Author: genixfertilitycare

I quantify the risks of colon and rectal cancers from eating bacon, ham, hot dogs, sausage, and lunch meat.

In 2018, arguably the most prestigious cancer research institution in the world, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), part of the World Health Organization, published its report on processed meat, concluding that foods like bacon, ham, hot dogs, lunch meat, and sausage are cancer-causing, classifying processed meat as a Group 1 carcinogen. “These findings,” concluded the director of the agency, “further support current public health recommendations to limit intake of meat.” Critics questioned putting processed meat in the same carcinogenic classification as asbestos and tobacco. Or, as a pesticide company roughly put it, how can eating processed meat be in the same category as mustard gas?

As I discuss in my video How Much Cancer Does Processed Meat Cause?, the classifications only relate to the strength of evidence that the agent causes cancer or not, not how much cancer. This doesn’t mean they all pose the same level of danger. It’s safer to eat a sandwich filled with pastrami than plutonium, even though they are both Group 1 carcinogens, which means both substances are known to cause cancer in people. So, just how dangerous is meat? The relative risk of colorectal cancer was 18% for every 50 grams eaten a day. But what exactly does that mean?

Well, 50 grams is about one hot dog, or two breakfast links, or two slices of Canadian bacon or ham. So, a daily sandwich with one or two slices of baloney would increase your colorectal cancer risk by 18%. But a half-pound of pastrami on rye would bump it up more like 80%. Okay, but what does the 18% increased risk really mean? One way to look at it is absolute risk versus relative risk. Assuming that the lifetime risk of colorectal cancer is about 5% (1 in 20), increasing your risk by about 20% would only bump up your absolute risk of getting colorectal cancer from 5% to 6%. Now, on a population scale, an 18% drop in risk could mean about 25,000 fewer cases of colorectal cancer every year in the United States, 25,000 fewer families a year dealing with that diagnosis, if we swapped out the daily baloney sandwich for hummus or if we chose veggie dogs instead. So, it all depends on how you look at it.

Colorectal cancer is the United States’ second leading cause of cancer death for men and women combined, after lung cancer. So, if you don’t smoke, colon and rectal cancer may be your greatest cancer nemesis. But we can drop the risk of getting it by about a fifth with a single dietary tweak: cutting a serving of processed meat out of our daily diet.

How does 18% increased cancer risk compare to other risky behaviors? In my testimony before the Dietary Guidelines Scientific Committee, I made what may sound like a hyperbolic metaphor. I asked, “We try not to smoke around our kids, why would we send them to school with a baloney sandwich?” That is not hyperbole. According to the Surgeon General, living with a smoker increases our risk of lung cancer by 15%. So, breathing second-hand smoke day in and day out increases our risk of lung cancer almost as much as eating a serving of processed meat day in and day out increases our risk of colorectal cancer.

The meat industry responded by saying that we must consider the risks together with the benefits before we tell people what to eat or breathe. Think about all the baloney benefits—lunch meat isn’t just about cancer, but convenience.

Indeed, processed meat isn’t just about cancer. An article railing against the World Health Organization’s “meat terrorism” cited the Global Burden of Disease studies comparing how many cancer deaths are caused by processed meat consumption compared to tobacco or alcohol use. But if you look at the study they’re referencing, the roughly 37,000 deaths attributable to higher processed meat intake are just the colorectal cancer deaths and don’t also include the 100,000 deaths from diabetes or the 400,000 deaths from heart disease. So, in actuality, we may be talking about half a million deaths attributable to processed meat, as you can see below and at 4:06 in my video.

And it’s not just colon and rectal cancer. If you look at the science since the IARC decision was published, processed meat may also increase the risk of prostate cancer, breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer.

Unfortunately, research shows that “despite growing public health concerns about processed meat consumption, there have been no changes in the amount of processed meat consumed by US adults over the last 18 years.” Of course, it would have helped if the last Dietary Guidelines for Americans had happened to mention that processed meat was a carcinogen. Publishing “an explicit and science-based statement on processed meat” in the next Dietary Guidelines would certainly help. But the scientific committee made no such recommendation.

