Viewpoints: Does The Definition Of Death Need Updating?; Learning To Heal From Trauma

Bloomberg: How Is Death Defined? Dangerous New Guidelines Will Revise It 
Death can’t be denied but it can be edited. In 1981, the Uniform Law Commission proposed a model law for the determination of death. It says that individuals have died when they have experienced an irreversible end to either their respiratory and circulatory functions or their brain functions. Most states have adopted this definition, and the rest adopted it in substance if not precise wording. (Ramesh Ponnuru, 6/14)

Stat: A Resilience Prescription For Covid-19 And Other Traumatic Events 
One morning almost five years ago, a disgruntled former employee tried to kill me with a shotgun as I walked out of my local deli. The buckshot pellets from the blast pierced my right shoulder and chest; blood gushed from the wound. I learned later that the shot would have killed me had it landed a few inches to the left. I had studied trauma victims for decades to understand resilience and find new treatments for mood and anxiety disorders like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Now I was the trauma victim. (Dennis S. Charney, 6/15)

The Boston Globe: Where Mental Illness And Criminal Justice Meet 
Law enforcement agencies have historically been ill-prepared to respond effectively to emergency incidents involving behavioral health — that is, when a person suffering from a serious mental illness or substance use disorder behaves in a threatening manner, endangering themselves or the public. That’s starting to change, albeit slowly. As calls for police reform have heightened in recent years, police departments across the country have made it a priority to establish and increase funding for teams of social workers to respond safely to such incidents. (6/15)

NBC News: Race And Health Care Collide In Revealing American Medical Association Controversy
This spring brought a shake-up within medicine's old guard: the American Medical Association, or AMA, and its associated journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, or JAMA. Established in 1847 and 1883, respectively, the association and its journal set health standards used around the world. (Dr. Esther Choo, 6/14)

The New York Times: The I.V.F. Plot In Aziz Ansari's ‘Master Of None’ Is Based On My Story
There’s a scene in the fourth episode of the new season of the Netflix series “Master of None” in which Alicia, a woman trying to have a baby as a single mother via in vitro fertilization, steps into another room, off camera. She has been told that, after an arduous and expensive process of thrice-daily injections, hormone pills and procedures to extract her eggs, none of her embryos are viable. Her weeping voice can be heard trailing off. That scene hit extremely close to home for me: My name is also Alicia. The character’s story is based upon my life. (Alicia Lombardini, 6/15)

Stat: Aducanumab Approval Highlights Value Of Brain Disease Biomarkers 
People living with Alzheimer’s dementia — the forgetfulness, the confusion, and the ultimate erasure of identity — and their families pushed hard for the Food and Drug Administration to approve aducanumab, Biogen’s drug for it. Clinicians and scientists working on Alzheimer’s were split in their opinions on its clinical benefit. The FDA’s own expert panel advised against it. (Ken Marek, 6/15)

The Baltimore Sun: New Alzheimer’s Drug Is Not The Disease Solution We Seek; Here’s Why 
In 1901, the German Psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer clinically examined a patient called Auguste Deter who was admitted to the insane asylum of Frankfurt am Main for behavior changes, including suspiciousness directed toward her husband. Over the course of her hospital stay, a decline in memory and other cognitive changes were noticed, a pattern that was considered atypical of a classical psychiatric disorder. Therefore, when she died on April 8, 1906, Alzheimer performed a post mortem examination of her brain at the request of the superintendent of the mental asylum. Under the microscope, he observed two types of protein deposits, a clump of proteins outside the brain cell, the neuron, that he called a “plaque” and twisted proteins inside the cell that were called “neurofibrillary tangles.” Since then, thousands of scientists have spent billions of dollars worldwide to better characterize these proteins biochemically and to study the underlying biology of what is commonly known as Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Plaques and tangles are presumed to be central to the underlying cause of the disease and need to be identified in post mortem tissue for a definitive diagnosis of AD. (Anand Kumar and Charles Nemeroff, 6/14)