Health
Drug Company to Share Revenues With Indigenous People Who Donated Their Genes
When Stephane Castel first met with a group of Māori people and other Pacific Islanders in New Zealand to talk about his drug company’s plans for genetic research, locals worried he might be seeking to profit from the genes of community members without much thought to them.
Instead, Dr. Castel and his colleagues explained, they were aiming to strike an unconventional bargain: In exchange for entrusting them with their genetic heritage, participating communities would receive a share of the company’s revenues. Dr. Castel also vowed not to patent any genes — as many other companies had done — but rather the drugs his company developed from the partnership.
“A lot of people told us this was a crazy idea, and it wouldn’t work,” Dr. Castel said. But five years after that first conversation during an Indigenous health research conference in March 2019, Dr. Castel’s gambit is beginning to pay off for both parties.
On Tuesday, his company, Variant Bio, based in Seattle, announced a $50 million collaboration with the drugmaker Novo Nordisk to develop drugs for metabolic disorders, including diabetes and obesity, using data collected from Indigenous populations. Variant Bio will distribute a portion of those funds to the communities it worked with in nine countries or territories, including the Māori, and will seek to make any medicines that result from its work available to those communities at an affordable price.
Experts on Indigenous genetics said the deal was a positive step for a field that has been plagued by accusations of exploitation and a gulf of mistrust.
“In the past, researchers would enter Indigenous communities with empty promises,” said Krystal Tsosie, a geneticist and bioethicist at Arizona State University who runs a nonprofit genetic repository for Indigenous people. “Variant Bio is the only company, to the best of my knowledge, that has explicitly talked about benefit-sharing as part of their mission.”
The concept for Variant Bio was hatched in a Manhattan bar in August 2018 over drinks between Dr. Castel and Kaja Wasik, who had become friends during their graduate studies in genetics at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island.
Though their laboratory research kept them under the glare of fluorescent lights, they shared a zest for international travel, which they indulged during backpacking trips together in Peru and Chile. They dreamed of building a company that could get them to remote places.
At the time, drugmakers were establishing partnerships with biological repositories such as UK Biobank, which contains biological samples and health records from a half-million people living in Britain, in order to hunt for associations between genes and disease.
But these databases are primarily made up of genes from people of European descent.
“What’s the value of sequencing the 500,001st British person?” Dr. Castel said. “There are only so many insights to find by studying the same group of people.”
He and Dr. Wasik were more enthusiastic about recent findings from underrepresented groups, such as the discovery of novel gene variants affecting metabolism that were first identified in Inuit populations in Greenland.
Such variants may be more common, and consequently easier to identify, in historically isolated populations because they confer some functional benefit to people with a certain diet or lifestyle, or simply because of chance events in their history. Yet they can also serve as promising drug targets that will help a wider swath of the global population.
With $16 million in seed funding from Lux Capital, a venture capital firm in New York City, Dr. Castel and Dr. Wasik quit their jobs and began working full-time for their startup. Dr. Wasik hopped across eight countries in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Pacific in the company’s first year, while Dr. Castel, for the most part, dutifully built their software platform from his base in the United States.
They enlisted ethical advisers to develop a benefit-sharing model and went on a listening tour. They knew from the get-go they would have to tread carefully.
In 2007, a member of the Karitiana tribe in Brazil told The New York Times that his community had been “duped, lied to and exploited” by scientists who had collected their blood and DNA, which was later sold for $85 per sample. The tribe members, who said they had been wooed with promises of medicines, received nothing.
Ten years later, there was still no consensus about the optimal way to conduct such work. To protect against so-called biopiracy, many countries ratified the Nagoya Protocol under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which requires the “equitable sharing of benefits” emerging from genetic resources. But the protocol excluded human genomic information.
During Dr. Castel’s and Dr. Wasik’s trip to New Zealand in 2019, the researchers and community members were troubled by a previous attempt by U.S. researchers to patent a test for obesity risk based on genetic studies carried out in Samoa. The researchers’ universities did not include their Samoan collaborators on their patent application as co-inventors, nor did they have formal benefit-sharing agreements in place with local institutions. (That patent application has since been abandoned, and the researchers said they always intended to share benefits with their partners.)
One of Variant’s first advisers was Keolu Fox, an outspoken geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, who had been harshly critical of the Samoan research.
