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In a move that reflects a growing acceptance of transgender individuals in the U.S., the American College of Physicians on Monday issued its first guidelines on caring for transgender patients. This isn’t the first set of such guidelines. They go back at least 10 years, initially aimed at endocrinologists, the medical specialty to which transgender individuals were often referred. What is newsworthy about the new guidelines is the audience, “your critical mass of general internal medicine people who are primary care providers and also people who are family medicine doctors,” said Dr. Joshua Safer, professor of endocrinology and executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery in New York City. (Joseph, 7/1)

Going back to the 1940s, radioactive iodine has been among the treatments for an overactive thyroid. It's absorbed mostly by the thyroid gland, destroying those cells. But it has also been linked to cancers in other parts of the body down the line, especially when it's used in higher doses as a treatment for primary thyroid cancer. New research published Monday sheds new light on the association, following up with patients in the United States and the UK for nearly 70 years. Most had an autoimmune disorder that causes hyperthyroidism called Graves' disease. (Nedelman, 7/1)

You might assume that standard medical advice was supported by mounds of scientific research. But researchers recently discovered that nearly 400 routine practices were flatly contradicted by studies published in leading journals. Of more than 3,000 studies published from 2003 through 2017 in JAMA and the Lancet, and from 2011 through 2017 in the New England Journal of Medicine, more than one of 10 amounted to a “medical reversal”: a conclusion opposite of what had been conventional wisdom among doctors. (Kolata, 7/1)

A few years ago, a scientist named Nenad Sestan began throwing around an idea for an experiment so obviously insane, so “wild” and “totally out there,” as he put it to me recently, that at first he told almost no one about it: not his wife or kids, not his bosses in Yale’s neuroscience department, not the dean of the university’s medical school. Like everything Sestan studies, the idea centered on the mammalian brain. More specific, it centered on the tree-shaped neurons that govern speech, motor function and thought — the cells, in short, that make us who we are. (Shaer, 7/2)

As our devices get smaller and more sophisticated, so do the materials we use to make them. That means we have to get up close to engineer new materials. Really close. Different microscopy techniques allow scientists to see the nucleotide-by-nucleotide genetic sequences in cells down to the resolution of a couple atoms as seen in an atomic force microscopy image. But scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. and the Institute for Basic Sciences in Seoul, have taken imaging a step further, developing a new magnetic resonance imaging technique that provides unprecedented detail, right down to the individual atoms of a sample. (Sheikh, 7/1)

Scientists have created living entities that resemble very primitive human embryos, the most advanced example of these structures yet created in a lab. The researchers hope these creations, made from human embryonic stem cells, will provide crucial new insights into human development and lead to new ways to treat infertility and prevent miscarriages, birth defects and many diseases. The researchers say this is the first time scientists have created living models of human embryos with three-dimensional structures. (Stein, 7/1)

Kaylee Patterson woke with a sharp pain in her right eye the morning after she had Lasik surgery. She felt a dull ache on one side of her face. Worried, Ms. Patterson visited her surgeon and her regular eye doctor several times over the next few weeks. They repeatedly told her that everything looked normal, she says. Yet the slightest thing—a draft of air, a ray of light—would cause excruciating pain in her head. “I was in pain and nobody was helping me,” the 33-year-old mental-health counselor said. (McKay, 7/1)

In 2015, Jessica Price, a 29-year-old Air Force veteran in Illinois, started experiencing urinary tract infection symptoms, including an unrelenting urge to urinate and bladder pain. But standard dipstick testing, where a doctor dips a plastic stick into a urine sample to check it for signs of bacteria, kept coming back negative. Based on her symptoms and the negative tests, doctors told Price she had interstitial cystitis (IC), an incurable syndrome of unknown cause and suggested several invasive procedures that only worsened her pain. (Weiss, 7/1)

Scientists believe that bedbugs have developed resistance to some insecticides, and travel is helping to spread the resistant insects worldwide. Another major contributor is the failure of many hotels and residential landlords to identify infestations promptly, and to dispose of or treat infested bedding and carpeting. It has been known since the 1950s that bed bugs can develop resistance to commonly used insecticides, like pyrethrin. Resistance has emerged to more products over the years. (Ray, 7/1)

A new clinical report on organized sports for children, preadolescents and adolescents from the American Academy of Pediatrics keeps coming back to the question of fun. The report summarizes evidence on the many benefits of sports participation for children, from acquiring motor skills to developing positive self-image, from strong social interactions to higher levels of physical activity and good weight management. But especially in younger children, all of this should spring from the child’s desire to get out there and play, and kids who participate in organized sports should also have lots of time for less formal activities with friends. (Klass, 7/1)

When Sylvia Groth steps through the doors of the Vanderbilt Eye Institute in Nashville, she knows she has a tough day ahead. Before she goes home, she’ll likely have at least one hard talk with a person whose sight has been ravaged by glaucoma. “When I make a diagnosis of advanced glaucoma, I do it with a heavy heart,” the ophthalmologist says. “It’s such an empty feeling to not be able to do anything.” (Woolston, 7/1)

People with obesity-related disorders may benefit from supplements of a common gut bacterium, a small pilot study suggests. Researchers tested the bacterium, Akkermansia muciniphila, in 32 men and women who met the criteria for metabolic syndrome by having at least three of five conditions: high fasting blood sugar, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, low HDL (the “good” cholesterol) or excessive waist circumference. (Bakalar, 7/1)