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    A Blood Test for Alzheimer’s: What to Know

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    The test may make it easier to identify whether people with memory and thinking problems have Alzheimer’s or not.A blood test that can help diagnose Alzheimer’s disease has received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration. This is a step toward a goal of scientists and doctors to one day be able to diagnose a confounding illness with the prick of a finger. But there is still a long way to go.Here is what to know:What is the test, and how should it be used?The test, manufactured by Fujirebio Diagnostics, is intended to be used only by specialists in Alzheimer’s, the F.D.A. said. Its mouthful of a name — Lumipulse G pTau217/ß-Amyloid 1-42 Plasma Ratio — describes what the test measures: levels of two proteins, amyloid and tau, that are hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease.In people who develop Alzheimer’s, amyloid begins to accumulate and form plaques in the brain more than 20 years before any symptoms of cognitive impairment. Tau accumulates later, forming tangles in the brain, and is much more closely correlated with cognitive decline.Can people who don’t have memory problems take the blood test?No. The F.D.A., and Alzheimer’s experts, emphasized that the blood test should be given only to people who are already experiencing cognitive decline and are ages 55 and older. Moreover, it should not be used on its own to diagnose or to rule out Alzheimer’s.“Other clinical evaluations or additional tests should be used for determining treatment options,” the F.D.A. said in a statement, adding that “the results must be interpreted in conjunction with other patient clinical information.”The current gold standard for diagnosing Alzheimer’s still involves either imaging using PET scans, which are expensive, or spinal taps, which are invasive. The blood test can help flag the presence of the Alzheimer’s-related proteins, and doctors might then order confirmatory testing with one of the other methods.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Push to Defund Harvard Prompts Clash Over Veteran Suicide Research

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      The proposed termination of medical research funded by the V.A. is part of the Trump administration’s broader pressure campaign against the university.The Trump administration’s move to cancel a slew of federal contracts at Harvard University has sparked an internal clash over the impact on medical research intended to help veterans, including projects involving suicide prevention, toxic particle exposure and prostate cancer screening, according to emails reviewed by The New York Times.The dispute among officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs has focused in part on a collaboration with Harvard Medical School to develop a predictive model to help V.A. emergency room physicians decide whether suicidal veterans should be hospitalized, according to the records.Canceling that contract would result in “more veteran suicides that could have been prevented,” Seth J. Custer, an official in the V.A.’s Office of Research and Development, wrote in a May 8 email asking leaders at the agency to reverse their decision. But John Figueroa, a longtime private industry health care executive and a senior adviser to Doug Collins, the veterans affairs secretary, said that researchers at other institutions could do the work instead.Peter Kasperowicz, a V.A. spokesman, said that the department’s research contracts with Harvard were “under review.” He said the goal of the review was to ensure that “the projects best support the Trump administration’s veterans-first agenda.”Mr. Custer declined to comment. In a brief telephone interview, Mr. Figueroa said the V.A. was examining “every contract” it had issued. A White House spokeswoman declined to comment. So did a spokeswoman for Harvard.The tensions inside the V.A. over the Harvard contracts demonstrate how President Trump’s use of research funds as leverage in his broader pressure campaign on universities carries political risks. Mr. Trump and other Republicans have courted veterans as a key political constituency, and Mr. Collins has repeatedly promised that veteran care would not be affected, even as he enacts major cost-cutting measures and other changes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Patients Are Being Forced to Switch to a 2nd-Choice Obesity Drug

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      CVS Caremark decided to stop offering Zepbound in favor of Wegovy for weight loss. It’s the latest example of limits imposed by insurance that disrupt treatments for patients.Tens of thousands of Americans will soon be forced by their health insurance to switch from one popular obesity drug to another that produces less weight loss.It is the latest example of the consequences of secret deals between drugmakers and middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, that are hired by employers to oversee prescription coverage for Americans. Employers pay lower drug prices but their workers are blocked from getting competing treatments, a type of insurance denial that has grown much more common in the past decade.One of the largest benefit managers, CVS Health’s Caremark, made the decision to exclude Zepbound in spite of research that found that it resulted in more weight loss than Wegovy, which will continue to be covered.Those research findings, first announced in December, were confirmed in an article published on Sunday in The New England Journal of Medicine. The study involved a large clinical trial comparing the drugs that was funded by Eli Lilly, the maker of Zepbound. Earlier research not financed by Eli Lilly reached similar conclusions.Ellen Davis, 63, of Huntington, Mass., is one of the patients affected by Caremark’s decision. “It feels like the rug is getting pulled out from under my feet,” she said.After taking Zepbound for a year, she has lost 85 pounds and her health has improved, she said. She retired after working for 34 years at Verizon, which hired Caremark for her drug coverage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Federal Report Denounces Gender Treatments for Adolescents