“This is an extension of all these other forms of colonialism,” said Dr. Fox, who is Native Hawaiian and joined Dr. Wasik and Dr. Castel on their New Zealand outreach trip. He believed that Variant could lead by example.
In the company’s benefit-sharing program, up to 10 percent of a project’s budget goes toward community programs, typically by funding local organizations.
For example, as part of its New Zealand-based study into the genetic causes of kidney disease and other metabolic disorders in the Māori and other people of Pacific ancestry, the company spent $100,000 to fund several local health organizations along with scholarships and scientific conferences for Indigenous people.
“Before Variant came along, we didn’t do that because we couldn’t afford to do so,” said Tony Merriman, a gout expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who has collaborated with the company on two projects in the Pacific region.
Dr. Merriman said that he also appreciated that the company ensured that its findings were shared with the community. In French Polynesia, the company’s research has encouraged increased access to a gout medication after concluding that the local population did not have an elevated risk of a fatal drug reaction that had been observed in certain Asian populations.
The new Novo Nordisk deal kicks off a second, longer-term phase of the benefit-sharing program. Communities will share in a 4 percent slice of Variant’s revenue and, if the company is ever sold or goes public, 4 percent of its equity. That percentage is comparable to the royalties that universities receive for licenses to their patents.
Ron Curtis, an English professor in Montreal, lived for 40 years with a degenerative spinal disease, in what he called the “black hole” of chronic pain.
On a July day in 2022, Mr. Curtis, 64, ate a last bowl of vegetable soup made by his wife, Lori, and, with the help of a palliative care doctor, died in his bedroom overlooking a lake.
Aron Wade, a successful 54-year-old stage and television actor in Belgium, decided he could no longer tolerate life with the depression that haunted him for three decades.
Last year, after a panel of medical experts found he had “unbearable mental suffering,” a doctor came to his home and gave him medicine to stop his heart, with his partner and two best friends at his side.
Argemiro Ariza was in his early 80s when he began to lose function in his limbs, no longer able to care for his wife, who had dementia, in their home in Bogotá.
Doctors diagnosed A.L.S., and he told his daughter Olga that he wanted to die while he still had dignity. His children threw him a party with a mariachi band and lifted him from his wheelchair to dance. A few days later, he admitted himself to a hospital, and a doctor administered a drug that ended his life.
Until recently, each of these deaths would have been considered a murder. But a monumental change is underway around the world. From liberal European countries to conservative Latin American ones, a new way of thinking about death is starting to take hold.
Over the past five years, the practice of allowing a physician to help severely ill patients end their lives with medication has been legalized in nine countries on three continents. Courts or legislatures, or both, are considering legalization in a half-dozen more, including South Korea and South Africa, as well as eight of the 31 American states where it remains prohibited.
It is a last frontier in the expansion of individual autonomy. More people are seeking to define the terms of their deaths in the same way they have other aspects of their lives, such as marriage and childbearing. This is true even in Latin America, where conservative institutions such as the Roman Catholic church are still powerful.
“We believe in the priority of our control over our bodies, and as a heterogeneous culture, we believe in choices: If your choice does not affect me, go ahead,” said Dr. Julieta Moreno Molina, a bioethicist who has advised Colombia’s Ministry of Health on its assisted dying regulations.
Yet, as assisted death gains more acceptance, there are major unresolved questions about who should be eligible. While most countries begin with assisted death for terminal illness, which has the most public support, this is often followed quickly by a push for wider access. With that push comes often bitter public debate.
Should someone with intractable depression be allowed an assisted death?
European countries and Colombia all permit people with irremediable suffering from conditions such as depression or schizophrenia to seek an assisted death. But in Canada, the issue has become contentious. Assisted death for people who do not have a reasonably foreseeable natural death was legalized in 2021, but the government has repeatedly excluded people with mental illness. Two of them are challenging the exclusion in court on the grounds that it violates their constitutional rights.
In public debate, supporters of the right to assisted death for these patients say that people who have lived with severe depression for years, and have tried a variety of therapies and medications, should be allowed to decide when they are no longer willing to keep pursuing treatments. Opponents, concerned that mental illness can involve a pathological wish to die, say it can be difficult to predict the potential effectiveness of treatments. And, they argue, people who struggle to get help from an overburdened public health service may simply give up and choose to die, though their conditions might have been improved.
Should a child with an incurable condition be able to choose assisted death?