Sadly, even those with colorectal cancer “hardly improve their overall lifestyle after diagnosis,” though that may be because “70% of cancer patients have never received nutrition advice from their [medical] providers during or after treatment.” That just blows me away.

An article published in a scientific cancer-research journal stated that “despite the continued obfuscation of the issue by the meat industry—they learned well from the tobacco merchants—meat should continue to be a focus of public health action.” New York City is leading the way, passing legislation to ban processed meats from school meals. Not giving our kids carcinogens? What a concept!

Meanwhile, the processed meat industry is trying to reformulate its products. It’s kind of like in the pharmaceutical area, where you try to mitigate the potential adverse effects of one drug by prescribing an additional drug. For example, fiber could be added to hot dogs to try to counterbalance the risk, potentially reducing the cancer load by changing how it’s processed instead of by banning processed meat altogether.

Doctor’s Note

If you missed the previous video, see IARC: Processed Meat Like Bacon Causes Cancer.

For my full testimony on the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, check out Highlights from the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Hearing.

Chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, or CAR-T, has transformed treatment for blood cancers. The immunotherapy involves reprogramming a patient’s own immune cells to recognize and attack tumor cells. It offers many patients long-lasting remission and even a cure. Yet the approach still fails in many lymphomas—cancers that affect the lymphatic system—especially when cancer cells are located in lymph nodes.

Researchers at the Max Delbrück Center, led by Dr. Uta Höpken, group leader of the Microenvironmental Regulation in Autoimmunity and Cancer lab at the Max Delbrück Center, and Dr. Maria Zschummel, a former doctoral student in her lab, have found a way to help CAR-T cells reach their targets. By engineering the cells to express the receptor CCR7, the team improved both their ability to migrate into lymph nodes and to kill lymphoma cells. The research was published in Cancer Immunology Research.

“Many lymphomas grow primarily in lymph nodes,” explains Zschummel, now a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“If therapeutic immune cells cannot reach these sites efficiently, even powerful therapies may fail. By restoring the receptor CCR7, we essentially gave the cells a better navigation system to find the tumor.”

Better homing and a quick death

“Under normal conditions, immune cells use CCR7 to guide them into lymph nodes,” explains Höpken, whose lab has been studying the receptor for many years. However, the manufacturing process used to produce CAR-T cells reduces expression of this receptor, which limits the cells’ ability to migrate into lymph node tissue.

To overcome this problem, the researchers tweaked the genetic engineering of CAR-T cells so that they permanently express CCR7. They then tested the modified cells in a series of experiments using human immune cells, lymphoma cell lines and mouse models of lymphoma.

They found that their CAR-T-CCR7 cells regained the ability to migrate into lymph nodes and accumulated more efficiently. In mouse models, these cells also eliminated lymphoma cells more effectively than conventional CAR-T cells.

“This was a surprise,” says Zschummel.

“We expected improved migration, but CCR7 also boosted the cells’ killing efficiency.”

More effective immunotherapy

The work has important implications for cancer therapy. Boosting the ability of CAR-T cells to zero in on lymphoma cells has the potential to make the therapy more effective. It may also reduce the incidence of cancer relapse.

The strategy could also be applied to other cancers that spread to lymph nodes, adds Höpken, senior author of the paper.

“We show that improving the ‘navigation system’ of immune cells can make them generally more effective fighters against cancer.”

Before the approach can reach patients, further studies will need to evaluate safety and long-term effects, she adds.

“Nevertheless, the work highlights how insights from basic immunology can help refine next-generation cell therapies.”

As demand for heart transplants continues to far exceed the number of available donor hearts, experts at the 46th Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) explored a critical question: how should this scarce, life-saving resource be allocated?

In his presentation, “Allocation Models Beyond the US: Scoring or Status? Global Perspectives,” Guillaume Coutance, MD, highlighted how different countries approach this complex challenge—and why no single system has emerged as the optimal solution.

Approximately 7,000 heart transplants are performed annually worldwide, while about 10–15% of patients on the waiting list for a heart die before transplantation.

