There’s no question that the wildly popular injectable weight-loss drugs help people drop pounds, lower heart-disease risk, manage obstructive sleep apnea, and more. But as more people use these drugs, which target hormones including GLP-1, doctors are learning more about the potential downsides, as well. In the latest study published on MedRxiv—a site that hosts early research not yet peer reviewed by experts—scientists in Canada report that using GLP-1 drugs can contribute to a higher risk of hair loss, especially among women. Advertisement Dr. Mohit Sodhi, a resident in emergency medicine at University of British Columbia, and his colleagues analyzed data from just over 1,900 people who were prescribed semaglutide and 1,300 who were prescribed bupropion-naltrexone—an older obesity treatment known as Contrave. Semaglutide is the compound in the drugs Ozempic, which treats diabetes, and Wegovy, which treats obesity. Sodhi focused only on people taking Wegovy to treat overweight or obesity to avoid any potential confounding effects of diabetes on hair loss. He and his team then compared the diagnoses for hair loss in these patients’ medical records and found that those prescribed semaglutide had a 50% higher risk of being diagnosed with a hair-loss condition compared to those prescribed Contrave. That risk was twice as high for women as for men. Read More: The Health Risks and Benefits of Weight-Loss Drugs

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) who has vowed to address chronic illnesses by making changes to the country’s food supply, recently told food companies that one of the Trump Administration’s goals is to remove artificial dyes from food products. The news comes just a few months after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned the use of one dye, Red Dye No. 3, in food and ingested drugs—a move that predated Kennedy’s new role. Consumer advocates and some health experts have expressed concerns over other types of dyes as well, and at least a dozen states are considering bills that would prohibit certain dyes. Advertisement Artificial food dyes, which add colors to food and drink products, have generated much debate among researchers and experts over whether they’re healthy for people to consume. Here’s what to know about the issue. Why was Red 3 banned by the FDA? In 1990, the FDA prohibited Red 3 from being used in cosmetics and topical drugs, in light of research that found the dye caused cancer in male rats. Federal rules mandate that the agency ban food additives that have been found to cause cancer in animals or humans, so consumer and health advocates encouraged the FDA to ban Red 3 in foods as well. But it was only in January that the agency took that step. In its announcement about the decision, the FDA clarified that the way Red 3 causes cancer in male rats “does not occur in humans,” adding that “studies in other animals and in humans did not show these effects.”

On March 14, Dr. Mehmet Oz will answer questions from members of the Senate Finance Committee in his confirmation hearing to lead the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Oz is an unusual combination of a high-achieving doctor—he has an Ivy-League pedigree and was a heart surgeon at Columbia University for decades—and a TV personality who hosted a daytime talk show for 13 seasons. He’s also courted controversy over endorsements of what many experts view as questionable products and remedies. It's not the typical background for a head of CMS, which generally includes a heavy focus on health policy. Advertisement Here's what to know about Oz and his position on everything from Medicare to supplements during his years in the public eye. Oz’s medical background Oz was on the faculty of Columbia University, earning some renown as a skilled heart transplant surgeon who was part of the first published study, in 2001, reporting on the benefits of mechanical hearts in treating heart failure. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also completed an MBA. He went to Columbia for his medical residency and remained to join the faculty, where he spent the rest of his medical career. Oz earned notoriety for his then-unorthodox views on medical treatment, such as allowing his patients to receive massage and spiritual interventions to help their recovery. His untraditional views attracted the attention of health journalists eager to hear more about the quick-talking, engaging surgeon who wasn’t afraid of discussing such unprecedented strategies. Advertisement Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang Branded Content Grottoes bear the enduring touch of Tang By China Daily His fame-making Oprah appearance Unlike many academics, Oz felt comfortable in the spotlight and seemed to have a knack for distilling complicated medical jargon and ideas into language that was easy for people without medical expertise to understand. He gained fame, for example, as a guest on Oprah in 2014 when he spoke about bowel movements. “It should sound like a diver from Acapulco hits the water,” he told a skeptical Oprah about how feces should land in the toilet. He also informed viewers that their stool should be shaped like the letter "S." Read More: What to Know About Marty Makary, Trump’s Pick to Lead the FDA In following episodes, he brought the same straight-talk to educating people about keeping their hearts healthy, bringing cadaver hearts to shock people into seeing the differences between hearts damaged by smoking and healthy ones. The Dr. Oz Show: Celebrity and controversy The popularity of his appearances led Oprah to support his own talk show focused on health issues, which ran from 2009 to 2022. Oz built on his medical knowledge and engaging way of communicating to discuss everything from how to keep hearts healthy to good nutrition and trendy supplements. His unique ability to tackle embarrassing health topics even led to a parody on Saturday Night Live in 2011.