The ability to consent is a core consideration in requesting assisted death. Only a handful of countries are willing to extend that right to minors. Even in the places that do, there are just a few assisted deaths for children each year, almost always children with cancer.
In Colombia and the Netherlands, children over 12 can request assisted death on their own. Parents can provide consent for children 11 and younger.
Denise de Ruijter took comfort in her Barbie dolls when she struggled to connect with people. She was diagnosed with autism and had episodes of depression and psychosis. As a teenager in a Dutch town, she craved the life her schoolmates had — nights out, boyfriends — but couldn’t manage it.
She attempted suicide several times before applying for an assisted death at 18. Evaluators required her to try three years of additional therapies before agreeing her suffering was unbearable. She died in 2021, with her family and Barbies nearby.
The issue is under renewed scrutiny in the Netherlands, where, over the past decade, a growing number of adolescents have applied for assisted death for relief from irremediable psychiatric suffering from conditions such as eating disorders and anxiety.
Most such applications by teens are either withdrawn by the patient, or rejected by assessors, but public concern over a few high-profile cases of teens who received assisted deaths prompted the country’s regulator to consider a moratorium on approvals for children applying on the basis of psychiatric suffering.
Should someone with dementia be allowed assisted death?
Many people dread the idea of losing their cognitive abilities and their autonomy, and hope to have an assisted death when they reach that point. But this is a more complex situation to regulate than for a person who can still make a clear request.
How can a person who is losing their mental capacity consent to dying? Most governments, and doctors, are too uncomfortable to permit it, even though the idea tends to be popular in countries with aging populations.
In Colombia, Spain, Ecuador and the Canadian province of Quebec, people who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or other kinds of cognitive decline can request assessment for an assisted death before they lose mental capacity, sign an advance request — and then have a physician end their life after they have lost the ability to consent themselves.
But that raises a separate, challenging, question: After people lose the capacity to request an assisted death, who should decide it’s time?
Their spouses? Their children? Their doctors? The government? Colombia entrusts families with this role. The Netherlands leaves it up to doctors — but many refuse to do it, unwilling to administer lethal drugs to a patient who can’t clearly articulate a rational wish to die.
Jan Grijpma was always clear with his daughter, Maria: When his mind went, he didn’t want to live any more. Maria worked with his longtime family doctor, in Amsterdam, to identify the point when Mr. Grijpma, 90 and living in a nursing home, was losing his ability to consent himself.
When it seemed close, in 2023, they booked the day, and he updated his day planner: Thursday, visit the vicar; Friday, bicycle with physiotherapy and get a haircut; Sunday, pancakes with Maria; Monday, euthanasia.
All of these questions are becoming part of the discussion as the right to control and plan one’s own death is pushed in front of reluctant legislatures and uneasy medical professionals.
Dr. Madeline Li, a Toronto psychiatrist, was given the task of developing the assisted-dying practice in one of Canada’s largest hospitals when the procedure was first decriminalized in 2015. She began with assessing patients for eligibility and then moved to providing medical assistance in dying, or MAID, as it is called in Canada. For some patients with terminal cancer, it felt like the best form of care she could offer, she said.
But then Canada’s eligibility criteria expanded, and Dr. Li found herself confronting a different kind of patient.
“To provide assisted dying to somebody dying of a condition who is not happy with how they’re going to die, I’m willing to assist them, and hasten that death,” she said. “I struggle more with people who aren’t dying and want MAID — I think then you’re assisting suicide. If you’re not dying — if I didn’t give you MAID, you wouldn’t otherwise die — then you’re a person who’s not unhappy with how you’re going to die. You’re unhappy with how you’re living.”
Who has broken the taboo?
For decades, Switzerland was the only country to permit assisted death; assisted suicide was legalized there in 1942. It took a further half century for a few more countries to loosen their laws. Now decriminalization of some form of assisted death has occurred across Europe.
But there has recently been a wave of legalization in Latin America, where Colombia was long an outlier, having allowed legal assisted dying since 2015.
Paola Roldán Espinosa had a thriving career in business in Ecuador, and a toddler, when she was diagnosed with A.L.S. in 2023. Her health soon deteriorated to the point that she needed a ventilator.
She wanted to die on her terms — and took the case to the country’s highest court. In February 2024, the court responded to her petition by decriminalizing assisted dying. Ms. Roldán, then 42, had the death she sought, with her family around her, a month later.