“A shortage in donor hearts is the primary limiting factor to performing more heart transplants,” said Dr. Coutance, Cardiologist, Department of Heart Transplantation at Georges Pompidou European Hospital, Paris. “Because donor hearts are limited, allocation systems must carefully balance competing priorities: saving the sickest patients, maximizing transplant success, and ensuring fairness.”

Two major allocation schemes

In a review of 24 countries, Dr. Coutance identified 11 different allocation schemes; however, most fall into two main categories:

• Status-based systems (used in 23 countries) assign patients to priority tiers based on the severity of their illness and treatment status. Patients on life-support therapies like ECMO (an advanced life-support machine that temporarily takes over the functions of a failing heart and lungs) are typically given the highest priority.
• Score-based systems (used in France) use statistical models to estimate both the risk of death on the waiting list and expected survival after transplantation.

“Status-based systems may sometimes reflect the intensity of care rather than true medical urgency, and may be vulnerable to variable clinical practices,” he said. “However, the predictive modeling used in score-based systems remains imperfect with limited statistical performance of predictive models applied in such allocation schemes.”

Within the allocation approaches deployed globally, key differences include:

• number of priority levels
• how much weight is given to treatments like ECMO
• whether long-term outcomes are factored into decisions
• national versus regional allocation systems.

France’s data-driven model

France replaced its urgency-based approach with its current score-based allocation system in 2018.

“At its core, the French model ranks all patients on the waiting list using a single composite score that allows for direct comparison between candidates across the country,” he said. “This approach aims to ensure that organs are allocated to those who need them most while also maximizing the chances of transplant success.”

The composite score is based on a four-step calculation process designed to balance equity, efficiency, and transparency:

1. Predicting one-year waitlist mortality using a multivariable analysis. Patients receive a cardiac risk index based on factors such as the need for temporary mechanical support, kidney and liver function, and biomarkers of heart failure.
2. Establishing exceptions to adjust for special clinical situations.
3. Donor–recipient matching, including blood type compatibility, body size, age difference, and predicted survival after transplantation.
4. Geography and logistics to account for the travel time between the donor and recipient hospitals.

“Unlike simpler status-based systems, which rely on broad clinical categories, our model aims for a more individualized and continuous prioritization of patients,” he said.

Dr. Coutance said although studies suggest score-based systems have helped standardize allocation decisions and reduce the unnecessary use of aggressive therapies aimed solely at increasing priority status, they have not significantly changed transplant outcomes.

“No allocation system has proven clearly superior in terms of improving both pre- and post-transplant outcomes,” he said. “All systems face the same fundamental challenge: how to balance urgency, utility, and equity in the context of organ shortage.”

Allocation systems must also continue to adapt as medicine advances and clinical practices change.

“The growing use of mechanical support devices, changing patient populations, and improved data analytics are all reshaping how allocation decisions are made,” Dr. Coutance said.

“There is no perfect allocation system. Every model must balance urgency, fairness, and expected benefit—and all must contend with the reality of organ shortage.”

By studying and engineering heart tissue in the unique low-gravity environment of space, the laboratory of Arun Sharma, Ph.D., is uncovering new ways to protect and repair the failing heart. He addressed the 46th Annual Meeting and Scientific Sessions of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT), held from 22–25 April at the Metro Toronto Convention Center in Toronto, ON, Canada.

Dr. Sharma described space as a yin-yang environment that both accelerates tissue aging and degradation and provides an ideal setting for growing more complex, three-dimensional heart tissues and patches from patient-specific stem cells.

Heart disease experiments conducted in space produce fast results

“In microgravity, cardiovascular deconditioning is accelerated; the heart and muscles weaken much faster than on Earth,” said Dr. Sharma, Ph.D., director of the Center for Space Medicine Research at Cedars-Sinai in LA. “It allows us to study disease-like changes such as weakening contractility and metabolic shifts over weeks instead of years.”

Among Dr. Sharma’s projects are experiments on the International Space Station on the cellular mechanisms underlying heart failure, as well as harnessing stem cells to produce mini heart organs.

“Gaining a better understanding of how heart muscle fails and recovers can also improve pre-transplant optimization, keeping patient hearts and other organs in better shape while they wait for a donor organ,” he said.

