High out-of-pocket costs in Medicare may leave many beneficiaries in financial precarity. Beneficiaries with modest incomes are often ineligible for Medicaid (which covers most out-of-pocket Medicare costs) and may have insufficient resources to pay an unexpected health care bill. This has prompted calls to improve financial protections, but the target population remains uncharacterized.

Cell-free DNA blood tests (cf-bDNA) and next-generation stool tests could change colorectal cancer (CRC) screening.

Rosuvastatin and atorvastatin are the most widely prescribed moderate- to high-intensity statins. However, evidence on their efficacy and safety during actual use is limited.

Headache medicine and therapeutics evidence have been rapidly expanding and evolving since the 2020 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) clinical practice guideline (CPG) for the management of headache. Therefore, the CPG was revised in 2023, earlier than the standard 5-year cycle. This article reviews the 2023 CPG recommendations relevant to primary care clinicians for treatment and prevention of migraine and tension-type headache (TTH).

Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) adults have historically been grouped with Asian adults in U.S. mortality surveillance. Starting in 2018, the 1997 race and ethnicity standards from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget were adopted by all states on death certificates, enabling national-level estimates of cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality for NHPI adults independent of Asian adults.

REPRIEVE (Randomized Trial to Prevent Vascular Events in HIV) led to new guidelines for statin use among people with HIV (PWH) with low to moderate risk for atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD). Little is known about the natural history of diabetes mellitus (DM) or mechanisms contributing to statin effects on DM among this population.

Induced abortion is safe, is common, and reduces pregnancy-related maternal morbidity and mortality. Internal medicine physicians are uniquely positioned to counsel patients on their pregnancy options, assess medical risks of pregnancy in the context of comorbidities, refer for abortion care when the patient desires it, or provide abortion care themselves. Clinicians can also provide anticipatory guidance about what patients should expect if they seek abortion care.

Target trial emulation is an approach to designing rigorous nonexperimental studies by "emulating" key features of a clinical trial. Most commonly used outside of policy contexts, this approach is also valuable for policy evaluation as policies typically are not randomly assigned. In this article, we discuss the application of the target trial emulation framework in a policy evaluation context. The policy trial emulation framework includes 7 components: the units and eligibility criteria, definitions of the exposure and comparison conditions, assignment mechanism, baseline ("time zero") and follow-up, outcomes, causal estimand, and statistical analysis and assumptions. Policy evaluations that emulate a randomized trial across these dimensions can yield estimates of the causal effects of the policy on outcomes. Using the policy trial emulation framework to conduct and report on research design and methods supports transparent assessment of threats to causal inference in nonexperimental studies intended to assess the effect of a health policy on clinical or population health outcomes.