Diabetes, disparities, and Covid-19: Intertwined ‘epidemics’ raise risk of severe illness, death

It’s clear that if people with diabetes are infected with Covid-19, they have higher odds of worse outcomes: One study suggests that the mortality rate for people with diabetes may be as high as 30%. But it’s not yet figured out why that is — and finding an answer may be complicated. People with diabetes can have a mix of biological and socioeconomic factors that could be making them more vulnerable to Covid-19. Some, for example, might live in households with essential workers or in neighborhoods where it’s harder to be physically active while staying 6 feet away from others. And diabetes can damage the same organs that Covid-19 targets, making it “incredibly difficult to parse out the cause and effect of what’s going on in these patients,” one expert tells STAT’s Elizabeth Cooney. Read more.

Timothy Ray Brown, first person cured of HIV, dies from cancer

Timothy Ray Brown, the first person to be functionally cured of HIV after receiving a bone marrow transplant in 2007 to treat acute myeloid leukemia, died yesterday of cancer at 54. Also known as the “Berlin patient,” Brown was working as a translator in the German capital when he was diagnosed with HIV and then leukemia. He announced last week that his leukemia had returned and spread. Brown’s transplant came from a donor with a particular and rare genetic mutation that scientists believed could make it difficult for the HIV virus to get into cells. And his treatment served as a blueprint for others: In March 2019, scientists announced that a second person, dubbed the “London patient,” had successfully gone through a similar regimen. Adam Castillejo decided to reveal his identity earlier this year.

Female primary care docs spend more time with patients than males but bring in lower revenues

Research into the gender pay gap among physicians has often suggested that female doctors earn less than their male counterparts partly because they work fewer hours. But a new analysis that looked at claims and electronic health record data from more than 24 million primary care office visits in 2017 finds that women spent slightly more time on each patient visit — and brought in nearly 11% less in revenue than their male colleagues, while working close to the same number of days. Physicians are largely paid per patient visit, so spending even a bit longer with each patient can mean fewer visits per day. A few caveats on the study: The paper examined revenue per physician, and not their take-home pay, and it did not look at whether female physicians' patients had better outcomes.

Inside STAT: Her father developed dementia. She made a surreal, hilarious documentary about it

KIRSTEN JOHNSON DIRECTS A SCENE WITH HER DAD FOR THE NEW DOCUMENTARY, "DICK JOHNSON IS DEAD." (NETFLIX)

In a new documentary, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson navigates her father’s dementia and impending death with surrealism and humor — staging enactments of her dad dying in accidental ways. “Dick Johnson Is Dead,” which premieres on Netflix tomorrow, plays the “deaths” for laughs, but they underpin a moving look at memory loss, grief, and preserving what Johnson is so sad about losing. Devastated by her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Johnson became interested in how memory and time function, relating those two to her world of cinema. She set off to explore the idea of making a movie with her father as a form of defiance toward death. “Like I’m going to laugh this time, I’m not going to just do the veil of tears that I did last time,” she tells STAT’s Andrew Joseph. Read their conversation here.

Are a subtype of brain cells more important than we thought?

Of all the cells in the brain, neurons tend to get all the credit and the glory. But a subset of cells in the brain called microglia have a very important job: Some of these cells tidy up some of the unnecessary or broken connections between neurons and clear out damaged neurons. Now scientists have found a new role that microglia play: They report in a just-published paper that microglia can break down a chemical that neurons release when they’re active and tell overactive neurons to stop firing quite so much. The researchers wrote that these microglia could play a role in neurodegenerative diseases — but this study was done using mice, including some that were genetically modified to act as models for Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease. Much more research is needed to see if these findings could potentially translate into something like a new treatment.

Alcohol-related deaths are on the rise

More people — and many more women — are dying from alcohol-related conditions than in past years, according to a new CDC analysis. The agency reports the number of people dying from a group of conditions, including those linked to muscle, liver, heart, or brain damage due to alcohol consumption, increased by 43% between 2006 and 2018. While more men who lived in rural areas died from these conditions than any other group — more than 25 per every 100,000 people — the number of women dying from these conditions has jumped 76% since 2000. These findings build on previous research that has shown an upward tick in the number of people who report drinking any amount of alcohol, and those who drink at harmful levels. But notably, these studies don’t cover 2020 — and experts have observed that people are drinking even more during the pandemic.

What to read around the web today

What it’s like to participate in a Covid-19 vaccine trial Elemental
Why are so few drugs tested for safety in pregnancy? Undark
Huge study of coronavirus cases in India offers some surprises to scientists New York Times
‘You just got better at making money’: Democrats blast Celgene, Teva for price hikes detailed in internal documents STAT
Why Vienna opera singers are ready to risk their lives to perform in a pandemic Vox