Low gravity can also be harnessed to manufacture heart organoids or miniature 3D organs that simulate normal heart function. Heart organoids are used to identify new drug targets designed to slow the progression of heart failure and improve post-transplant care by producing insights into how cardiac tissue adapts, remodels, or deconditions under stress.

Microgravity environment helps produce robust therapies

“Microgravity also improves the 3D structure and blood vessel networks in engineered tissue,” he said. “Space-enhanced manufacturing could facilitate the bioprinting of stronger, more physiologic cardiac patches.”

Induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived heart muscle patches are designed to stabilize or partially repair failing hearts, buying time for and reducing the number of patients who need full organ replacement.

“iPSC patches are being produced here on Earth as bridge therapies for patients with severe heart failure waiting for a complete heart transplant,” Dr. Sharma said. “A microgravity environment offers the potential to produce thicker, more robust patches less prone to collapse under gravity when brought back to Earth,” he said.

Long-term, Dr. Sharma said space research could also enable a more precise 3D organization of cells and the extracellular matrix, potentially yielding more durable or more physiologic valves, conduits, and support structures.

“For transplant programs, that would mean longer-lasting valve replacements and structural repairs, fewer re-operations, and possibly a delayed need for full transplant in some patients,” he said. “If microgravity lets us produce larger, well-vascularized 3D heart tissues, we may be able to eventually engineer substantial portions of myocardium suitable for patching large infarcts or even replacing sections of a failing transplanted heart.”

The work of Dr. Sharma’s lab is part of the vision for on-demand organ or tissue fabrication, such as iPSC-derived heart cells from specific genetic backgrounds or disease phenotypes.

The World Health Organization announced Friday that it had given prequalification approval to a malaria treatment for newborns and infants for the first time.

Artemether-lumefantrine is the first antimalarial formulation designed specifically for the youngest victims of the mosquito-borne disease.

“The prequalification designation indicates that the medicine meets international standards of quality, safety and efficacy,” the WHO said in a statement.

Up to now, infants have been treated with formulations intended for older children—carrying a greater risk of dosage errors, side effects and toxicity.

“For centuries, malaria has stolen children from their parents, and health, wealth and hope from communities,” said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.

“But today, the story is changing. New vaccines, diagnostic tests, next-generation mosquito nets and effective medicines, including those adapted for the youngest, are helping to turn the tide.

“Ending malaria in our lifetime is no longer a dream—it is a real possibility, but only with sustained political and financial commitment. Now we can. Now we must.”

In 2024, there were an estimated 282 million malaria cases and 610,000 deaths in 80 countries, according to the WHO.

Africa accounts for 95% of cases and deaths, with children under five accounting for three-quarters of those deaths.

The UN health agency says progress against malaria is being hampered by drug resistance, insecticide resistance, diagnostic failure and sharp reductions in foreign aid spending.

The WHO said its prequalification would enable public sector procurement and help close a long-standing treatment gap for around 30 million babies born each year in malaria-endemic areas of Africa.

Globally, 70% of countries do not have regulatory systems that are robust enough to oversee medicines, vaccines, tests and medical devices.

The WHO prequalification program ensures that key health products for international procurement meet global standards of quality, safety, efficacy and performance.

© 2026 AFP

After taking the pill for a decade, Elodie Monnier Legrand decided to try “natural” birth control, an increasingly popular trend that requires tracking fertility to avoid becoming pregnant.

“I wanted my body to return to its natural state,” the French 30-year-old business owner told AFP.

However after getting two abortions within six months, she discovered the app she was using had slightly miscalculated her fertility cycle.

“It’s not an exact science,” Legrand said.

She is one of a rising number of women who are abandoning hormonal contraception such as the pill.

In France, 7.5% of women used natural contraceptive methods in 2023, rising from 4.6% in 2016, according to the INSERM institute.

Helping drive this trend are influencers on social media, who often promote natural birth control as a way for women to “liberate” themselves from the hormonal effects of the pill.

However experts warn that some common claims about the pill’s side effects represent misinformation—and that methods based on tracking fertility require strict adherence to be effective.

Geoffroy Robin, a gynecologist at the University Hospital of Lille in France, told AFP that the interest in natural methods was fueled by “a climate of hormone-phobia.”