By now, most people have reached a resigned acceptance when it comes to COVID-19. We accept that we’re probably going to get infected at some point during respiratory disease season—and that when we do, we’ll feel sick for a couple of days, and then get over it. But what if you could avoid getting COVID-19 altogether? That’s the potential promise of a new study on a drug made by Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi. At a scientific conference in San Francisco, researchers reported that their drug, ensitrelvir, helped prevent people who were exposed to SARS-CoV-2 from testing positive for the disease. Advertisement There is currently no drug approved to prevent COVID-19, but ensitrelvir is already approved in Japan as a treatment for COVID-19. It reduces hospitalizations for COVID-19 among people at the highest risk of complications; for the less vulnerable, it cuts down on the number of days they're sick with symptoms. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is considering the drug for fast-track approval as a way to prevent COVID-19, based on this latest study presented at the Conference of Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections. (The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.) Researchers studied more than 2,300 people age 12 and older who didn't have COVID-19 but lived with someone who had tested positive at the time of the study. They were then randomly assigned to receive either ensitrelvir or placebo pills for five days. Everyone in the study began taking their pills once a day within three days of when their housemate first reported symptoms of COVID-19.

President Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), former Republican Congressman Dr. Dave Weldon, was set to face questioning by Senators on March 13. But on the morning of the hearing, the White House withdrew Weldon’s nomination, according to Axios, which first reported the news. Weldon was due to appear before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions, and members were expected to question him on topics including his past statements expressing vaccine skepticism. In an interview, Weldon told the New York Times that he just learned about the withdrawal of his nomination the night before; a White House official told him he didn’t have the votes to be confirmed for the role. Advertisement “It is a shock, but, you know, in some ways, it’s relief,” he told the Times. “Government jobs demand a lot of you, and if God doesn’t want me in it, I’m fine with that.” Here’s what to know about Weldon. Dave Weldon is a physician, veteran, and former Congressman Weldon, 71, served in the Army, and currently operates a private medical practice in Florida. From 1995 to 2009, he served in Congress, representing Florida. Since then, he’s largely been out of the political spotlight, though he’s run campaigns—he lost the GOP Primary for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2012, as well as the GOP Primary for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives in 2024. He was the president of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries From 2017 to 2020, Weldon was the president of the Alliance of Health Care Sharing Ministries, an association of faith-based organizations that claim to offer alternatives to health insurance. The organizations have sparked controversy and criticism from state regulators, who have expressed concern that the groups’ marketing strategies have led to confusion among consumers over whether the ministries would fund medical claims.

Later this year, a handful of people with a rare eye condition will receive a novel injection that is designed to quite literally turn back time. Nonarteritic anterior ischemic optic neuropathy—known as NAION—can cause sudden blindness when blood flow to the optic nerve is blocked. It’s not clear what causes the condition, although diabetes, high blood pressure, and smoking are known to be risk factors. Some early evidence also suggests GLP-1-based weight-loss drugs such as Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Zepbound might also make patients twice as prone to the condition compared with those not taking the medications. Whatever its cause, there are no treatments for NAION. And if it strikes one eye, there is a good chance it will also affect the other, leading to complete blindness. Advertisement Scientists hope to change that with what is potentially much more than an eye treatment. The injection will test a new gene therapy that, instead of targeting specific genetic mutations that cause NAION, attempts to return certain optic-nerve cells to their pre-NAION state. It would be the equivalent of pressing a biological rewind button that takes the affected cells back to a younger condition—one in which they haven’t yet been struck by NAION or any other disease. To some scientists, this sounds wildly ambitious. To others, extremely unlikely. Either way, it is just the kind of big—and controversial—swing that is emblematic of the growing field of science devoted to untangling and reversing what is a central fact of life: aging. The particular therapy behind the NAION treatment is based on the work of David Sinclair, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He has spent decades trying to understand the wear-and-tear processes that age our cells and is convinced that many conditions that plague us—from joint issues to metabolic processes that break down as we get older—could be avoided and even reversed.