Ecuador has decriminalized assisted dying through constitutional court cases, and Peru’s Supreme Court has permitted individual exceptions to the law which prohibits the procedure, opening the door to expansion. Cuba’s national assembly legalized assisted dying in 2023, although no regulations on how the procedure will work are yet in place. In October, Uruguay’s parliament passed a long-debated law allowing assisted death for the terminally ill.
The first country in Asia to take steps toward legalization is South Korea, where a bill to decriminalize assisted death has been proposed at the National Assembly several times but has not come to a vote. At the same time, the Constitutional Court, which for years refused to hear cases on the subject, has agreed to adjudicate a petition from a disabled man with severe and chronic pain who seeks an assisted death.
Access in the United States remains limited: 11 jurisdictions (10 states plus the District of Columbia) allow assisted suicide or physician-assisted death, for patients who have a terminal diagnosis, and in some cases, only for patients who are already in hospice care. It will become legal in Delaware on Jan. 1, 2026.
In Slovenia, in 2024, 55 percent of the population who voted in a national referendum were in favor of legalizing assisted death, and parliament duly passed a law in July. But pushback from right-wing politicians then forced a new referendum, and in late November, 54 percent of those who voted rejected the legalization.
And in the United Kingdom, a bill to legalize assisted death for people with terminal illness has made its way slowly through parliament. It has faced fierce opposition from a coalition of more than 60 groups for people with disabilities, who argue they may face subtle coercion to end their lives rather than drain their families or the state of resources for their care.
Why now?
In many countries, decriminalization of assisted dying has followed the expansion of rights for personal choice in other areas, such as the removal of restrictions on same-sex marriage, abortion and sometimes drug use.
“I would expect it to be on the agenda in every liberal democracy,” said Wayne Sumner, a medical ethicist at the University of Toronto who studies the evolution of norms and regulations around assisted dying. “They’ll come to it at their own speed, but it follows with these other policies.”
The change is also being driven by a convergence of political, demographic and cultural trends.
As populations age, and access to health care improves, more people are living longer. Older populations mean more chronic disease, and more people living with compromised health. And they are thinking about death, and what they will — and won’t — be willing to tolerate in the last years of their lives.
At the same time, there is diminishing tolerance for suffering that is perceived as unnecessary.
“Until very recently, we were a society where few people lived past 60 — and now suddenly we live much longer,” said Lina Paola Lara Negrette, a psychologist who until October was the director of the Dying With Dignity Foundation in Colombia. “Now people here need to think about the system, and the services that are available, and what they will want.”
Changes in family structures and communities, particularly in rapidly urbanizing middle-income countries, mean that traditional networks of care are less strong, which shifts how people can imagine living in older age or with chronic illness, she added.
“When you had many siblings and a lot of generations under one roof, the question of care was a family thing,” she said. “That has changed. And it shapes how we think about living, and dying.”
How does assisted dying work?
Beyond the ethical dilemmas, actually carrying out legalized assisted deaths involves countless choices for countries. Spain requires a waiting period of at least 15 days between a patient’s assessments (but the average wait in practice is 75 days). In most other places, the prescribed wait is less than two weeks for patients with terminal conditions, but often longer in practice, said Katrine Del Villar, a professor of constitutional law at the Queensland University of Technology who tracks trends in assisted dying
Most countries allow patients to choose between administering the drugs themselves or having a health care provider do it. When both options are available, the overwhelming majority of people choose to have a health care provider end their life with an injection that stops their heart.
In many countries only a doctor can administer the drugs, but Canada and New Zealand permit nurse practitioners to provide medically assisted deaths too.
One Australian state prohibits medical professionals from raising the topic of assisted death. A patient must ask about it first.
Who determines eligibility is another issue. In the Netherlands, two physicians assess a patient; in Colombia, it’s a panel consisting of a medical specialist, a psychologist and a lawyer. The draft legislation in Britain would require both a panel and two independent physicians.
Switzerland and the states of Oregon and Vermont are the only jurisdictions in the world that explicitly allow people who are not residents access to assisted deaths.
Most countries permit medical professionals to conscientiously object to providing assisted deaths and allow faith-based medical institutions to refuse to participate. In Canada, individual professionals have the right to refuse, but a court challenge is underway seeking to end the ability of hospitals that are controlled by faith-based organizations and that operate with public funds to refuse to allow assisted deaths on their premises.
