Recurrent kidney stones are unpleasant and may lead to kidney damage, sepsis, or invasive procedures.

The SARS-CoV-2 Omicron variant continues to pose a global health burden.

Clinicians and patients need updated information on antiviral treatments for COVID-19.

Bereavement after the death of someone close is universal, and clinicians may be uncertain if or what interventions may be beneficial.

Management of chronic kidney disease (CKD) has been rapidly evolving, now involving many interventions that can be managed in the primary care setting. In April 2025, leadership within the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) approved a joint clinical practice guideline (CPG) for the primary care management of CKD. This synopsis reviews the 2025 recommendations related to diagnosis, assessment, and management of CKD.

The American College of Physicians (ACP) developed these rapid practice points addressing the comparative effectiveness and harms of trivalent (3 different influenza viruses or viral proteins) and quadrivalent (4 different influenza viruses or viral proteins) influenza vaccines in adults aged 18 years or older who are not pregnant or immunocompromised. These practice points do not address adults aged 18 years or older who are pregnant or immunocompromised.

Seasonal influenza is a contagious viral respiratory illness that causes yearly epidemics.

Urinary albumin-creatinine ratio (UACR) and urinary protein-creatinine ratio (UPCR) are both used in clinical practice to diagnose and monitor chronic kidney disease (CKD). Which measure exhibits stronger associations with clinical outcomes and whether this varies by patient characteristics are unknown.

Safe and reliable venous access is critical for high-quality cancer care. Patients with both solid and hematologic cancers require vascular access devices (VADs) for systemic chemotherapies and for supportive treatments, including blood products, antimicrobials, antiemetics, and fluids. However, VADs are associated with serious complications, including bloodstream infection and venous thromboembolism. Evidence-based guidance could maximize benefits and reduce risks in the selection and management of VADs in patients with cancer. The authors convened a 9-member international multidisciplinary panel and used the RAND/UCLA Appropriateness Method to develop recommendations for VAD selection, insertion, and management in patients with cancer. A literature review informed the development of clinical scenarios, which were rated by the panel for appropriateness based on cancer type, treatment indication, urgency, comorbidities, and anticipated duration of use. Of 1422 scenarios, 502 (35%) were rated as appropriate, 400 (28%) were rated as neutral/uncertain, and 520 (37%) were rated as inappropriate. Appropriateness of VAD selection varied by type of cancer, treatment urgency, and planned dwell time. For patients with acute hematologic cancers requiring urgent chemotherapy, placement of a double-lumen peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC) or a tunneled central venous catheter (CVC) was rated as appropriate, regardless of treatment intensity or infusate characteristics. For patients with malignant solid tumors, a single-lumen tunneled CVC or implanted port was rated as appropriate for delivering chemotherapy, regardless of treatment intensity, urgency, or duration. In patients with advanced chronic kidney disease, coordination of care with a nephrologist to ensure vein preservation in the context of cancer prognosis was recommended. By developing comprehensive, evidence-informed expert recommendations, the Michigan Appropriateness Guide for Intravenous Catheters in Adult Patients With Cancer (MAGIC-ONC) aims to improve clinical care, reduce complications, support quality improvement efforts, and advance the safety of vascular access for patients with cancer.

Recent developments and controversies in organ transplantation necessitate the reaffirmation and application of foundational ethical norms as the laudable goal of increasing viable organs for transplantation is pursued. The physician's primary duties are to individual patients under the physician's care. For physicians of prospective donor-patients, the "bright line" between serving the best interests of donor-patients and their families and serving potential recipient-patients and the public interest can become blurred in ethically problematic ways. This paper provides ethical guidance for clinicians involved in organ transplantation as well as for patients, families, the public, policymakers, and others to help maintain trust and encourage participation in this life-saving enterprise. It clarifies the duties and roles of care teams of prospective donor-patients, recipient-patients, and organ procurement teams, reaffirming that end-of-life decision making for prospective donor-patients must center on the best interests of donor-patients and their families independent of organ donation potential. It also emphasizes the importance of truly informed consent for organ donation and advocates for prioritizing equity and transparency in transplantation processes.

