The New Yorker:

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., declared chronic diseases an “existential threat.” Then his agency terminated one of the world’s longest-running diabetes trials.

By Dhruv Khullar

In 1999, Peggy Bryant, a fifty-year-old oncology nurse in Boston, received a postcard asking whether she’d like to take part in a clinical trial aimed at preventing diabetes. Well, this is fitting, she thought. How many patients have I asked to enroll in trials? Bryant, who’d long struggled with her weight, told me that she had cared for people dealing with grave complications of diabetes—vision loss, kidney failure, limb amputations—and had worried that “full-blown diabetes might be in my future.” She decided to sign up. Some of the trial’s participants were given a medication called metformin; others were given a placebo. Bryant was assigned to a third group, in which volunteers didn’t receive a pill but instead worked with trial staff to meet their health goals, exercise more, and lose weight. About once a month, she gave blood and urine samples. “It changed the way I approached my health,” she told me. “The staff were so committed that it made you more committed.” The study found that, in people with prediabetes, metformin lowered the risk of diabetes by roughly a third; the life-style intervention cut the risk by more than half. Both components were so successful that the trial was stopped early. (All participants got the life-style intervention for a year; since then, the study has mostly been observational.) The Secretary of Health and Human Services held a press conference to announce the findings. “I’ve been doing this a long time, and I’ve never heard of a study’s results being announced by the head of H.H.S.,” David M. Nathan, a Harvard professor who chaired the study, told me. “It was a big fucking deal.”

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