U.S. News & World Report via HealthDay News – Quotes James Sargent, professor of pediatrics and community and family medicine, and senior author of a new study that reports young people who use e-cigarettes are much more likely to become smokers than those who don’t. “The real concern is that if it does indeed move these adolescents in the direction of smoking cigarettes, it’s going to turn around the two-decade-long decline in teen smoking that we’ve seen,” says Sargent. “The government needs to get off the pot on this. They need to act.”

Yahoo News via Reuters – Quotes Dustin Lee, postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychiatry, on a recent study which found that nearly one in five high school students in Connecticut who said they used electronic cigarettes to vaporize nicotine also used them to vaporize marijuana. “We know very little about the acute and long-term effects of high-potency THC on neurobiology and behavior,” says Lee, who was not involved in the study. “This is especially concerning for teens, who are in a critical time for development of brain structures that are integral in executive functioning.”

Payson Roundup – An article on research conducted by Lisa Jackson, Geisel ’14, which found that teens attending Payson High School (PHS) in Payson, Ariz., engage in substantially more high-risk behaviors than the national average — and suffer a much higher rate of teen pregnancies.

Valley News – Sandra Wong, the William W. Coon Professor of Surgical Oncology and associate chairwoman of clinical affairs at the University of Michigan Health System, has been named chairwoman of surgery and senior vice president of the surgical service line at Dartmouth-Hitchcock and chairwoman of surgery at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Her term begins Oct. 26.

Valley News – Quotes Peter Mason, assistant professor of community and family medicine, on the announcement that Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital will become Dartmouth-Hitchcock’s fifth affiliate, should the state approve the agreement the two institutions expect to file in September. Mason says he hopes that an affiliation would make patients’ transitions between the two hospitals “much more seamless and much more appropriate.”

The Boston Globe – Cites comments by Gregory Tsongalis, professor of pathology, from a meeting of the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council last month on how the differences in the molecular profiles of primary tumors and their metastases, and from one spot in a tumor to another, “speak to how little we know about this disease.”

MedPage Today – Quotes Elliot Fisher, director of the Dartmouth Institute for Heath Policy and Clinical Practice, who comments that a hospital or physician group were more likely to achieve savings the longer they had participated in Medicare Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs), which comprise hospitals, physicians groups, and other clinicians collaborating to coordinate care for all patients.

Wired – An opinion piece by Kendall Hoyt, assistant professor of medicine, which urges governments to invest in countermeasure programs that will allow for more speedy and efficient creation of vaccines that are outbreak ready before pandemics arise and spread. Hoyt argues that “medical countermeasure programs must focus not just on innovation but also on the timeliness of innovation. Once this becomes our goal, we will run faster in our race against pathogens.”