pigmentosa is a genetic disorder that causes degeneration of the light-sensing cells in the retina. Generally diagnosed in childhood or early adolescence, patients gradually lose peripheral and night vision, often becoming legally blind by young adulthood. 

    With the exception of a subset of patients who present a specific genetic mutation and can be treated with gene therapy, there is no cure for the condition. Cases are addressed by measures to slow degeneration and preserve what is left of the vision.

    Optogenetics  — the technology just recognized with a Nobel Prize — could offer hope, according to a new paper published on Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. 

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    1. Annalisa (Nalis) Merelli is focused on boys’ and men’s health: She looks into reproductive health, trending treatments, screening approaches, mental health, and everything in between.

  • STAT+: In Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a promising therapy is available to a fortunate few

    STAT+: In Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a promising therapy is available to a fortunate few

    By Jason Mast

    Oct. 7, 2026

    General Assignment Reporter

    There’s a boy like you in Minnesota, Yannick’s mom told him a few years ago. He has the same disease. He has the same kind of smile. Maybe you could talk?

    They clicked. After school and on weekends, the two boys boot up their computers, Yannick in San Diego and Brecken in a suburb of St. Paul, Minn. They play Roblox or build virtual worlds on Minecraft: a zoo, for example, like the real-world one 13-year-old Yannick wants to build when he grows up, full of lions, tigers, and giraffes. 

    They seldom talk about Duchenne muscular dystrophy, the rare fatal muscle-wasting disease they live with. But lately it’s all their moms can talk about. In stolen phone calls on the way to coffee or back from school, they compare the two boys: how quickly Yannick is declining and how steadily Brecken is — shockingly — improving.

    Last winter, Brecken, 12, started receiving an experimental drug developed by Avidity Biosciences. The medicine makes the cell’s protein-building machinery “skip” part of the gene, called an exon, behind Duchenne, allowing patients to make a shortened but functional version of a protein essential for muscle survival. In trials, it appeared to virtually arrest the disease in some patients. 

    The approach, however, is out of most patients’ reach. In principle, “skipping” strategies could benefit about 70% of the 10,000 to 15,000 Duchenne boys and men in the U.S. (The disease almost exclusively affects males.) But the medicines have to be targeted to a patient’s specific mutation. Only about 7% of patients — or roughly 900 Americans — are eligible for Avidity’s drug, called Del-zota, which is now under Food and Drug Administration review.

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  • NIH rolling out streamlined website to help public find information more easily

    NIH rolling out streamlined website to help public find information more easily

    Finding information from the National Institutes of Health about human health, disease, and biomedical research is about to look a lot different. On Monday, the NIH will unveil a new version of its website that shifts attention away from individual institutes and centers and towards eight thematic hubs focused on health, research, data, clinical studies, rare diseases, technology, cancer, and grants.

    Agency officials say the redesign — which is part of an ambitious project to consolidate the NIH’s digital footprint — is intended to streamline what was a sprawling and fractured information ecosystem, requiring users to understand the NIH’s organizational structure, into an intuitive experience that more closely reflects what type of information people seek out most often. 

    The goal, said Amanda Fine, NIH deputy director for public affairs, is “to make trusted NIH information across the agency easier and faster to find.”

    The beta version, which was soft-launched this week, is still under development and will continue to evolve in the coming months, NIH officials told STAT. Some functions, including search, do not yet appear to be operational. During this transition period, NIH’s existing websites will remain available. They will be sunset on a rolling basis “as critical and mandated content is verified and redirects are put in place,” Fine told STAT.

    Researchers who study science communication and science misinformation say the overhaul is a welcome development. “It was badly needed,”said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a professor of communication and former director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. “Trying to find something on the old website required the skills of an Egyptologist.”

    Over the past few decades, the NIH’s digital footprint had ballooned to include more than 700 separate websites — often with different, non-connecting backend architectures and hosting platforms — stretching across millions of webpages. Information was duplicated across five or six locations, sometimes appearing in slightly different configurations. Its potential for creating confusion became apparent during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the public turned to the NIH and other federal science agencies for guidance and information about the fast-moving public health crisis. 

    “It became a dramatic illustration of a dysfunctional website whose dysfunction wasn’t evident pre-Covid,” said Hall Jamieson. 

    Spurred by the pandemic, the NIH began to develop its first-ever five-year strategic communications plan in 2022 under President Biden. Working groups made up of more than 70 staffers from communications offices spread across NIH’s 27 institutes and centers came up with a plan to streamline the hundreds of NIH-owned websites to just one per institute. This massive undertaking was set to be phased over five years, starting in 2025. 

