LAURA H. CYPHERS

Although a few countries lowered their preterm birth rates between 2010 and 2020, global rates of preterm births have stagnated at about 10% over the past decade, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund. Of the 13.4 million neonates born before 37 weeks in 2020, about 1 million died of complications due to prematurity.
Source: JAMA Online First

The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced $140 million of funding, distributed over 5 years, for the new Somatic Mosaicism Across Human Tissues (SMaHT) Network, which will focus on DNA changes that occur after conception in the body’s somatic—or nonreproductive—cells to better understand how the variation affects human development, disease, and aging.
Source: JAMA Online First

This Medical News feature discusses the increasingly common combination of xylazine, an animal tranquilizer, and illicit fentanyl.
Source: JAMA Online First

This study used a population-based individual patient data set that included diagnoses of COVID-19 to determine whether there was a temporal association between COVID-19 and type 1 diabetes in children.
Source: JAMA Online First

This JAMA Patient Page describes mpox signs and symptoms, risk factors, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention measures.
Source: JAMA Online First

This observational retrospective analysis of prospectively collected data examines whether airway mucus plugs identified on chest computed tomography were associated with increased all-cause mortality in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
Source: JAMA Online First

Goals-of-care conversations between clinicians and patients with serious illness have been shown to improve measures of patient and family well-being, while also decreasing health care costs and high-intensity treatments at the end of life. Nonetheless, achieving the goal of skillful, timely goals-of-care conversations for hospitalized patients with serious illness remains a challenge due to a multitude of patient, clinician, and system-level factors, including clinician discomfort and time constraints.
Source: JAMA Online First

This randomized clinical trial compares the effect of a communication-priming intervention vs usual care on patient-physician discussions on goals of care for hospitalized older patients with serious illness.
Source: JAMA Online First

This Viewpoint discusses the legal risks physicians and health care facilities may incur by miscoding a surgical or chemical abortion as a miscarriage to conceal an abortion procedure.
Source: JAMA Online First

This Viewpoint discusses the long-term medical, emotional, and financial implications of using amnioinfusion to treat anhydramnios; outlines the ongoing Renal Anhydramnios Fetal Therapy (RAFT) trial, which aims to document outcomes and survival in infants after amnioinfusion; and suggests that amnioinfusions be withheld in early anhydramnios, pending the findings of the RAFT trial.
Source: JAMA Online First