t’s one of the most common misdiagnoses in American medicine, and it usually happens like this: An old and frail person gets confused, tired, or a little dizzy. Maybe she just doesn’t feel like eating. Or she stumbles. These are classic geriatric syndromes that usually receive a classic medical response: the senior is ordered to pee in a cup for testing. The leading suspect is a urinary tract infection. Too often, it’s the wrong suspect. The urinary tract infection (UTI), has become the medical bogeyman that will not go away, a default but often incorrect diagnosis that seems to come up every time an older person has some ill-defined health presentation but still lacks the most reliable symptom of painful urination. As a career geriatrician, I don’t enjoy calling out colleagues, but health professionals need to spend less time ordering people to pee in a cup and more time figuring out the true causes of the problem.

It’s hard to believe it's been five years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2020, the disease has killed more than 1.2 million Americans—more than in any other country. That accounts for more than 1 in 7 reported COVID-19 deaths in the whole world (although the true global death toll is likely much higher due to under-reporting). Don’t be fooled by some social-media revisionist historians who would have us believe that COVID-19 was “mild”—it was one of the most lethal infectious disease outbreaks in human history, ranking only behind the 1918 Spanish Flu and the Bubonic Plague (not including the ongoing HIV/AIDS epidemic). Advertisement Thankfully, in 2025, the days of lockdowns and quarantines now seem a distant memory for many—even though the physical, mental, and emotional impacts of the pandemic persist in many ways. However, the question remains: Are we better prepared for next time? Sadly, if anything, we are less prepared than before. Pandemics are not necessarily once-in-a-lifetime events. We already saw in 2009 a swine flu pandemic that killed up to half a million people globally. H5N1 bird flu continues to spread in poultry, wild birds, and mammals in the U.S., with each case increasing the risk of further spillover into humans—making the U.S. a possible epicenter of any new flu pandemic, should the virus evolve further to spread easily among humans. MPox, MERS (another coronavirus with a high fatality rate), and Ebola are just some of the currently circulating pathogens with pandemic potential. And, of course, "Disease X" (a potential virus that could emerge in the future that we don't yet know about) is always a possibility. What should we be doing that we’re not? First, we should be making investments, not cuts, in pandemic preparedness. The U.S. has withdrawn funding from the World Health Organization. Working alongside local and national health authorities, the WHO is a key “first responder,” identifying and containing infectious-disease outbreaks before they spread. The U.S. contributed approximately $120 million in 2023-2024 on responding to acute health emergencies and to preventing pandemics and epidemics, so our step back leaves a massive hole in resources designed to tackle emergencies and stop outbreaks from spreading. Also, recent funding cuts or freezes to agencies like USAID are already having ramifications on the ground, with public-health professionals concerned that progress in tackling diseases like tuberculosis will stall or regress. With less funding, pandemic preparations also slow down, and the U.S. ceasing negotiations for the Pandemic Agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations makes matters worse. Advertisement Nationally, purported plans to de-prioritize infectious-disease research and defund some CDC training programs are a recipe for having a public-health workforce that is under-resourced and under-skilled to deal with future pandemic threats. Although some employees have since been rehired, sweeping and hasty cuts to key staff involved in potential pandemic response will mean a loss of invaluable experience of those working on the public-health frontlines during COVID-19. Read More: Measles Is Back. And a Lot More People Are at Risk Second, the ideologies and track records of some of those with the greatest responsibility for protecting public health in the U.S. would suggest that, if a new pandemic were to emerge in the next few years, the response would be hands-off. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently endorsed (albeit weakly) the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine to fight the measles outbreak in Texas. While that was a welcome move, he has a long history of spreading misinformation on vaccines. RFK Jr. has lobbied against and opposed COVID-19 vaccines. The Trump Administration is said to be re-evaluating nearly $600 million funding for H5N1 mRNA vaccine research. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the likely new head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), held views on COVID-19 that deviated from the scientific mainstream, which included arguing in favor of a herd-immunity approach that thousands of scientists argued would have led to preventable deaths. While the U.S.’s COVID-19 policies were far from harmless and perfect, and while some of the more draconian and harmful measures like extended school closures could hopefully be avoided in the future, doing too little during the next health emergency would be reckless. How much would pandemic measures like vaccines be promoted next time?

