UT San Antonio study: As FDA approved semaglutide for weight management, calls to poison control centers skyrocketed in the U.S.

Prior to 2021, poison control centers nationally received roughly 1,000 to 1,500 cases per year. After mid-2021, these volumes nearly doubled, and by 2023 poison centers logged more than 8,000 GLP-1RA-related calls

University of Texas at San Antonio

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When semaglutide’s popularity exploded following FDA approval for weight management in 2021, so too did a wave of calls to poison control centers.

At the time, Jordan Miller ’25 was a UT San Antonio undergraduate student. She set out to discover if the spike in calls was a result of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration’s expanded approval or simply a coincidence.

Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Receptor Agonists (GLP-1RAs) became a cultural phenomenon after the FDA first approved them for chronic weight management in 2021. As sales soared, poison control centers across the country were also experiencing a massive increase in incoming calls — and there was a clear category that stood out.

“One of them was this quite odd category of semaglutide,” said David Han, Miller’s research mentor and Romo Endowed Professor in the UT San Antonio Department of Statistics & Data Science. “We suspected that the call volume was skyrocketing because of the misuse and mishandling of this drug and that it may be attributed to the FDA approval of this drug for weight management.”

Under Han’s guidance and supported by the Provost’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship, Miller and Long School of Medicine colleagues Robert S. Miller, Pharm.D, senior specialist in poison information, and Shawn M. Varney, MD, professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine and medical director of the South Texas Poison Center, studied the data.

Jordan Miller later presented the team’s findings at UT San Antonio’s Los Datos conference, where she took home first prize.

Prior to 2021, poison control centers nationally received roughly 1,000 to 1,500 cases per year. After mid-2021, these volumes nearly doubled, and by 2023 poison centers logged more than 8,000 GLP-1RA-related calls.

Most cases stemmed from unintentional dosing or therapeutic errors rather than deliberate misuse, but the UT San Antonio researchers found the massive increase jarring nonetheless.

“In that figure that tracks the increase by specific drug, I wasn’t expecting semaglutide to be so incredibly dominant,” Jordan Miller recalled. “I figured that it would lead the pack, but it was staggering. On the other hand, it makes sense with all the media attention.”

Han says the research is a living example of what data science is meant to do — moving beyond numbers and into the world.

“This work demonstrates the quantified impact of these drugs on public health,” he said. “Statistics, data science, analytics, machine learning and AI are meant to help people. We use them to transform data from any field into meaningful insight and informed action. Without that focus, it becomes hollow – numbers without real impact.”

The project by Miller, now a UT San Antonio graduate student in mathematics, began with a simple question she almost didn’t ask.

“You lose nothing by asking,” she said. “If you have a professor, you really get along with or admire, you lose nothing by asking them what they’re working on or if they have space for a research assistant. I got really lucky with Dr. Han saying, ‘I’m here to help — you pick what you want to work on.’”

Miller’s research confirmed that the FDA’s semaglutide approval was a clear inflection point. The volume and nature of calls before and after approval told two very different stories. The pool of people using GLP-1RA drugs to treat diabetes is one thing; the population now using them for weight loss is an entirely different scale.

“When the GLP-1[RA] drugs are being sold to diabetic patients, that’s a completely different story versus when the drug is used for weight management,” Han explained. “So, we had to quantify this evidence to show that it stemmed from the FDA approval and how to contain the risk. We need to better educate the public because how this drug behaves in our body and its long-term safety are not yet fully understood.”

The errors driving the spike in calls to poison control centers were, in many cases, preventable. Semaglutide is a weekly injection, not a daily one. Patients are also supposed to begin at a low dose before gradually increasing their use. Two of the most common mistakes were captured in the data. Patients were injecting daily instead of weekly, and they were starting at the full dose immediately.

“Can you imagine something you’re supposed to trickle up to, and you’re going full blast and seven times more often than you’re supposed to?” Jordan Miller said.

The solution, both Miller and Han agree, lies in education—from the prescriber’s office to the pharmacy counter.

The team’s research was featured as the cover story in Significance, a flagship magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association. It is also published in the Journal of Medical Toxicology, the official journal of the American College of Medical Toxicology.

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Journal

Journal of Medical Toxicology

 

People lack critical information about wildfire smoke risks

New research reveals gaps in wildfire smoke education, highlights need to better protect vulnerable populations

COPD Foundation

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Miami (June 23, 2026) – Wildfire smoke can trigger breathing problems and flare-ups for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), yet many people are not receiving the trusted health information they need to stay safe, according to a new study in the May 2026 issue of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases: Journal of the COPD Foundation, a peer-reviewed, open access journal.