Colorectal cancer is the second leading cause of cancer-related deaths for both men and women. Screening for colorectal cancer is an effective strategy to reduce morbidity and mortality, but uptake remains suboptimal. Several performance measures for colorectal cancer screening and surveillance are currently used in pay-for-performance, public reporting, and/or accountability programs. The American College of Physicians (ACP) embraces performance measurement as a means to improve quality of care. The ACP believes that a performance measure must be methodologically sound and evidence-based to be considered for inclusion in payment, accountability, or reporting programs. These principles are critical given the potential effect to physician administrative work and reputation and reimbursement and to prevent unintended consequences on patient care. The ACP's Performance Measurement Committee (PMC) reviews performance measures using a validated process to recognize high-quality performance measures, address gaps and areas for improvement in performance measures, and help reduce reporting burden. This article aims to present a review of current performance measures for colorectal cancer screening and surveillance to inform physicians, payers, and policymakers in their selection and use of performance measures and make recommendations for measures that could be developed. The PMC appreciates the importance of colorectal cancer screening in the prevention and early detection of colorectal cancer and supports performance measures based on strong recommendations. The PMC reviewed 5 performance measures for colorectal cancer screening relevant to internal medicine and supports 1 performance measure ("Facility 7-Day Risk-Standardized Hospital Visit Rate after Outpatient Colonoscopy") for use.

Users of GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) make judgments about the size of intervention effects on desirable and undesirable people-important health outcomes or on benefits and harms. Benchmarking effect sizes by using decision thresholds (DTs) can help to facilitate these judgments and the process. This article provides GRADE guidance for use of DTs for judgments about the magnitude of desirable and undesirable health effects, such as in a health guideline or health technology assessment. Through iterative discussions and refinement in in-person and online meetings of a GRADE project group and through e-mail communication, the authors developed guidance for using DTs in Evidence-to-Decision (EtD) frameworks. The authors applied the approach and used these examples from guidelines and the results of a randomized methodological study to develop official GRADE guidance. Several alternatives for determining and using DTs are presented. In the first main approach, outcome-specific DTs for trivial, small, moderate, and large effects are determined through a calculation using empirically derived generic coefficients and the outcome's utility value and are compared with the effect estimate obtained from an evidence synthesis. In the second main approach, outcome-specific DTs are also determined, but through direct surveying of decision makers to explicitly assign thresholds for the prioritized health outcomes. The article also describes how these approaches can be combined. The suggested approaches provide transparency for judgments in EtD frameworks that are based on findings from evidence syntheses.

Internal medicine physicians are specialists who promote health, emphasize disease prevention, manage complex acute and chronic conditions in adults, and receive extensive training in the diagnosis and treatment of diseases affecting all systems of the human body. As a result, internal medicine performance measures (PMs) target several topics. Many PMs are not based on high-certainty evidence of at least moderate net benefit and are burdensome, with low or no value to patient care. The American College of Physicians (ACP) wants to provide a national focus to improve the quality of health care in the United States. The ACP is a leader in the evidence-based world, being the only physician organization designated as a GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) Center, an Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (AGREE) Center, and a member of the Cochrane U.S. Network. Using a structured, stepwise, evidence-based approach, ACP identified the most important clinical topics evaluated and treated by internal medicine physicians. The ACP is also actively working toward recommending essential PMs for each core clinical topic that can be used to evaluate and improve patient care. This position paper describes ACP's method and results of identifying core clinical topics. It also offers a blueprint for defining core PMs and illustrating the principals through application to 2 core clinical topics. The ACP plans to apply this method on PMs for other core clinical topics.

Optimal transfusion strategies for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) are uncertain. The aim of this guideline is to provide recommendations for red blood cell transfusion in patients with AMI.

