Direct Primary Care: Financial Analysis and Potential to Reshape the U.S. Healthcare Landscape.

As the United States faces a looming shortage of primary care physicians and escalating rates of clinician burnout, there is a pressing need to explore alternative models of primary care delivery. Direct Primary Care (DPC) is an emerging primary care model in which patients enroll in a membership plan and make direct monthly or yearly payments to a DPC practice for specific primary care services. Although DPC holds the potential to enhance patient care and mitigate clinician burnout, no published studies provide a financial analysis of DPC practices or compare them to traditional fee-for-service (FFS) primary care models.

Culturally Tailored Strategies to Enhance Type 2 Diabetes Care for South Asians in the United States.

South Asian immigrants in the United States face an elevated risk of developing type 2 diabetes (T2DM). This phenomenon has been linked to lifestyle factors and social determinants of health (SDOH) such as high-carbohydrate diet, limited physical activity, and stress from assimilation and other life challenges. Unfortunately, barriers stemming from language discordance, low health literacy, and certain cultural practices can hinder effective clinical management of T2DM among South Asian immigrants.

The use of race terms in epigenetics research: considerations moving forward.

The field of environmental epigenetics is uniquely suited to investigate biologic mechanisms that have the potential to link stressors to health disparities. However, it is common practice in basic epigenetic research to treat race as a covariable in large data analyses in a way that can perpetuate harmful biases without providing any biologic insight. In this article, we i) propose that epigenetic researchers open a dialogue about how and why race is employed in study designs and think critically about how this might perpetuate harmful biases; ii) call for interdisciplinary conversation and collaboration between epigeneticists and social scientists to promote the collection of more detailed social metrics, particularly institutional and structural metrics such as levels of discrimination that could improve our understanding of individual health outcomes; iii) encourage the development of standards and practices that promote full transparency about data collection methods, particularly with regard to race; and iv) encourage the field of epigenetics to continue to investigate how social structures contribute to biological health disparities, with a particular focus on the influence that structural racism may have in driving these health disparities.

Increased cytotoxicity of Pb with co-exposures to a mitochondrial uncoupler and mitochondrial calcium uniporter inhibitor.

Lead (Pb) is an important developmental toxicant. The mitochondrial calcium uniporter (MCU) imports calcium ions using the mitochondrial membrane potential (MMP), and also appears to mediate the influx of Pb into the mitochondria. Since our environment contains mixtures of toxic agents, it is important to consider multi-chemical exposures.