“I Have the Unfortunate Genetics That I Am Bald’: What We Heard This Week

“I have the unfortunate genetics that I am bald, and so is the driver of the vehicle who was saying these horrible racist things to this woman.” — Andrew Spector, MD, of Dartmouth Health, on an unflattering case of mistaken identity.

“A single observed moment may be a sign that cognitive impairments are present, but they are often neither sensitive or specific.” — Jason Karlawish, MD, of the Penn Memory Center, Philadelphia, discussing Joe Biden and Donald Trump’s public moments of forgetfulness.

“It’s a shame if restrictive views of embryos would prevent these children from being born.” — Rachel Weinerman, MD, of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, on how a recent Alabama ruling establishing that frozen embryos are children puts IVF at risk.

“Treating a kid in clinic and sending them back to those conditions where they became sick in the first place doesn’t make sense, right?” — Darlene Bhavnani, PhD, MPH, of Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, on how indoor exposure to mice and cockroaches was associated with upper respiratory infections in kids with asthma.

“Much of Parkinson’s may be preventable … We should seek to create a world where Parkinson’s is increasingly rare, not common.” — E. Ray Dorsey, MD, of the University of Rochester in New York, discussing the link between pesticides and Parkinson’s disease.

“It’s very unfortunate that the insurance coverage is still very limited, and only 1% or 2% of patients who are eligible for bariatric surgery get the surgery currently.” — Ali Aminian, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic Bariatric and Metabolic Institute, on a meta-analysis supporting bariatric surgery’s long-term benefits in type 2 diabetes.

“We don’t typically think of patient sex as being an important factor in influencing patient death.” — Joshua Thaden, MD, PhD, of Duke University School of Medicine in Durham, North Carolina, on study findings that women with Staphylococcus aureus bacteremia had a higher mortality risk than men.