Staying #Up2Date 🚨

1: New Home, New Connections

A cohort study looked at how social participation shifts when older adults move into nursing homes or assisted living. In 606 long-term care entrants, community involvement — things like clubs, religious services, or seeing friends and family — had already dipped in the years leading up to the move. But after moving in, participation actually went up: 15.6% more joined clubs, 12.6% more attended religious services. The boost wasn’t evenly spread, though — Black, Hispanic, and other minority residents were less likely to see the same gains.

2: Inflammation and Insomnia: A Potent Pair for Depressive Symptoms

In this RCT, adults 60+ with insomnia who got an IV dose of endotoxin (to induce inflammation) had triple the increase in depressive symptoms compared to those without insomnia. The takeaway: older adults with insomnia may be especially vulnerable to mood dips when inflammation hits.

3: AI-Assisted Teaching Helps Medical Students Sharpen Surgical Skills

This RCT out of McGill tested whether AI-assisted teaching could sharpen med students’ surgical skills. Students who got personalized, AI-informed feedback from their tutors scored higher than those with human tutoring alone — both in practice resections (mean diff = 0.26; 95% CI, 0.09-0.43; P = .01) and in transferring skills to a complex realistic scenario (mean diff = 0.20; 95% CI, 0.06-0.34; P = .02). The verdict: pairing human input with AI could give trainees the best of both worlds.

Recurrence-Free Hope💉

Promising Phase 1 trial for pancreatic cancer vaccine leaves doctors optimistic

What happened: A one-size-fits-all vaccine designed to prevent hard-to-treat pancreatic cancers from returning showed promise in an early trial.

Why it matters: The vaccine targets the KRAS gene mutations, which occur in about one-quarter of all cancers, including 90% of pancreatic cancers. The drug uses short chains of amino acids called peptides that teach immune cells to recognize and attack cells that have the mutations.

While cancer vaccines aren’t new, most of them are personalized to the patient. That’s what makes the vaccine from the study different; it doesn’t need to be personalized, and if approved, would be available off the shelf.

During the Phase 1 trial, a team of doctors recruited 20 people with pancreatic cancer and 5 with colorectal cancer. Every participant had KRAS mutations and had undergone standard treatment to remove most of their tumors. Every patient got 6 priming doses of the experimental vaccine (ELI-002-2P), while 13 received booster shots.

85% of participants fought against the KRAS mutations, and two-thirds of those patients had an immune response strong enough to fight off any lingering cancer cells. What’s even more exciting is that almost 70% of trial participants had an immune response to not only the KRAS mutations, but to other tumor cells that weren’t in the vaccine.

The research team is currently running a Phase 2 trial to test whether the vaccine is more effective than the standard of care, which currently monitors patients for recurrence. During the Phase 1 trial, people with pancreatic cancer survived for about 29 months and lived recurrence-free for more than 15 months post-vaccination.

Bottom line: Before the vaccine can be given to the public, it’ll have to go through more advanced clinical trials, but researchers are excited about the possibility of giving cancer patients the time they deserve.

Hot Off The Press

1: 🥸 Sophisticated “paper mill” networks are cranking out fake research, and it’s not just a few bad actors. A new Northwestern-led analysis found organized webs of authors, editors, and brokers gaming journals, selling authorship slots, and even hijacking defunct titles to slip in sham studies. Fraudulent science is growing 10× faster than legitimate literature, seeding bogus data into meta-analyses and, potentially, AI training sets. Without serious guardrails, we may be watching the scientific record rot in real time.

2: 💔 A gunman who believed the COVID-19 vaccine had harmed him fired 181 rounds into the CDC’s Atlanta campus Friday, shattering 150 windows, killing a police officer, and sending 92 children in an on-site daycare into lockdown. CDC staff say the agency was deliberately targeted, and many blame years of anti-vaccine rhetoric — including from HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — for creating a climate where such violence feels inevitable. In a profession already strained by pandemic burnout and political attacks, the shooting is a chilling reminder that public health work now comes with a target.

3:🚶A study has found that people who move to walkable cities like Chicago and Philadelphia could log over 1,000 more steps a day. The two cities have a walkability score of 78, and if all US cities matched this score, 36 million more Americans could meet national activity targets.

4: 🦠 Flesh-eating bacteria deaths are on the rise across the southeastern coasts of the U.S. Vibrio vulnificus is found in warm seawater, and Florida has already seen 16 cases this year. Other states include Louisiana, North Carolina, and Mississippi. The bacteria enters the body through open wounds in the skin, causing the tissue to die. The CDC announced that 1 in 5 people die from the disease and is asking folks who are swimming to either wear waterproof Band-Aids or skip the activity altogether.

Notable Numbers 🔢

6: the number of mountains Seoul National University students in South Korea must climb for a $540 scholarship. With over 1,400 students applying, you could say the competition is reaching new peaks.

3: weekly servings of French fries linked to a 20% higher risk of Type 2 diabetes. Boiled, baked, or mashed potatoes didn’t have the same effect, so it might be time to rethink your burger’s sidekick.

30: people in a small study hinting that blowing into a conch shell might ease sleep apnea. The results sound promising, but experts say it’s too early to call this the conch-lusion we’ve been dreaming of.

Postcall Picks ✅

 🍽️ Eat: the best sheet pan chicken piccata. It’s so good you’ll want to make it every night, and since it’s all in one pan, clean-up is a breeze.

🎧 Listen: to the newest episode of the White Coat Investor Podcast! This week, the hosts talk about saving money during residency and is medical school worth it?

🤑 Save: on back-to-school deals. Best Buy has some laptops, headphones and backpacks on sale.

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