    That plan, which was never published but which was obtained by STAT, was scrapped when the Trump administration came in and fired hundreds of communications staffers as part of a government-wide reduction in the federal workforce. As a result of the layoffs and mass cancellation of contracts in early 2025, millions of NIH websites have been effectively frozen for nearly 18 months. That created a sense of urgency for the remaining dozen or so communications employees tasked with pushing forward website consolidation under the new administration.

    Fine said her team worked to develop a data-driven process to better understand the path people take to NIH websites and how they navigated them once there. That helped them identify where people were getting stuck and the most highly sought after and frequently accessed information. The content on the new site is taken directly from health information from existing NIH websites, Fine said.

    The consolidation, once complete, will reduce the number of NIH-owned websites from more than 700 to a single, fully connected web environment.

  • Top journal’s special issue on women’s health casts spotlight on menopause and pain

    Top journal’s special issue on women’s health casts spotlight on menopause and pain

    Ovulation. Endometriosis. And especially: menopause. These once taboo words — among others — have become part of our daily vocabulary and conversations, a sign of greater interest in, and knowledge of, women’s health. 

    Yet even as women’s health has been receiving more attention than perhaps ever before, women remain poorly represented in clinical trials, and female health poorly understood compared to male health. Much of the attention remains focused on the reproductive aspects of women’s health.

    This led the journal Science to plan a special issue dedicated to women’s health, published Thursday. “Biomedical science has come a long way over the years, and it has become increasingly clear that there are sex-dependent differences in many diseases that do not involve reproduction and that occur at all ages,” according to the introduction. 

    The issue was edited by an all-female team (Yevgeniya Nusinovich, Sacha Vignieri, Joana Osório, and Sarah Ross), which named political attacks on women’s rights and health care, as well as funding cuts affecting research in this area, as urgent motives behind their planning.

    “The importance of doing clinical trials specifically in women has gained recognition over the years, and it’s something that should continue to be elevated, including as research funding cuts are targeted at this and other women-specific research, threatening the quality of women’s future healthcare,” they said. 

    Beyond reproductive health

    The issue features reviews of research that aim to highlight recent findings on the impact of sex-dependent biological differences beyond reproduction, as well as deep dives into the latest discoveries about menopause and the pregnant body.

    Women experience functional pain at about twice the rate of men, with persistent pain in the pelvic area often becoming a debilitating factor in their daily lives. The issue takes stock of recent research that identified sex-specific mechanisms of pain. The review highlights the impact of sex hormones, immune-neural interactions, the gut microbiome, and the role of ovarian hormones in pain, though it also highlights the deficit in efforts to understand female pain.

    “Women are desperately waiting for concrete answers that might help eliminate the common ‘all in your head’ approach to their illnesses,” the authors of the review wrote. 

    Another review focuses on the impact of XX and XY chromosomes on aging and disease, making the argument that their impact is so significant that sex chromosomes should always be considered when developing precision medicine strategies. 

    Other contributions do take on issues of reproductive health. They call for a rethinking of menopause research and treatment, with an approach more tailored to the individual; investigating the immune system’s role in preparing for and carrying out a pregnancy; and considering the role of the ovary’s postmenopausal function.

    Nusinovich, a senior editor at Science, said she considers research on post-reproductive health to be different from reproductive investigations “because the focus here is not on improving reproductive success but on considerations for a woman’s own health.” She said she considered including other medical conditions unrelated to reproduction in which sex differences play a role, such as cardiovascular and metabolic disease, “but it didn’t seem like there would be enough new biological insights (with mechanisms, not just clinical observations) for entire coherent review articles.” 

    The dearth of this research highlights the existing gaps. “We tend to focus on women in their reproductive years, and a lot of that I do think is driven by what institutions are willing to fund,” said Tiarney Ritchwood, a professor in the department of public health at Wake Forest University School of Medicine who focuses on health equity. “But I do think that the greater discussion on women outside of the reproductive years is really important.”

    For other experts, however, including a strong focus on reproductive health is inevitable. 

    “There is still so much we don’t know about women’s health simply because sex is often considered an extraneous variable,” said Nicole Woitowich, executive director of the Northwestern University Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute who did not take part in the issue. “For many years, women’s health was synonymous with reproductive health. I’m glad we’ve broadened this perspective to consider the influence of sex across human physiology. Yet, pregnancy and menopause, for example, remain unique aspects of women’s health and we are just beginning to understand how these events can shape our long-term health and well-being.” Woitowich recently researched the reporting of sex differences in NIH-funded papers. 