Wildfire smoke negatively affects air quality across the United States and is a leading cause of pollution. Wildfire smoke is especially dangerous for people with COPD, often triggering breathing difficulties and exacerbations. COPD, which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis, affects more than 30 million Americans and is the fourth leading cause of death worldwide.

In this new study, researchers interviewed people living with COPD who were enrolled in Kaiser Permanente Northern California and lived near significant wildfire events in the past to explore participants’ understanding of wildfire smoke, protective behaviors, and information sources.

Interview responses revealed most people rely on smartphone apps and online information for air quality information; have not had conversations with their doctors about how air quality negatively affects their health; lack knowledge about mitigation strategies (indoor air purifiers, vehicle air recirculation button); and prefer real-time guidance from their health care team when air quality becomes a health risk.

“Some patients are already monitoring air quality but not all,” said Laura C. Myers, M.D., MPH, of Kaiser Permanente Northern California and senior author of the study. “We need to make sure that people with COPD receive accurate, actionable guidance from trusted sources in real-time so they can take actions to protect themselves. Patient-centered approaches to wildfire preparedness can help the most vulnerable people prepare for and respond to air quality events before their symptoms get worse.”

To access current and past issues of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases: Journal of the COPD Foundation, visit journal.copdfoundation.org.

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About the COPD Foundation
The COPD Foundation is a nonprofit organization whose mission is to help millions of people live longer and healthier lives by advancing research, advocacy, and awareness to stop COPD, bronchiectasis, and NTM lung disease. The Foundation does this through scientific research, education, advocacy, and awareness to prevent disease, slow progression, and find a cure. For more information, visit copdfoundation.org, or follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Journal

Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Diseases Journal of the COPD Foundation

DOI

10.15326/jcopdf.2025.0682 

Article Title

Understanding COPD Patients’ Perspectives on Utilizing Strategies to Limit Their Exposure to Wildfire Smoke

 

High-severity fires burn 30 times more acreage than 40 years ago, researchers find

University of California - Los Angeles

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Key takeaways

• From 1985-2024, high-severity forest fire increased thirtyfold in California, outpacing restorative fire, a UCLA study found.
• Increases in fire severity correlate with drying trends linked to climate change, especially in densely forested areas.
• Severe fires kill trees instead of giving them a chance to recover, changing the face of California’s landscape.

Forest fires now burn ten times more acreage annually than in 1985, while wildfire severity has gotten even worse. In California, 30 times more acreage burned from high-severity, forest-killing fires, according to new UCLA research. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, California’s forest fires burned mostly at low or moderate severity, generally benefiting ecosystems. But as fires have grown in size, severe fires causing widespread tree death have overtaken beneficial fire as the most common fire type in California’s forests.

The study, published June 22 in the journal PNAS, found that the changes are tied to the increasingly warm and arid environment. These aridity-driven changes were also stronger in more densely forested areas, said UCLA bioclimatologist and senior author Park Williams.

“These high-severity, forest-replacing fires used to be uncommon, and now it’s the dominant fire type,” said Williams, a UCLA professor of geography. The research showed that the yearly forest area burned by severe fires increased at a much faster rate than the area burned by beneficial, lower-severity fire from 1985 to 2024, even as both fire types increased. “Fire is a natural process that can be healthy for ecosystems, but most of California’s tree species have a difficult time coming back following fires that kill huge swaths of trees.”

The biggest fire year in terms of forest area burned in the Western U.S. in modern history was 2020, and then 2021 quickly became the second biggest year on record, Williams said. CalFire data showed that 8 of the 10 largest fires to take place in California’s last 100 years all happened within the last 10 years.

Low-severity blazes started to be outnumbered in California in 2012, said lead author Mitchell Hung, an earth-systems researcher who completed the fire study as a graduate student at UCLA. 

“From 2012 to 2024, high-severity fire beat out low-severity fire every single year,” said Hung, now a doctoral student at Stanford. “There’s a clear trend.”

Burn severity has quantitative measures, such as how much tree canopy burns away, or how badly the soil chars. To Hung, it also has a telltale look that he associates with painful trips through Yosemite National Park. 

