Vaporized nicotine products (VNPs) are more effective than nicotine replacement therapy (NRT) for smoking cessation in general populations, but their effectiveness among low socioeconomic groups is largely unknown.

Glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs), medications used to treat type 2 diabetes and obesity, are associated with delayed gastric emptying, which is a risk factor for gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD). However, evidence linking these drugs to GERD is limited.

Aluminum is used as an adjuvant in nonlive vaccines administered in early childhood. Concerns persist about potential associations between vaccination with aluminum-adsorbed vaccines and increased risk for chronic autoimmunity, atopy or allergy, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Large-scale safety data remain limited.

Single-arm trials can be used to explore the feasibility, implementation, and effects of treatment. They typically use opportunistic convenience sampling to find potential participants. Their main limitations for health care decision making are lack of generalizability and the poor quality of the comparative evidence they produce. The authors propose a single-arm trial design that can provide greater generalizability and higher quality of comparative evidence than traditional single-arm trials, called a random invitation single-arm trial or RISAT. A RISAT has 4 essential components. First, it has a data infrastructure for routinely collected real-world data (RWD) where participants have provided consent to have their data used for research (for example, a registry or electronic medical record database). Second, a subset of those participants are randomly invited to take part in the RISAT. Those not invited are not contacted. Third, invitees are offered the specific intervention (such as a novel treatment), to which they consent or not. Fourth, all invitees are followed prospectively regardless of their acceptance of the intervention. For an optional randomized comparison, RISATs can use the RWD infrastructure to measure outcomes from invitees and noninvitees. The authors describe the advantages and challenges of this approach, including inferential issues and biases and comparison with other designs. They show how RISATs allow fairer access to participation, improve applicability and generalizability of results compared with traditional single-arm trials, and provide a form of randomized real-world evidence. At negligible added cost beyond already existing infrastructure, this approach may catalyze the early generation of evidence of higher value than that produced with traditional single-arm trials, increasing the credibility and validity of accelerated drug approval processes and enabling better health care decisions.

Violent injury survivors are at risk for revictimization. The St. Louis area hospital-based violence intervention program (HVIP), Life Outside of Violence (LOV), is the first multisystem, region-wide HVIP in the United States.

A 2020 consensus statement proposed body mass index (BMI)-specific waist circumference (WC) thresholds to improve patient care.

Drugs are approved when their benefits outweigh their risks based on the results of clinical trials. It remains unclear how often regulatory agencies extrapolate or restrict the approval compared with the trial.

The European Association for the Study of Obesity (EASO) recently introduced a new framework to define obesity that incorporates anthropometric measures beyond body mass index (BMI) and clinical comorbidities. However, this framework has not been validated.