The telehealth company Hims & Hers Health is expanding its weight-loss offerings by adding new medications to its platform. The company said Tuesday it now provides access to Zepbound, a brand-name version of the drug tirzepatide, as well as to generic liraglutide. Zepbound is made by drugmaker Eli Lilly. While Hims & Hers offers it for $1,899 per month, Lilly said the price on its own LillyDirect platform starts at $349 for self-paying customers. With insurance, some patients may pay as little as $25, according to a report published by The Wall Street Journal. Other medications for weight loss on the Hims & Hers platform include Ozempic and Wegovy, priced at $1,799 and $1,999 per month, respectively. “We’ve now expanded that choice even further by adding access to generic liraglutide and branded tirzepatide through our platform,” Hims & Hers said. Lilly said it has no official connection with Hims & Hers. Hims & Hers said it plans to keep expanding its offerings to help people find the treatment that works best for them. “All of this is part of our long-term commitment to build the most comprehensive and personalized digital health platform for weight loss and beyond,” Hims & Hers noted. The company’s weight-loss business is growing fast. Hims & Hers expects at least $725 million in revenue from its weight-loss services alone in 2025. …  read on >  read on >

For nearly two decades, a stroke had left a woman unable to speak — until now.  Thanks to a new brain implant, her thoughts are being turned into real-time speech, giving her a voice again for the first time in 18 years. The device was tested on a 47-year-old woman with quadriplegia who lost her ability to speak after a stroke. Doctors placed the brain-computer implant during surgery as part of a clinical trial, The Associated Press reported. It “converts her intent to speak into fluent sentences,” said Gopala Anumanchipalli, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley and a co-author of the study published Monday in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Unlike other brain-computer systems that have a delay, this new technology works in real time. Scientists say that the delay in existing systems makes conversations hard and, sometimes, frustrating. Jonathan Brumberg of the Speech and Applied Neuroscience Lab at the University of Kansas, who reviewed the findings, welcomed the advances. This is “a pretty big advance in our field,” he told The Associated Press. Here’s how it works: The team recorded the woman’s brain activity using electrodes as she silently imagined saying sentences. They also used a synthesizer using her voice before her stroke to re-create the sound she would have made. An AI model was trained to translate her…  read on >  read on >

Fasting every other day can prompt more weight loss than simply cutting calories, a new clinical trial shows. People who undertook 4:3 intermittent fasting lost just under 8% of their body weight within a year, compared to a 5% loss among people who cut their daily calories by about a third, researchers reported March 31 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. In 4:3 intermittent fasting, people restrict their calorie intake by 80% three days a week, alternating between days with no dietary restrictions at all. “Long-term adherence to daily calorie restriction is challenging for many people,” wrote the research team co-led by Danielle Ostendorf, an assistant professor of kinesiology, recreation and sport studies at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. “Our results suggest that 4:3 [intermittent] is an alternative dietary weight loss strategy that may produce modestly superior weight loss compared with [daily calorie restriction] at 12 months, when provided in the context of a high-intensity, comprehensive behavioral weight loss program,” the team concluded. For this trial, researchers assigned 84 overweight and obese people to this type of fasting, and another 81 folks to cut their calories by 34%. Both groups were asked to get in 300 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a week, double the amount recommended by U.S. physical activity guidelines. They also received support from a weight-loss program led by a registered dietitian. After…  read on >  read on >

As a measles outbreak spreads across the United States, doctors are now seeing a new and unexpected danger: Children getting sick from taking too much vitamin A. At Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, several unvaccinated children showed signs of liver problems after taking large amounts of vitamin A, according to Dr. Lara Johnson, the hospital’s chief medical officer. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has promoted vitamin A during the outbreak, even suggesting it might help prevent measles. But doctors say this isn’t true. “If people have the mistaken impression that you have an either-or choice of MMR vaccine or vitamin A, you’re going to get a lot of kids unnecessarily infected with measles. That’s a problem, especially during an epidemic,” Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN. “And second, you have this unregulated medicine in terms of doses being given and potential toxicities.” The measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine is the only proven way to prevent measles. It is 97% effective after two doses. Kennedy has said he encourages vaccines, but considers vaccination a personal choice. Vitamin A can be helpful for people with measles when given in the right dose by a doctor.…  read on >  read on >

Splenda doesn’t directly add calories to your diet, but the sweetener still might lead people to pack on pounds, a new study says. The sugar substitute might spur on a person’s appetite and feelings of hunger, potentially leading them to overeat, according to results published March 26 in the journal Nature Metabolism. Splenda’s main ingredient, sucralose, appears to confuse the brain by providing a sweet taste without also delivering the calories one would expect, senior investigator Dr. Kathleen Page, director of the University of Southern California Diabetes and Obesity Research Center, said in a news release. “If your body is expecting a calorie because of the sweetness, but doesn’t get the calorie it’s expecting, that could change the way the brain is primed to crave those substances over time,” she said. About 40% of Americans regularly consume sugar substitutes, usually as a way to reduce their sugar intake, researchers said in background notes. “But are these substances actually helpful for regulating body weight?” Page asked. “What happens in the body and brain when we consume them, and do the effects differ from one person to the next?” To explore this further, researchers tested how 75 people responded after consuming water, a drink sweetened with sucralose or a drink sweetened with regular sugar. The team collected MRI brain scans, blood samples and hunger ratings from participants…  read on >  read on >