Prince Frederik of Luxembourg, the youngest son of Prince Robert of Luxembourg and Princess Julie of Nassau, died in Paris at age 22 on March 1—a day after Rare Disease Day—of a rare genetic disease known as POLG. His father announced his passing on March 7 in a statement posted on the website of the POLG Foundation, which Frederik cofounded in 2022 and was the creative director of. “Frederik fought his disease valiantly until the very end,” Robert wrote. “His indomitable lust for life propelled him through the hardest of physical and mental challenges.” Advertisement Frederik—who is survived by his parents; his brother, Alexander; his sister, Charlotte; his cousins, Charly, Louis, and Donall; his brother-in-law, Mansour; his aunt and uncle, Charlotte and Mark; and his dog, Mushu—was remembered as a resilient fighter and a headstrong advocate. “Frederik knows that he is my Superhero,” Robert wrote. “Part of his superpower was his ability to inspire and to lead by example.” He even expressed gratitude for having his disease, Robert wrote. “He felt that there were so many amazing people that he would never have known had it not been for his disease,” and once told a friend, “‘Even though I’ll die from it … and even if my parents do not have the time to save me, I know that they will be able to save other children.’” What is POLG? POLG disease is a mitochondrial disorder caused by inherited mutations in the POLG gene—which is critical to the processes of replicating cells’ genetic material and DNA repair. The disease, which has no cure, affects multiple organs, including the brain, nerves, muscles, and liver, and symptoms can be wide-ranging and debilitating. “One might compare it to having a faulty battery that never fully recharges, is in a constant state of depletion and eventually loses power,” Robert wrote. It’s also difficult to diagnose. While it’s one of the most common inherited mitochondrial diseases, affecting around 1 in 10,000 people, it’s considered a rare disease. Molecular genetic testing for the mutation exists, and the disease can also be detected through brain imaging to look for associated brain changes and electroencephalogram (EEG) testing, but the range in symptoms and lack of public awareness around the disease means it can be hard for even physicians to identify. Frederik was diagnosed at age 14. Doug Turnbull, a professor of neurology at Newcastle University and a member of the POLG Foundation’s scientific advisory board, described POLG deficiency as “the worst” of all mitochondrial diseases. “It is so relentlessly progressive, attacking so many different systems with sadly the same conclusion.” The disease can impact vision, mobility, and speech, and it can be deadly—life expectancy ranges from three months to 12 years from the onset of the disease.

Afriend called recently asking about measles. She’s the mother of four very young kids and wanted to know if she should be worried. She’d heard about the large measles outbreak in northwest Texas. Since January, more than 159 people are known to have been infected, and the outbreak has resulted in two deaths and dozens of hospitalizations. Now, this measles outbreak has spread into nine other states, and there’s an alert to travelers passing through the Los Angeles Airport. Advertisement Contrary to statements by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., outbreaks of this deadly disease are highly unusual. The U.S. declared measles eliminated more than 20 years ago, thanks to an exceptionally safe and effective vaccine. But efforts to undermine confidence in that vaccine have contributed to these recent outbreaks. There are things we can do, individually and collectively, to protect our most vulnerable and hopefully eliminate measles in this country again. My friend understands the settled evidence behind the safety and efficacy of vaccines. She’s following the vaccine schedule her pediatrician recommended. Measles vaccines are among the most protective shots we have, so when she gets her kids vaccinated, they are protected. But the large outbreaks we are starting to see are still creating risks, including among our very youngest kids, our immunocompromised kids, and even among vulnerable adults. Measles vaccines are highly effective: 93% after the first dose, 99% after the second dose. The problem is the timing. The first dose is not recommended until a child is 12 to 15 months old, and the second dose usually between the ages of 4 and 6. Infants have some passive immunity from their mom’s antibodies for the first 6 months, but not enough to be fully protective, which is why the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention strongly recommends that parents of children too young to be vaccinated avoid travel to areas with measles outbreaks. Read More: What to Know About the Measles Vaccine All children under the age of 1, before they get their first measles vaccine, are at risk if they come near someone with measles. Given that measles is one of the most contagious diseases on Earth, outbreaks mean we are likely to see more infections among children in this age range, including kids whose parents fully intend to vaccinate. And while the first dose is highly protective, the best protection comes after the second dose, which is usually given when a child is ready to start school. Between those two doses, children may still be at some risk, especially if they come into repeated contact with measles from others refusing or unable to be vaccinated.