    The attention to menopause is especially welcome, said Omisade Burney-Scott, a menopause justice advocate pushing to make menopause care inclusive through her platform, the Black Girl’s Guide to Surviving Menopause. Still, Burney-Scott said, the journal article is lacking some perspectives — including discussion of early menopause due to gender-affirming care, or a medical intervention — that shows the limitations of current research. “We must take into account the significant impact of environmental factors, such as systemic oppression (racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, carcerality) on menopause health outcomes,” said Burney-Scott, who was not involved in the issue. 

    Women’s health needs funding, not just attention

    For the editors, the value of the issue also resides in showing how much there is to learn about women’s health. “Out of all the special issues I’ve encountered, this one stood out to me as highlighting a ton of open questions and things that are just beginning to be studied, especially in the article on chronic pain, pointing to many opportunities for future productive research,” said Nusinovich.

    The experts STAT spoke with agreed that a high-profile journal such as Science dedicating an issue to women’s health sends a strong signal to the scientific community. “It will contribute to increased awareness and even potentially increase research in this area, hopefully in the years beyond the reproductive ones,” said Ritchwood, “but none of this goes anywhere if there’s no funding dedicated to it.”

    Unless there is a broader dissemination of these findings — and, just as importantly, a clear call to fund women’s health research — the impact will remain limited, she said. “The public is not reading Science, so it can’t just be something that we just communicate to ourselves. … Are we going to see it in Vogue, or something that the public is actually looking at?” she said.

    Paula Schneider, the CEO of the Institute Advancing Women’s Health, a global nonprofit that focuses on improving women’s clinical care in midlife and after, noted that there is a lag in adopting new knowledge in clinical practice.

    “Research is only half the equation. Even the evidence we already have on women’s midlife health too often doesn’t make it into clinical practice,” she said. “We need to close the gap between what’s known and what’s done, so that as discoveries like these arrive, women know what to ask, doctors know how to answer, and the system knows what to do next.”

  • Risk from toxic metals can persist months after wildfires, Maui study finds

    Risk from toxic metals can persist months after wildfires, Maui study finds

    Metal mixtures found in the leftover smoke, ash and debris from the deadly 2023 Maui wildfires were harmful to the lung health of people living nearby long after the burning ended, a new study says.

    The work shows that major wildfires, which are worsening with the planet’s warming, could have lasting effects beyond immediate exposure.

    Post-wildfire air quality needs to be monitored longer term, the research suggests, and recovery efforts need to consider what might remain in contaminated soot, residue and dirt well after burning stops.

    The wildfires, caused by wind spreading a brushfire spurred by downed power lines, burned on the Hawaiian island of Maui in August 2023, destroyed the town of Lāhainā and killed more than 100 people. They were among the deadliest in U.S. history.

    New research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday found higher metal levels, associated with respiratory harm, in nearby residents up to a year and a half after the fires.

    As part of the Maui Wildfire Exposure Study, one of the largest postfire investigations in the country, University of Hawai‘i researchers studied the urine of 1,400 adults. They found substantially elevated concentrations of metals such as arsenic, cadmium, copper and antimony.

    Chemicals from burned buildings and electronics

    These metals could be the result of burned buildings, vehicles, electronics and other materials lost in the wildfires, the researchers say. They can cause a different human impact than simply the burned vegetation that is typically studied after fires of this magnitude.

    “What we’re dealing with, especially in the aftermath of what we experienced in Lāhainā, is a much more complicated mixture of these chemical exposures,” said Alika Maunakea, co-principal investigator of MauiWES and an anatomy, biochemistry, and physiology professor at the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa.

    Alika Maunakea: Consequences of fire “can unfold over many years.”
    Crystal Milner/STAT

    The researchers found antimony nearly 40 times higher in the Maui participants than U.S. biomonitoring data. They found manganese 3.8 times higher, barium 2.3 times and arsenic 2.2 times.

    Having more metals in the body was more likely to result in abnormal lung function, such as having less breathing capacity and difficulty moving air in and out of one’s lungs, during standard breathing tests, the study found.

    Those lung effects aligned with the geographic distribution of smoke and ash; those nearest to Lāhainā, and Wailuku and Kahului, experienced a different impact than in those near Kula.

    “It’s really important to identify potential sources of these exposures and to mitigate and reduce potential risks for re-exposures that might be contributing to these effects,” Maunakea said. “What happens to the land and environment can shape what people breathe, take into their bodies, and develop over time. The consequences of that can unfold over many years.”

    Warming planet can worsen wildfires

    Wildfires are getting larger, more intense, faster-moving and more frequent in certain parts of the globe, experts say, in part due to the warming and drier weather associated with climate change. Human-caused climate change has upped the likelihood of many major fires around the world in recent years and led to fires in regions that typically do not see them as often.