He also pointed out that the pill had long been seen as a “tool of women’s emancipation.”

Different methods

Louise, a 26-year-old in France who did not want to give her surname, told AFP that “hormonal contraception was a complete disaster” for her.

When she was 18, her body rejected a hormonal IUD. After getting an implant, she said she suffered from side effects including weight gain, mood swings and depression.

For the last six years, she has been using the calendar method of natural birth control.

This requires calculating the window when women are fertile—which is around 10 days a month—and abstaining from sex during this period.

The temperature method involves daily checks to detect if women’s bodies have gotten a little warmer, which happens during ovulation.

For the “Billings” method, women must inspect their vagina daily to see if there is a build-up of cervical mucus. The “sympto-thermal” method combines the latter two techniques.

The embrace of natural contraception—also called fertility awareness—comes as the use of the pill has declined in many countries.

A study published last year in BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health estimated that hormonal contraception in England and Wales fell from 19% in 2018 to 11% in 2023.

The research also suggested there was a link between the increasing use of natural birth control and a rising number of abortions.

According to the experts AFP spoke to, natural techniques are significantly less effective than traditional methods.

INSERM said they should only be considered by women “who accept a risk of pregnancy.”

A review conducted by INSERM in 2022 found that less than 20% of around 100 fertility apps it analyzed made correct predictions about fertility cycles. Most apps also shared users’ data with third parties, often without their knowledge, the review found.

“Just another business?”

Robin warned that “natural methods are absolutely ineffective” for those with irregular cycles—roughly one out of every five women.

And there are several factors that can skew measurements.

For example, yeast infection or medication such as antihistamines can disrupt the secretion of vaginal mucus. Paracetamol, antibiotics or even a change in work schedule can alter a woman’s temperature.

This means that natural methods are not suitable for everyone, the experts stressed, recommending that women considering a change consult their gynecologist.

French sociologist Cecile Thome said the rise of natural contraceptive methods, driven by promises of “taking control of one’s body,” is part of the booming wellness industry.

These arguments were compelling for Legrand, who paid seven euros a month for a fertility app and bought a “smart ring” for over 200 euros to monitor her temperature.

After getting two abortions, she contacted the app’s customer service.

“Their responses were very cold, it wasn’t very humane,” she said.

The abortions were “hard on her body, hard psychologically,” she emphasized.

While Legrand still finds the subject “super interesting,” she wondered if “ultimately, it is just another business.”

© 2026 AFP

Researchers at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside have discovered previously unrecognized immune surveillance structures in the skin. Found within hair follicles, the cells resemble M (microfold) cells—specialized epithelial cells traditionally associated with the gut and airway tissues.

The findings, published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, suggest that the skin may use specialized “sentinel” cells located within hair follicle structures to monitor environmental exposure and microbial presence, expanding current understanding of how barrier tissues defend the body. The work was done in mice.

Senior author Dr. David Lo, a distinguished professor of biomedical sciences, explained that unlike the gut and airway epithelium, which consists of a single-cell layer allowing relatively direct environmental sampling, the skin is composed of multiple stratified layers that form a more robust physical barrier.

“This raises a long-standing question in immunology: how does the skin efficiently monitor external threats despite its thickness?” Lo said.

Lo’s team proposes that hair follicles may act as localized “gateway” structures that concentrate both environmental material and immune sensing activity. Within these niches, the team identified M cell-like sentinel cells that appear to participate in localized immune responses, particularly to Gram-positive bacteria—bacteria that can cause a range of infections, from food poisoning to serious respiratory diseases.

“Hair follicles may represent a central hub for immune surveillance in the skin,” said Diana Del Castillo, the first author of the paper and a graduate student in Lo’s lab. “These structures bring together environmental exposure, immune sensing, and potentially even neural signaling in a highly localized environment.”

While the research team is still characterizing the cells, early findings suggest they are part of a broader category of epithelial surveillance mechanisms that may exist across multiple tissues.

The discovery also raises new questions about how immune and sensory systems may be integrated. Hair follicles are already known to contribute to touch sensation, and the newly identified structures appear to be in regions closely associated with nerve endings, suggesting a potential link between immune detection and sensory signaling.