“Even when assisted dying has been legal and available somewhere for a long time, there can be a gap between what is legal and what is acceptable — what most physicians and patients and families feel comfortable with,” said Dr. Sisco van Veen, an ethicist and psychiatrist at Amsterdam Medical University. “And this isn’t static. It evolves over time.”
Jin Yu Young in Seoul, José Bautista in Madrid, José María León Cabrera in Quito, Veerle Schyns in Amsterdam and Koba Ryckewaert in Brussels contributed reporting.
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A new experimental scalp treatment called clascoterone has shown strong results in helping reduce male-pattern hair loss (also known as androgenetic alopecia, or AGA).
Experts call the results promising, claiming that this could be the first new approach to reversing hair loss in decades.
Conducted by Cosmo Pharmaceuticals in Ireland, the two large, late-stage trials — named Scalp 1 and Scalp 2 — enrolled a combined total of 1,465 men across the U.S. and Europe, according to a press release.
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Participants either used the topical solution or a placebo under randomized conditions. The main measure of success was “target-area hair count” (TAHC), an objective count of hairs in a defined scalp area.
The topical solution works by blocking the action of dihydrotestosterone (DHT) — a hormone that causes genetically sensitive hair follicles to shrink — directly at the follicle receptor rather than affecting hormones system-wide, according to Cosmo Pharmaceuticals.
Cosmo Pharmaceuticals reported strong phase 3 results for clascoterone in treating male-pattern hair loss. (iStock)
This localized approach attempts to address the biological root cause of AGA without exposing the body to additional hormones.
In the Scalp 1 group, clascoterone showed a 539% relative improvement in hair count compared with the placebo group. The participants in Scalp 2 showed a 168% relative improvement, the release stated.
“We really don’t have a very effective cream or lotion for hair loss, so this may be valuable for widespread clinical use.”
One study showed “statistical significance” in patient-reported outcomes, while the other showed a “favorable trend,” the release noted. When data from both trials were combined, the improvement was described as “statistically significant” and aligned with the counted-hair results.
“For decades, patients have had to choose between available treatment options with limited efficacy or safety issues due to systemic hormonal exposure, often resulting in patients not treating their hair loss at all,” Maria Hordinsky, M.D., from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Dermatology, said in a statement sent to Fox News Digital.
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“These findings show the potential for clascoterone 5% topical solution to change that equation by delivering real, measurable regrowth with negligible systemic exposure,” added Hordinsky.
Patient-reported outcomes — how study participants perceived their hair growth — were also positive.
If approved, the treatment would be the first new approach in nearly three decades. (iStock)
“I think this is promising,” Marc Siegel, M.D., senior medical analyst for Fox News, told Fox News Digital. “We really don’t have a very effective cream or lotion for hair loss,” added the doctor, who was not involved in the study.
Minoxidil lotion, one of the most widely used, FDA-approved topical treatments, generally has limited effectiveness, Siegel noted. “So, this may well be valuable for widespread clinical use.”
Potential limitations and risks
Siegel, who was not involved in the trials, referenced the study’s claim that the only side effect was “local irritation,” and said the medication appeared to be generally safe.
Safety and tolerance of the drug appeared to be comparable to the placebo group. Side effects were minimal and occurred at similar rates in both the active and placebo groups, with most found to be unrelated to the drug, according to the researchers.
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The researchers noted that the improvement in the study participants was in comparison to the placebo group in the study — it doesn’t guarantee that men will grow five times more hair than with other treatments.
Safety outcomes for the medication were similar to placebo, with no unexpected adverse effects, the researchers said. (iStock)
Each individual’s results depend on how much hair they had at the start, and without the full data, it’s unclear how much visible growth most men will achieve.
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“You do need to watch out for allergic reactions, and in rare cases, adrenal insufficiency, since the cream is an anti-androgen,” Siegel cautioned. This means because this treatment blocks androgens (male hormones), it could slightly affect the adrenal glands, which help the body manage stress hormones.
Full data, including long-term results and detailed absolute hair-count changes, are still pending regulatory review. (iStock)
Also, these are top-line results, as more detailed data — including long-term durability, variation between different degrees of hair loss and extended safety over 12 months — have yet to be released.