    The researchers did note a limitation of the study in that it cannot assess exactly how much of the impact came directly from the wildfires versus chronic or other exposures — such as Hawai‘i’s geology, diet, historic agricultural and industrial activity and environmental sources — given there is no comparable data from before August 2023.

    However, previous studies have also found significant long-term human impacts from wildfires and other environmental crises. The impacts have included lung issues and mental health issues such as depression.

    “This is bigger than wildfires. These climate-related disasters can change the environment in ways that continue after the immediate emergency is over,” said Ruben Juarez, co-principal investigator of MauiWES and professor of health economics at the university. “Floods, hurricanes, fires, and other disasters definitely can disturb soil, debris, buildings, and legacy contaminants that we have in Hawai‘i, creating these pathways for exposure. … Disaster response should not stop when visible danger is gone.”

    Kekoa Taparra, a physician and assistant professor who studies chronic diseases at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the research expands our understanding of the health burden of the fires, particularly over an extended period.

    “This type of work echoes that climate-related disasters affect human health well beyond the immediate injuries and deaths we see during the event itself,” said Taparra, who was not involved in the study released Monday but has studied the health impacts of disasters. “Historic wildfires in Lāhainā  and even Los Angeles have highlighted how these disasters can produce longer-lasting consequences through displacement, disruption of healthcare and social networks, environmental exposures, and potentially increased mortality.

    “As these events become more frequent and severe, understanding and measuring their full health impact will be essential to building more resilient communities and health systems.” — Alexa St. John

  • Platinum-based chemotherapy in childhood causes mutations that age the liver

    Platinum-based chemotherapy in childhood causes mutations that age the liver

    Platinum-based chemotherapy — in particular cisplatin and carboplatin — are a lifeline for children with certain cancers. These treatments, for instance, transformed the prognosis of hepatoblastoma, a rare cancer of the liver that is the most commonly diagnosed in childhood, from a five-year survival rate of 20% to more than 80% for localized tumors. 

    However, these medications work by damaging the DNA of cancer cells, and they are also known to cause mutations in the DNA of healthy cells, potentially raising the risk of new cancers later in life. The mutations have been documented in adults, but the picture is less clear when it comes to children. A new study published Thursday in Science sought a clearer understanding of the long-term impact of platinum agents in children treated for hepatoblastoma. 

    The study looked at children who had received platinum therapy followed by surgery to remove the tumor. The researchers sampled tissues from the liver — both healthy and cancerous — and the patient’s blood, analyzing them through a sophisticated DNA sequencing technique called NanoSeq. 

    They then compared the sequencing results to those from children who had been treated with different drugs, or had not been treated prior to surgery, as well as to fetal liver tissue. They found that being exposed to platinum agents led to hundreds of mutations in genes (on average 2,200 per liver sample), a burden of mutation usually found in adult livers. In other words, platinum aged the liver cells of treated children, making them look more like adult liver cells.

    Mutation load also increased proportionally to platinum exposure: children who received only cisplatin had a smaller number of mutations than those who received both cisplatin and carboplatin. These mutations could increase the likelihood of liver pathologies, or the emergence of secondary tumors, the authors said. 

    “We found lots of cancer genes but also genes associated with long-term changes in liver metabolism,” said Foad Rouhani, one of the authors of the paper and a professor at King’s College in London. However, he stressed that “by no means does that mean that these cells will definitely become cancerous in time. All we talk about is there was evidence for potential for these cells to eventually cause problems further down the line.” 

    Liver cells showed many more mutations than blood cells, even though chemotherapy is a systemic treatment. “The platinum is doing something differently to liver cells than other cells. Either it’s been metabolized differently or the liver cells are repairing differently, we don’t really know yet,” said Rouhani. This could mean that the liver was more susceptible to the effects of platinum, or it could be the other way around: The extent of the mutations may explain why that liver got sick in the first place. 

    In a perspective article, Sanjeev Vasudevan and Donald Williams Parsons, both professors at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, wrote that the findings “provide strong evidence for conducting survivorship studies of children that have undergone treatment for liver cancer beyond their third decade of life.”

    For the study authors, its primary contribution lies in establishing that the damage occurs, so clinicians can monitor these patients more closely during their lifetimes, said Rouhani, and identify issues at an earlier stage. 

    But there could be a prospective impact on treatment. “If we understand the mechanism, can we then eventually be able to design next-generation chemotherapies which are highly effective at treating the cancer but actually leave the background tissue largely untouched?” said Rouhani.