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      The H.H.S. review may set the stage for additional restrictions on gender-affirming care. Critics described it as an ideological statement.Federal health officials published a report on Thursday declaring that the use of hormonal and surgical treatments in young people with gender dysphoria lacked scientific evidence and expressing concern about long-term harms, a stark reversal from previous agency recommendations and the advice of top U.S. medical groups.The report instead prioritized the role of psychotherapy, a divisive intervention to treat gender dysphoria that many advocates and physicians have equated with so-called conversion therapy.Other parts of the review seemed to call into question the very notion that some people have a gender identity that does not align with their sex at birth.In January, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Protecting Children From Chemical and Surgical Mutilation” giving the Department of Health and Human Services 90 days to produce a report on the best practices for treating young people who say their gender does not align with their birth sex.But the order made it clear that the administration had already reached its own conclusion about gender transition treatments for minors, characterizing the “blatant harm done to children” as a “stain on our nation’s history.”The 400-page report took a more sober tone but reached a similar conclusion. In a remarkable departure from the standard for medical evidence reviews, the authors were not identified pending a post-publication review process that would begin in “the coming days.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      See Where Federal Dollars Flow to Universities Around the Country

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      <!–> [–><!–> –> <!–>Each circle is a university: PublicPrivate–> <!–> –><!–> [–><!–>In fiscal year 2023 alone, roughly $60 billion flowed from the federal government to universities in all 50 states, funding research on an array of topics, like cancer, Alzheimer’s disease and rare isotope beams. Funding went to small colleges, like the College of St. […] More

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      Citing N.I.H. Cuts, a Top Science Journal Stops Accepting Submissions

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      With federal support, Environmental Health Perspectives has long published peer-reviewed studies without fees to readers or scientists.Environmental Health Perspectives, widely considered the premier environmental health journal, has announced that it would pause acceptance of new studies for publication, as federal cuts have left its future uncertain.For more than 50 years, the journal has received funding from the National Institutes of Health to review studies on the health effects of environmental toxins — from “forever chemicals” to air pollution — and publish the research free of charge.The editors made the decision to halt acceptance of studies because of a “lack of confidence” that contracts for critical expenses like copy-editing and editorial software would be renewed after their impending expiration dates, said Joel Kaufman, the journal’s top editor.He declined to comment on the publication’s future prospects. “If the journal is indeed lost, it is a huge loss,” said Jonathan Levy, chair of the department of environmental health at Boston University. “It’s reducing the ability for people to have good information that can be used to make good decisions.”The news comes weeks after a federal prosecutor in Washington sent letters to several scientific journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, with questions that suggested that they were biased against certain views and influenced by external pressures.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Should We Start Taking the Welfare of A.I. Seriously?

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      As artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one A.I. company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious.One of my most deeply held values as a tech columnist is humanism. I believe in humans, and I think that technology should help people, rather than disempower or replace them. I care about aligning artificial intelligence — that is, making sure that A.I. systems act in accordance with human values — because I think our values are fundamentally good, or at least better than the values a robot could come up with.So when I heard that researchers at Anthropic, the A.I. company that made the Claude chatbot, were starting to study “model welfare” — the idea that A.I. models might soon become conscious and deserve some kind of moral status — the humanist in me thought: Who cares about the chatbots? Aren’t we supposed to be worried about A.I. mistreating us, not us mistreating it?It’s hard to argue that today’s A.I. systems are conscious. Sure, large language models have been trained to talk like humans, and some of them are extremely impressive. But can ChatGPT experience joy or suffering? Does Gemini deserve human rights? Many A.I. experts I know would say no, not yet, not even close.But I was intrigued. After all, more people are beginning to treat A.I. systems as if they are conscious — falling in love with them, using them as therapists and soliciting their advice. The smartest A.I. systems are surpassing humans in some domains. Is there any threshold at which an A.I. would start to deserve, if not human-level rights, at least the same moral consideration we give to animals?Consciousness has long been a taboo subject within the world of serious A.I. research, where people are wary of anthropomorphizing A.I. systems for fear of seeming like cranks. (Everyone remembers what happened to Blake Lemoine, a former Google employee who was fired in 2022, after claiming that the company’s LaMDA chatbot had become sentient.)But that may be starting to change. There is a small body of academic research on A.I. model welfare, and a modest but growing number of experts in fields like philosophy and neuroscience are taking the prospect of A.I. consciousness more seriously, as A.I. systems grow more intelligent. Recently, the tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel compared A.I. welfare to animal welfare, saying he believed it was important to make sure “the digital equivalent of factory farming” doesn’t happen to future A.I. beings.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Overlooked Clue Sheds Light on Shakespeare’s Marriage

