Monitoring temporal trends in firearm injury-related emergency department (ED) visits is challenging because traditional surveillance systems lack detailed temporal information.

Recent trends in use of tirzepatide, a dual glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) and glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide receptor agonist (RA), versus other glucose-lowering medications (GLMs) and weight-lowering medications (WLMs) remain unexplored.

Poor communication in health care increases the risk for patient safety incidents. However, there is no up-to-date synthesis of these data.

Epilepsy is a common neurologic condition characterized by at least 1 unprovoked seizure and a high risk for recurrent seizures. Distinguishing epilepsy from conditions that can mimic seizures is important for accurate diagnosis and effective treatment. This article reviews the evaluation of patients suspected of having epilepsy and discusses behavioral strategies and pharmacologic and surgical therapies that can help reduce morbidity associated with recurrent seizures.

Osteoporosis is a skeletal condition characterized by low bone mass and fragility resulting in an increased risk for fracture. It affects all bones, but fractures most often occur in the hip and spine. Osteoporosis is common in postmenopausal women, with estrogen deficiency thought to be a major contributing factor. Screening for osteoporosis with bone densitometry is recommended in all women 65 years of age or older and in postmenopausal women younger than 65 who are at increased risk. In 2023, the American College of Physicians published updated guidance on the pharmacologic treatment of osteoporosis. Among the recommendations was for clinicians to take an individualized approach regarding whether to start treatment with a bisphosphonate in women older than 65 years with osteopenia (a lesser degree of bone loss) to reduce the risk for fractures. Here, 2 bone endocrinologists debate how to manage a patient with both osteopenia and osteoporosis on bone densitometry. They discuss how to interpret and address these findings.

What is the added risk for death from smoking? Logistic regression has become the most common statistical method to answer such questions in the biomedical literature. However, the typical analyses estimate odds ratios, a metric too often misunderstood and misinterpreted. Although estimates of risks, and their differences and ratios, offer transparent clinical interpretations, commonly used statistical models have known methodological shortcomings. "Standardization" through modeling, weighting, or matching offers a solution. The goals of this article are to review classical concepts of standardization and to link them to regression modeling for causal inference. The authors also describe approaches based on weighting and matching compared with regression-based standardization. Using an example of smoking from the ARIC (Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities) study, they explain the value of standardization, long used in medicine and public health, to estimate risks and their differences and ratios for binary outcomes. The authors demonstrate how standard statistical software using models that best fit the data and respect underlying biological or clinical processes can reexpress results in clinically meaningful metrics. The Supplement offers examples with common software packages.

Medicare Advantage (MA) plans report diagnoses more intensely than providers in the traditional Medicare (TM) program, and there is wide variation in coding intensity across MA plans.