The New York Times (5/15, Jewett , Thacker) reports that budget cuts under the Trump Administration have affected anti-smoking programs across the United States. Experts on tobacco control said the “funding cuts would set back a quarter-century of public health efforts that have driven the smoking rate to a record low and saved lives and billions of dollars in health care spending.” FDA officials “fired many staff members who levied fines on retailers that sold tobacco to minors or marketed illicit vapes. Some scientists who were experts in addiction and toxicology lost their jobs.” Meanwhile, the NIH “canceled grants to researchers examining tobacco use among certain groups, including L.G.B.T.Q. youths, Black people and young people.” The White House also closed the CDC’s Office on Smoking and Health. The cuts were discussed during budget hearings on Wednesday, with lawmakers expressing concerns to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

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— MedPage Today (requires login and subscription)

Psychiatric News (5/15) reports a study found that “individuals with first-episode psychosis who experience a shorter period between first use of an antipsychotic and enrollment in a coordinated specialty care (CSC) program show improved functioning and quality of life at six months.” Researchers “examined outcomes for 147 first-episode psychosis patients enrolled from 2014 to 2019 in Specialized Treatment in Early Psychosis (STEP), a CSC in New Haven, Connecticut, that ran a dedicated four-year early detection campaign focused on raising public awareness of psychosis, training health professionals to identify symptoms, and streamlining the CSC referral process.” They observed the average total duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) “for patients enrolled in STEP was 5.9 months shorter than those in the CSC with standard detection protocols. This included a 1.3-month reduction in DUP-Demand and a 4.6-month reduction in DUP-Supply.” Notably, the “time reduction translated into improvements in functional outcomes.” The study was published in Schizophrenia Bulletin.

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— “Shorter Time Between Antipsychotic Initiation and CSC Referral Improves Outcomes,” Psychiatric News , May 15, 2025

CBS News (5/14, Moniuszko ) reports a study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association suggests that “men are twice as likely to die from the stress-related heart condition commonly called ‘broken heart syndrome’ compared to women.” Formally known as Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, the syndrome is “associated with severe emotional distress or stressful events, such as the death of a loved one,” with symptoms including “chest discomfort, shortness of breath, heart palpitations and arrhythmia, or irregular heartbeat.” Researchers “analyzed nearly 200,000 U.S. adults with data from 2016 to 2020” and found that “despite the condition being more common among women, the death rate among them was 5.5%, compared to 11.2% for men. The cause of the mortality discrepancy is not fully understood, the authors said, adding it could be due to hormonal differences or physical stress being a more common trigger for men than emotional stress.”

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— “Men more likely to die of “broken heart syndrome” compared to women, study finds,” Sara Moniuszko, CBS News, May 14, 2025

Psychiatric News (5/14) reports a study found the implementation of the Texas Heartbeat Act Senate Bill 8 – the strictest abortion law in the nation – in September 2021 “was associated with worsening mental health among women, particularly younger adult women.” Researchers “collected responses from 15,614 adult women and 14,500 adult men in Texas who completed the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System…between 2012 and 2022.” They analyzed “changes in frequent mental distress…between women and men in Texas before and after SB8 implementation.” They observed that “on average, 14.2% of Texas women experienced frequent mental distress each year prior to SB8 implementation, compared with 21.9% in the year after implementation; among Texas men, frequent mental distress rose from 11.1% to 15%.” The law’s implementation “appeared to have the biggest impact on women ages 18 to 29, which was not surprising to the researchers.” The study was published in JAMA Network Open.

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— “Texas Abortion Ban Increased Women’s Mental Distress,” Psychiatric News, May 14, 2025

The AP (5/14, Stobbe , Mulvihill ) reports early CDC data released Wednesday indicate “there were 30,000 fewer U.S. drug overdose deaths in 2024,” a decline of 27% from the 110,000 in 2023 and the “largest one-year decline ever recorded.” The previous one-year decline was 4% in 2017, “according to the agency’s National Center for Health Statistics.” All states but Nevada and South Dakota saw declines last year, with some of the most significant drops in Ohio, West Virginia, “and other states that have been hard-hit in the nation’s decades-long overdose epidemic.” Among the factors experts cited to explain the decline were the increased availability of naloxone, expanded addiction treatment, a shift in how people use drugs, and the “growing impact of billions of dollars in opioid lawsuit settlement money.” Nevertheless, “annual overdose deaths are higher than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.”