Lo said future work will focus on detailed anatomical mapping of these cells, particularly in whisker follicles in animal models since whiskers have dense innervation and complex structure.

“We would like to better understand how these cells interact with surrounding nerve and immune cells, and whether similar systems exist in humans,” he said.

Although the study is still in early stages, the findings may have future implications for understanding skin infections, immune disorders, and the development of topical therapeutics.

“We’re only beginning to understand how these systems are organized,” Lo said. “But they suggest the skin is far more dynamically involved in immune surveillance than previously thought.”

Del Castillo said the study highlights a potential shift in how scientists view barrier tissues—not as passive protective layers, but as active and highly specialized sensory and immune interfaces.

“Our study adds to growing evidence that epithelial barriers across tissues share more diverse and dynamic immune-related functions than previously recognized, particularly in their ability to respond rapidly to microbial stimuli,” she said.

Lo and Del Castillo were joined in the study by Hannah Kim and Sumaya Troy Alaama.

The research was supported by funds from the UCR School of Medicine.

The title of the paper is “Evidence for murine cutaneous immune surveillance localized to hair follicle epithelium.”

The brain has its own immune system, which detects threats and mounts a defense. A growing body of evidence has shown that in Alzheimer’s disease, those immune cells are chronically overactivated, causing inflammation that damages the connections between brain cells.

Now, in a preclinical study using human Alzheimer’s brain cells, scientists at Scripps Research have identified a molecular switch—and potential drug target—responsible for driving that chronic inflammation.

The research, published in Cell Chemical Biology on April 23, 2026, centers on a protein called STING, which normally functions as part of the immune system’s early-warning system. In the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, the team discovered that STING undergoes a chemical modification known as S-nitrosylation (or SNO, a reaction involving sulfur, oxygen and nitrogen) that promotes its overactivation. Blocking this chemical change to STING in a mouse model of the disease decreased neuroinflammation.

“This is a new and important therapeutic target for Alzheimer’s disease,” says senior author Stuart Lipton, the Step Family Foundation Endowed Chair at Scripps Research and a clinical neurologist. “It’s exciting to see that blocking this switch in mice reduces inflammation and protects the very brain cell connections that are lost in Alzheimer’s, especially because we found the same pathway to be activated in human Alzheimer’s brain samples and in human stem cell-derived models.”

Over three decades ago, Lipton, who’s also the founding co-director of the Neurodegeneration New Medicines Center at Scripps Research, discovered the S-nitrosylation process, in which a molecule related to nitric oxide (NO) binds to a cysteine amino acid in proteins, producing “SNO” and thus regulates the protein’s function. His lab has shown that SNO—which can be triggered by aging, neuroinflammation and environmental toxins such as air pollution and wildfire smoke—disrupts a variety of different proteins in the body. The modification, causing a veritable “SNO-STORM” to disrupt protein function, has been linked to several human conditions, including cancer, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s.

In this new study, the team focused on the protein STING, which was previously linked to Alzheimer’s inflammation. Lipton’s group, led by postdoctoral researcher Lauren Carnevale, collaborated with Professor John Yates III, a leading mass spectrometry expert at Scripps Research and holder of the John Lytton Young Endowed Chair. They pinpointed exactly where on STING an S-nitrosylation reaction occurred, homing in on one specific building block of the protein: cysteine 148. When cysteine 148 is S-nitrosylated, they discovered, STING clusters into larger complexes and triggers inflammation.

The team found high levels of the chemically modified form of STING (called SNO-STING) in postmortem brain tissue from Alzheimer’s patients, in human brain immune cells grown in the lab and exposed to Alzheimer’s proteins, and in a mouse model of the disease.

In laboratory experiments, the team showed that the clumps of proteins found in the brain in Alzheimer’s—including amyloid-beta and alpha-synuclein—can themselves trigger the S-nitrosylation reaction in STING. This finding suggests that inflammation occurs in a cycle: initial protein clumps, coupled with environmental influences and aging, could cause inflammation that generates NO, driving S-nitrosylation of STING, which in turn drives more inflammation.