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If approved, this would be the first scalp treatment that works by blocking DHT right at the hair follicle — the first of its kind made specifically for male hair loss, the company says.
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Cosmo plans to complete a full 12-month safety follow-up by spring 2026 before submitting the medication for regulatory approval in the U.S. and Europe.
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Each year, more than 5 million cosmetic filler procedures are performed in the U.S. — but these injectables can potentially block key blood vessels, putting patients at risk for serious harm.
In a study presented this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago, doctors found that ultrasound technology can spot these dangerous blockages early enough to guide treatment and help prevent lasting injury.
The researchers looked at data from 100 patients from six different locations who experienced vascular complications after hyaluronic acid filler injections. All data were collected between May 2022 and April 2025, according to a press release.
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They found that ultrasounds successfully detected vascular occlusion, which is a blockage in a blood vessel that stops normal blood flow.
If this condition goes untreated, it can cause pain, skin damage and scarring — and, in severe cases, vision loss or stroke.
Each year, more than 5 million cosmetic filler procedures are performed in the U.S. — but these injectables can potentially block key blood vessels. (iStock)
“Doppler ultrasound helps doctors see exactly where the filler is, how the blood is flowing in real time, and whether blood vessels may have been affected after a cosmetic procedure,” lead researcher Rosa Maria Silveira Sigrist, M.D., attending radiologist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, told Fox News Digital.
“The physical exam continues to be very important, but the ultrasound adds extra information that makes the evaluation safer and the treatment more precise.”
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In the study, more than 40% of patients had blockages in the perforator vessels, which are small connecting blood vessels, while 35% had major facial arteries that showed no blood flow.
The nasal region was identified as the highest-risk area, as the lateral nasal artery runs along the side of the nose and supplies blood to larger arteries that lead toward the eye and the brain.
Doctors found that ultrasound technology can spot dangerous blockages early enough to guide treatment and help prevent lasting injury. (iStock)
“Vascular occlusion after filler injections can lead to devastating outcomes, including skin necrosis, tissue loss, and — in the worst cases — blindness and even stroke,” Dr. Anthony Berlet, a board-certified plastic surgeon in New Jersey, who was not involved in the research, told Fox News Digital.
“Once a critical artery — for example, one feeding the retina or skin — is occluded by filler or embolus, the damage may be irreversible.”
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In the hands of an experienced, licensed professional using proper techniques, the risk of a vascular occlusion should be less than 1%, according to Dr. Samuel Golpanian, a double board-certified plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills.
“But if fillers are done by someone untrained or using the wrong needles or methods, the complication rate can be much higher — 10% to 20%, which is completely unacceptable,” Golpanian, who also did not work on the study, told Fox News Digital.
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Ultrasound helped doctors pinpoint the locations of the blockages, allowing them to place a dissolving enzyme (hyaluronidase) right where it was needed and avoid using large, guesswork doses.
The researchers suggested that using ultrasound during the injection itself could help to prevent blood-vessel injuries and enable faster, more precise treatment if blockages occur.
In the hands of an experienced, licensed professional using proper techniques, the risk of a vascular occlusion should be less than 1%, one plastic surgeon stated. (iStock)
“Ideally, ultrasound should be integrated into care in a way that supports timely decision-making — either as an immediate point-of-care tool in trained hands, or to confirm and optimize management once initial rescue therapy has begun,” Dr. Asif Pirani, a board-certified cosmetic plastic surgeon in Toronto, Canada, told Fox News Digital.
To minimize dangerous complications, Pirani — another outside expert not involved in the study — emphasized that injectable treatments should be performed by board-certified specialists with formal training in facial anatomy and complication protocols.
Study limitations
Some limitations of the study were noted, including its relatively small sample size (100 adults) and the fact that it has not yet been peer-reviewed.
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“Another limitation we noticed is that the Doppler exam is performed differently even among very experienced specialists,” the lead researcher told Fox News Digital. “This shows how important it is to create clear, standardized guidelines, so the exam can be done in a more consistent way.”
“Once a critical artery is occluded by filler or embolus, the damage may be irreversible.”
Also, all study participants experienced significant complications, which means the findings may not apply to those with milder cases or different filler types.
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There could also be some degree of geographic bias, as the research was conducted in Brazil, where training standards may differ from the U.S.
Future studies are needed to follow more patients over longer time periods and track their recovery after ultrasound-guided treatment, the study noted.
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