The New York Times (2/28, Belluck ) reports patients with long COVID may experience “measurable cognitive decline, especially in the ability to remember, reason and plan, a large new study suggests.” Cognitive tests of nearly 113,000 UK patients “found that those with persistent post-COVID symptoms scored the equivalent of 6 I.Q. points lower than people who had never been infected with the coronavirus, according to the study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.” In addition, people “who had been infected and no longer had symptoms also scored slightly lower than people who had never been infected, by the equivalent of 3 I.Q. points, even if they were ill for only a short time.”

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— “The New York Times (requires login and subscription)

MedPage Today (2/28, Henderson ) reports the CDC on Wednesday issued new guidance “on identifying and responding to clusters of suicide, as tens of thousands of lives are lost to suicide each year in the U.S.” The agency recommended “three primary steps,” including “conducting a preliminary assessment to determine if a formal assessment is warranted; a formal assessment of the suspected cluster to determine whether it meets the definition of a cluster; and an investigation to identify similarities in cases that can guide community response.” CDC researchers wrote that while rare, suicide clusters “can have unique characteristics and challenges” and “can have considerable negative effects on the community, including prolonged grief and elevated fear and anxiety about further deaths.”

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— MedPage Today (requires login and subscription)

The Wall Street Journal (2/27, Mathews , Michaels, Subscription Publication) reports that the Justice Department has launched an antitrust investigation into U.S. health insurer UnitedHealth.
Bloomberg (2/27, Tozzi, Strohm , Nylen , Subscription Publication) reports, “The probe opens a new layer of scrutiny on the largest U.S. health insurer that operates in pharmacy benefits, medical care, technology and other services.” The investigation “emerged out of concerns about UnitedHealth’s acquisitions of health-care providers and data companies, according to one of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing information that isn’t public.”

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— “U.S. Opens UnitedHealth Antitrust Probe,”Anna Wilde Mathews, The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2024

Psychiatric News (2/27) reports, “Children whose parents experience parenting stress and other parenting issues may have a higher risk of nonsuicidal self-injury in adolescence, a study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry has found.” According to the study, “adolescents who perceived parental hostility and negativity at 6 years old had 1.8 times the odds of nonsuicidal self-injury compared with adolescents who did not. However, child characteristics and negative events did not appear to increase the odds of adolescents reporting nonsuicidal self-injury.”

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— “Risk of Self-Harm Higher in Adolescents With Stressed Parents, Psychiatric News , February 27, 2024

NPR (2/27, Archie ) reports, “The monthly rate of antidepressants being dispensed to young people increased about 64% more quickly during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.” The IQVIA Longitudinal Prescription Database was used by researchers “to examine a sample of about 221 million prescriptions written for millions of Americans between the ages 12 to 25, and from 2016 to 2022.” Researchers “separated the data into before and after March 2020, when the pandemic started.”

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— “The rate of antidepressants prescribed to young people surged during the pandemic,”Ayana Archie, NPR, February 27, 2024