The researchers then engineered a version of STING lacking cysteine 148 so it couldn’t be S-nitrosylated. When this modified protein was introduced into a mouse model of Alzheimer’s, brain immune cells showed significantly less inflammation, and critically, the connections between nerve cells (called synapses) were protected from degradation. This preservation of synapses is known to correlate with protection from the cognitive decline of dementia.

“What makes this target particularly promising is that we can quiet the pathological overactivation of STING without shutting down the normal immune response,” says Lipton. “You still need STING to protect yourself from infections, and when we target cysteine 148, we’re not blocking the entire molecule; we’re just preventing STING from becoming overactivated.”

Lipton’s group is now working to develop small molecules that block cysteine 148 for testing in preclinical models.

Damian Garde is a reporter at large, live and feature journalism, covering the global drug industry and contributing to STAT’s industry-leading events.

The Food and Drug Administration will accelerate its review of psychedelic drugs developed by Compass Pathways, the Usona Institute, and Transcend Therapeutics for mental health disorders, as part of the Trump administration’s plan to boost access to the controversial yet promising medications.

The agency will grant priority review vouchers specifically to Compass’ psilocybin product for treatment-resistant depression, Usona’s similar medicine for major depressive disorder, and an MDMA-like treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder from Transcend. 

The FDA identified the medications receiving the vouchers, but not the companies developing them. Compass, Usona, and Transcend confirmed they received vouchers.

What are the risks and benefits of using vitamin C for depression and anxiety?

“In adults, emerging evidence suggests that higher daily intake of fiber-rich fruit and vegetable servings is associated with lower incidences of anxiety, greater happiness, higher life satisfaction, and greater social-emotional well-being,” says a review in the journal Nutrients. So, “persuading people to consume more fruits and vegetables may not only benefit their physical health in the long-run, but also their mental well-being in the short-run,” concluded a study in Social Science & Medicine. Fruit consumption, for example, has a protective association with leading killers like heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer, as well as depression. The question is why?

Several mechanisms have been proposed. For example, one posits it’s the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties of produce, which scavenge the free radicals that are involved in some of the inflammation associated with depression. If that’s the case, what about simply taking vitamin C supplements? The brain has some of the highest levels of vitamin C in the body, so it’s thought that if extra vitamin C is consumed, it may have some sort of therapeutic role in brain diseases, especially given that it is not just an antioxidant, but also has other critical functions in the brain, such as helping to build neurotransmitters like dopamine. But you don’t know whether it actually helps until you put it to the test.

One study found a beneficial effect of adding vitamin C as an adjunct treatment to an antidepressant, while another study found no benefit from vitamin C supplementation.

So, there are mixed results for vitamin C and depression. Another study found no benefit when it came to depression, but those randomized to vitamin C instead of placebo pills did show a significant decrease in anxiety level. And this wasn’t only seen in that study.

The effects of oral vitamin C supplementation on anxiety in high school students were studied in a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial. The teens were given 500 mg a day of vitamin C or a placebo. That daily amount of vitamin C is about what you’d find in five oranges, four yellow kiwifruit or guavas, or one and a half yellow bell peppers. Within just two weeks, the vitamin C reduced anxiety levels compared to placebo, as well as provided a significant drop in heart rate.

Given these data showing that vitamin C may have an anxiety-reducing effect, researchers sought to find out if a single dose could acutely affect emotional states. And indeed, within only two hours of taking some vitamin C, study participants experienced a significant drop in anxiety compared to placebo, though only among those who started out the most anxious in the first place, as you can see below and at 2:42 in my video Do Vitamin C Supplements Help With Anxiety?.

As a bonus, vitamin C supplementation may lower our blood pressure a few points, but whole fruits and vegetables can do the same thing—and may even do it better for those who need it the most, as shown below and at 2:53 in my video.

As I’ve shown previously, simply adding just two servings of fruits and vegetables a day can have psychological well-being benefits within only two weeks—and without the kidney stone risk associated with vitamin C supplements, though that appears to be only a problem in men.

Doctor’s Note

For more on vitamin C and on anxiety, check out related posts below.