STAT Morning rounds: screen time and autism

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Election day is finally here. What to say? If you feel at all grateful for STAT’s journalism today, please consider supporting our newsroom. We are currently offering 40% discount on our annual subscription.

Today is the day

I assume you’ve already decided who you’re going to vote for. Maybe you have already voted! But if you want to think further about the stakes of this election, consider how a Kamala Harris or Donald Trump victory would change health care.

Interpreting and distilling candidates’ proposals is always difficult work — but it’s been especially hard work this year, STAT’s DC reporters told me. It was a light election cycle when it came to policy ideas because there weren’t really competitive primaries. That means there is less source material to work with, explained Rachel Cohrs Zhang, STAT’s chief correspondent in Washington.

I asked Rachel and our colleague Sarah Owermohle what some of their favorite stories from this election cycle were. Rachel pointed to her exclusivity from earlier this summer, which really sparked the idea for $35 insulin. “It turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected,” she said. Sarah recalled her trip to Montana, where she reported on how abortion rights regularly win in elections, but pro-abortion candidates might not. “The conversations that emerged between the researcher and complete strangers, just those conversations were fascinating,” she said.

As for today, Rachel was up at 5am for the morning shift, making sure they had everything as up to date as possible for today’s special edition of DC Diagnosis. Sarah will work the night shift and check for important races and voting before going to bed around 1am. (Don’t worry, she plans to take an afternoon nap.)

Stay up to date with Rachel and Sarah’s reporting every week in DC Diagnosis. And come back here tomorrow for those results.

Understanding the complex relationship between screen time and autism

When children under the age of two spend more than fourteen hours a week on a screen, they are at significantly greater risk of being diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder by the time they are twelve, according to a study published yesterday in JAMA Pediatrics. But the association is not causal, said the study authors, whose analysis is based on more than 5,100 children in Australia, 145 of whom had a parent-reported diagnosis of autism.

Instead, they point to underlying socioeconomic factors such as family income and mother’s education as “instrumental factors” that may influence the link between screen time and autism. Are not the first time one study identified this association but failed to establish causality. For some experts, this begs the question: What if autistic children happen to seek out more screen time? As the internet and social media become increasingly central to youth mental health research, more research is always needed.

Private Medicare plans are paid – the VA provides the care

With names like “Patriot Plan,” “Courage MA” and “Honor” plan, all the major private Medicare insurers are directly courting veterans and selling them plans that are supposed to supplement their Veterans Affairs coverage with benefits like dental and vision . And the plans are quite popular: Nearly 42% of all Medicare-eligible veterans had one in 2022.

But a new health care study shows that excess government spending is benefiting these Medicare Advantage plans. It finds that MA plans did not cover any care for 10% of their veteran members in 2020. At the same time, Medicare paid those plans more than $1.3 billion to cover those members. That’s just “the tip of the iceberg” regarding federal overpayments, said Jose Figueroa, a senior author of the study. Read more in STAT+ by Tara Bannow.

The FDA vax regulator wants to combat misinformation with transparency

Regardless of who wins the presidential election, vaccine fatigue and misinformation will remain major public health problems. At a public forum last week, Peter Marks, the FDA’s top vaccine regulator, said transparency is the way to counter this growing anti-vaccine movement. STAT’s Helen Branswell contacted Marks to talk more about vaccine production, safety and disinformation.

“It doesn’t take vaccination rates to drop off so much to get into trouble here, where you lose herd immunity,” Marks said. “So I think there is some concern that this could get worse. And we just don’t know the extent of the damage that has been done so far.” Read more from Helen.

What’s next for brain-computer interfaces?

Brain computer interface company bigwigs collected in New York City last weekend to chat and answer a pressing question: What’s next? In recent years, the field has demonstrated the safety and efficacy of the technology. Much of the discussion at the symposium focused on potential clinical endpoints and how the industry plans to translate these early successes into effective treatments.

The key to this process will be simplifying the technology, said Peter Yoo, director of neuroscience and algorithms at Synchron: “Once you give someone a BCI, you don’t need hours of training with a scientist to provide value. Imagine if I gave you an iPhone and you had to sit at Apple for hours to get it to work? That is not the way to commercialize.”

— Timmy Broderick, STAT’s disability reporting officer

(If you have ideas about what it will take to bring brain computer interface technology to market, send Timmy a message. They’re cooking up a story about this moment.)

Can TikTok convince you to stop taking birth control?

Nearly three-quarters of YouTube influencers who talk about contraception encourage people to stop using it, according to a study published last year. Another study found that the same is true for almost half of TikTok posts about contraception.

These social media posts are based on personal experiences and not scientific evidence, writes Emily Pfender, a researcher who worked on both studies. That said, positive changes can come from personal messages. Earlier this year, the CDC updated its IUD insertion guidelines to recommend pain management strategies, following a viral trend of women posting videos of their pained faces during the procedure. “This shows how social media can drive change, but it also shows the danger of allowing misinformation to dominate these platforms,” Pfender writes in a First Opinion essay.

Read more from Pfender about how misinformation about women’s health is spreading online, and what she thinks healthcare leaders should do about it.

What we read

• Richard A. Cash, who saved millions from dehydration, dies at 83, New York Times

• Thousands of children in Gaza are receiving the second dose of polio vaccine, while others are being cut off NPR

• Medicare has finalized coverage for some mental health apps. What now? STAT
• LGBTQ+ marriage is legal, but it is back on the agenda in three states 19th news