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      New research undermines the traditional view that Shakespeare was a distant, neglectful husband to his wife, Anne.Any clue about William Shakespeare’s life usually excites scholars, but one piece of evidence had been neglected for decades. Now, a new analysis of that overlooked document seems to shatter a longstanding narrative about the Bard’s bad marriage.Shakespeare was 18 in 1582 when he married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a family friend in Stratford-upon-Avon who was in her mid-20s and pregnant. For centuries, it was thought that the writer left his wife and children behind to lead a literary life in London, seeking to avoid “the humiliation of domestic feuds,” as one influential 19th-century essayist put it.This view of Shakespeare’s wife as a “distant encumbrance” suited scholars who thought “Shakespeare was far too interesting to be a married guy,” Matthew Steggle, a literature professor at the University of Bristol in England, said in an interview. The perception was bolstered by the fact that Shakespeare had famously bequeathed her his “second best bed” in his will.But Mr. Steggle’s new research, expected to be published this week in the journal Shakespeare, suggests that the writer was not detached from his marriage after all.The hint lies in a fragment of a 17th-century letter addressing a “Mrs Shakspaire,” found in the binding of a book published in 1608. The letter’s existence was noted in 1978 by an amateur historian, but it got minimal attention, even after the book was unbound in 2016, revealing what appeared to be part of a reply from Shakespeare’s wife, Mr. Steggle said.He was working on a Shakespeare biography when he learned of the 1978 find, and was surprised it wasn’t better known. Technological advances allowed him to track down people mentioned in the long-ago correspondence, along with other evidence indicating that it included the playwright’s wife, he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Kenyan Runner Will Try to Become First Woman to Break a 4-Minute Mile

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      A study suggested that Faith Kipyegon, the female record-holder, could do it under the right conditions. She is set to try in June.A star runner from Kenya, Faith Kipyegon, is set to try to become the first woman to run a mile in under four minutes this summer, after a study suggested that she could do so under the right conditions.Kipyegon, 31, set the world record in the women’s mile, running it in 4 minutes 7.64 seconds in 2023. More than 70 years after Roger Bannister, a British medical student, became the first person to break the four-minute barrier, it remains the next frontier for women’s middle-distance running.The attempt is scheduled for June 26 in Paris, Nike, which sponsors Kipyegon, said on Wednesday. In February, a study had predicted that Kipyegon, a three-time Olympic champion in 1,500 meters, known as the metric mile, could run a mile as fast as 3:59.37 by reducing drag with better drafting off pacesetters.Breaking four minutes would require her to run two seconds faster per lap on the four laps around the track, compared to her previous best.Factors ranging from wind and pacing to shoe technology and mental training will all play a significant role.The study predicting that Kipyegon could do it, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, posited that her best chance would involve drafting, or the use of pacesetters running in formation around her to help reduce wind resistance. The study suggested that one female pacer run 1.3 meters ahead of her and another the same distance behind.Nike did not reveal its plans for pace-setting or the use of racing spikes, whose enhanced foam cushioning and carbon-fiber plates have helped make sub-four-minute miles more common in men’s running.The company said the attempt would be made in a controlled environment at Stade Charléty, a stadium in the 13th arrondissement. Kipyegon set the 1,500-meter world record of 3:49.04 at a meet there in 2024. (A mile is a little over 1,600 meters.)Nike created similar experimental conditions on a course in Vienna in 2019, when the Kenyan runner Eliud Kipchoge became the first person to run the 26.2 miles of a marathon in under two hours.Even if she achieved her goal, Kipyegon might not set an official world record. For World Athletics, the global governing body for track and field, to ratify a sub-four-minute women’s mile, rules about pace setting have to be followed.According to the study, Kipyegon would have her best chance at breaking the mark if her pacers were substituted after the first half-mile. That would not conform to pacing rules. Kipchoge’s sub-two-hour marathon was not considered an official record as he used rotating pacers.An official record, however, might not be her priority.“I want this attempt to say to women, ‘You can dream and make your dreams valid,’” Kipyegon said in a statement. More