The U.S. health care system is experiencing numerous supply chain disruptions, including for important medications. Prescription drug shortages have been at record levels and have affected more drugs in recent years, especially generic sterile injectables and other low-margin medications. These shortages arise from a confluence of factors, including the complexity of the entire production and delivery supply chain, quality issues, outdated manufacturing facilities and practices, drug purchasing policies that prioritize lowest price over reliable production, changes in prescribing and usage patterns, geopolitical constraints, and market concentration, among other factors. When prescription drugs are in shortage, patients face negative health outcomes due to being unable to obtain necessary treatments, the stress associated with securing medications, and adverse effects from alternative treatments. Physicians also face substantial burden in navigating drug shortages because they must expend time and resources in identifying alternative treatment options and obtaining prior authorization for the coverage of alternative drugs, negatively affecting the patient-physician relationship. Policymakers, regulators, manufacturers, health systems, health professionals, and other relevant entities must collaborate to further efforts to ameliorate drug shortages and promote equitable access to treatments. In addition to short-term measures to address the immediate effect of drug shortages, policymakers, manufacturers, and drug purchasers should also undertake efforts to prevent future drug shortages by investing in, strengthening, and diversifying prescription drug supply chains and incentivizing procurement practices that emphasize reliable and sustainable production practices. Such efforts must be undergirded by policies to improve monitoring of and transparency into the prescription drug supply chain.

It is unclear whether weight loss before in vitro fertilization (IVF) improves reproductive outcomes in women with obesity.

Engineering infection controls include a wide range of interventions used indoors to reduce occupants' exposure to respiratory pathogens.

Risk adjustment is a critical component of health care reimbursement aimed at ensuring fair compensation on the basis of the characteristics of patients receiving care. Optimizing risk adjustment is not just a matter of improving efficiency or predictive accuracy; it is a crucial step toward achieving health equity by ensuring that resources are directed toward patients who need them most and reducing incentives to exclude or neglect high-risk patients. The authors reviewed available publications from PubMed and Google Scholar published between 2000 and 2025, as well as relevant news articles, policy documents, websites, and other sources related to risk adjustment and application areas. This process yielded 8 recommendations related to standardizing risk adjustment methods, promoting data interoperability, implementing strategies to enable more accurate and continuous reflections of patients' health status, integrating valid and reliable metrics into regular evaluation and feedback mechanisms, limiting "gaming" opportunities and incentives, creating valid ways to measure costs of caring for patients who are experiencing health care disparities and inequities and/or are disproportionately affected by social drivers of health, evaluating and leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning when able to improve risk adjustment models, and promoting research and implementation methods that combine elements of both prospective and concurrent risk adjustment. Implementation of these risk adjustment recommendations has broad implications for various entities in the health care ecosystem.

Climate change is anticipated to continue to adversely affect public health, with heat stress the predominant threat. Accordingly, heat-related illness is predicted to increase as extremely hot days become more frequent. Heat stroke, the most serious heat-related illness, is a medical emergency that may be fatal if it is not promptly recognized, addressed with early and rapid cooling, and accompanied by multidisciplinary supportive care as clinically indicated. Heat stroke is a preventable illness that occurs in 2 distinct forms-classic and exertional-that have distinct demographic profiles and clinical courses but similar management paradigms.

In January 2025, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives' Budget Committee offered a list of possible spending reductions to offset revenue losses from proposed tax cuts. In May, the Committee advanced a bill incorporating several reductions on the list. The Committee estimated that the 6 largest potential Medicaid cuts (for example, work requirements for some Medicaid enrollees) would each reduce the federal government's Medicaid outlays by at least $100 billion over 10 years. On the basis of the Committee's estimates of savings; Congressional Budget Office analyses; and peer-reviewed studies of the coverage, financial, and health impacts of past Medicaid expansions and contractions, the authors project the likely effects of each option and of the House bill advanced by the Budget Committee in May. Each option individually would reduce federal Medicaid outlays by between $100 billion and $900 billion over a decade, increase the ranks of the uninsured by between 600 000 and 3 900 000 and the annual number of persons forgoing needed medical care by 129 060 to 838 890, and result in 651 to 12 626 medically preventable deaths annually. Enactment of the House bill advanced in May would increase the number of uninsured persons by 7.6 million and the number of deaths by 16 642 annually, according to a mid-range estimate. These figures exclude harms from lowering provider payments and shrinking benefits, as well as possible repercussions from states increasing taxes or shifting expenditures from other needs to make up for shortfalls in federal Medicaid funding. Policy makers should weigh the likely health and financial harms to patients and providers of reducing Medicaid expenditures against the desirability of tax reductions, which would accrue mostly to wealthy Americans.