ABC News (5/14, Kekatos ) reports this marks the “second year in a row that drug overdose deaths have dropped after year-over-year increases were seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, and researchers say they’re cautiously optimistic about the declines.” The CDC noted “the biggest drop in deaths by drug type was seen in fatalities linked to synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, which fell from 76,282 to 48,422 between 2023 and 2024. Declines were also seen in overdose deaths from psychostimulants, such as methamphetamine;cocaine; and natural or semi-synthetic drugs such as morphine.”

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— “US overdose deaths fell 27% last year, the largest one-year decline ever seen,” Mike Stobbe and Geoff Mulvihill, Associated Press, May 14, 2025

The Hill (5/13, Migdon ) reports more than 100 House Democrats, led by Reps. Seth Moulton (MA) and Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL), wrote a letter Tuesday urging HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “to spare a crisis service for LGBTQ youth from federal funding cuts, calling the plan, part of a leaked budget proposal, ‘ill-advised’ and dangerous.” An internal budget document “would eliminate specialized services for LGBTQ youth who contact 988, the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, as part of a broader Trump administration effort to slash funding and programs it says are bloating the federal government.” The Democrats said, “Ending this mental health support for youth in distress would devastate a vital resource for some of our nation’s most vulnerable young people.” According to SAMHSA, “the program received an average of 2,100 crisis contacts daily.” Seven Democratic senators sent a similar letter to Kennedy last week.

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— “House Democrats: Funding cuts to LGBTQ suicide hotline will have ‘lethal consequences’,” Brooke Migdon, The Hill, May 13, 2025

MedPage Today (5/13, George ) reports, “More time spent sitting or lying down was linked with neurodegeneration and worse cognitive scores in older adults, even among people who were physically active, a 7-year study showed.” Researchers observed that “in cross-sectional models, greater sedentary time was tied to a smaller Alzheimer’s disease-imaging MRI signature and worse episodic memory scores.” They added that “in longitudinal analyses, more sedentary time was associated with faster hippocampal volume shrinkage, and declines in naming scores and processing speed scores.” Investigators concluded, “These findings suggest that above and beyond physical activity level, more sedentary behavior is still worse for brain health and cognition over time.” The study was published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia.

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Psychiatric News (5/12) reports a research letter published in JAMA Pediatrics says that “about one-quarter of children in the United States may be living in a household where one or more parents have a substance use disorder.” Researchers calculated national estimates of children “exposed to parental SUDs using data from the 2023 National Survey on Drug Use and Health.” They found that “nearly 19 million children lived with a parent who met DSM-5 criteria for past-year SUD. Of this total, around 11.3 million children had a parent with mild SUD, while 7.6 million had a parent with moderate to severe SUD.” They observed the “most common parental SUD was alcohol use disorder, which affected more than 12 million children, followed distantly by cannabis use disorder and then prescription medication use disorder.

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— “Nearly 19 Million Children May Be Living With a Parent With SUD,” Psychiatric News, May , 2025

The Washington Post (5/12, Docter-Loeb) reports new research published in JAMA Network Open shows that “more U.S. high-schoolers used nicotine pouches – smokeless nicotine powder products – last year than the year before.” The study used data from a 2023-2024 survey of 10,146 youths, revealing that “5.4 percent of 10th- and 12th-graders reported having used nicotine pouches, up from 3 percent the year before. The 10th- and 12th-graders’ use of pouches in the 12 months and 30 days before the surveys also increased year to year.” According to the study, teens who are male, white, and living in rural areas showed higher usage. The study also noted increased dual use with e-cigarettes, “but the sole use of e-cigarettes decreased across a lifetime, as well as in the previous 12 months and past 30 days.”

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MedPage Today (5/9, Lou ) reported, “Users of illicit stimulants were at elevated risk of ventricular arrhythmia (VA) and mortality, according to a longitudinal cohort study from California.” Investigators found that “a record of methamphetamine use was associated with increased incident VA…and mortality…over nearly 10-year follow-up.” Meanwhile, “cocaine use was similarly tied to VA…and mortality.” The findings were published in the European Heart Journal.

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