“I’ve driven through Yosemite a fair number of times, where often I’ll round a bend and see this huge field of burned snags,” Hung said. “Post-fire snags are the remnants of trees after everything has burned away but the trunk. They’re like tree gravestones.”

Why this is happening

The researchers found two main causes for the increase in fire severity. The first was fuel density. The UCLA study showed that severe burning increased the most rapidly in forests with the highest biomass density — that is, the densest plant life, with understories often full of highly flammable brush. This suggests fire prevention efforts, which have allowed many of California’s forest areas to accumulate high fuel densities, have contributed to the current problem, the researchers observed in the paper.

“We all remember Smokey Bear — ‘Only you can prevent forest fires’,” said Hung. “That had an inadvertently damaging effect on these ecosystems, which evolved alongside more frequent, less severe fires to keep them healthy. Preventing a fire often just prevents it in the short term, but kicks the can to a later point when there’s even more fuel to burn.”

With the increase in fire severity causing extensive tree death rather than benefiting the forests, California’s forest ecosystems are vulnerable to shifting toward grass and shrub plant types. When severe fires open up massive gaps in a forest and bake the soils, the nearest living seed source is often too far away for a new generation of trees to quickly regrow, Williams said. 

“The shift in fire types means land cover is changing,” Williams said. “Are we going to get rapid regeneration of dense forests, or will we go decades or longer without forests returning? Changes in vegetation cover will then circle back to affect future fire. A shift from forest to grass would alter how tightly connected future fires are to droughts, heat waves or wind events. If we want to understand how fire will continue to change in the future, we need to understand how fire is changing vegetation ecosystems.”

As forests burn, the state also loses the benefits that forests provide, such as cleaning the air, regulating the climate, supporting water management by reducing storm run-off and flooding, and even economic benefits like the timber and tourism industries, Hung said. In contrast, high-severity fires generate massive amounts of air pollution and increase flood risk.

“The loss of these forests isn’t just, ‘I can’t take a pretty picture,’” Hung said. “There are profound socioeconomic impacts. Real dollars are being lost each year due to high-severity forest fire. Studies suggest the loss of forests will put more stress on water management, which has already come under strain in recent years from prolonged drought.”

Environmental dryness is the second driver of increasingly severe fires, the researchers found. A measure called the vapor-pressure deficit measures the gap between how much moisture the air can hold versus how much moisture it has. The bigger the deficit, the drier the air, and the more water the air can absorb from plants and soil. 

“Climate change has made the atmosphere warmer, and a warmer atmosphere has a larger water-holding capacity,” Hung said. “When the weather is hot and dry, the vapor-pressure deficit is high, which leads the atmosphere to act like a sponge, soaking up surface water. In general, the warmer and drier the atmosphere, the more high-severity fire we saw over the last 40 years.”

What can be done to help

The researcher’s conclusions show that the state can make some headway in protecting California’s forests with changes in forest management, such as doing more manual clearing of underbrush and conducting more prescribed burns, Hung said. 

“Among the largest drivers of burn severity are the warming and drying of the atmosphere, which no amount of forest thinning can change,” Hung said. “But even though forest management alone can’t solve the problem statewide, for individual locations, making good forest management decisions can help alleviate the risk of high-severity fire.” 

The research was supported in part by the MacArthur Foundation, the Moore Foundation, USGS, the National Park Service, and the UCLA Sustainable LA Grand Challenge. This paper is a contribution of the Western Fire and Forest Resilience Collaborative.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

 

Synchronized heart rates as a marker for social engagement

PNAS Nexus

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image: 

“Audio Explorers” walking around New York while collecting data.

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Credit: Photo by Demant, published with permission.

When people are close—both physically and emotionally—their heart rates begin to align, rising and falling together. Could such cardiac alignment be used as a way to measure social engagement and connection in everyday settings? Hanlu He and colleagues used data collected by 72 students visiting New York City as part of an audio engineering competition. The students collected data with hearing aids that recorded ambient noise, Garmin wristbands that measured heart rate, and mobile phones that recorded GPS data. Participants were classified as physically close when they were within 20 meters of one another. Participants’ heart rate synchrony was stronger when they were together, especially during close-proximity interactions and joint attention to shared stimuli, such as attending the same lecture. People who were socially familiar with one another before the trip had significantly higher levels of synchrony. Complex interaction environments with challenging listening conditions were associated with reduced heart rate synchrony, suggesting that listening conditions might influence the degree of physiological alignment. Noise and difficulty hearing target sounds could cause stress or increase the demand for auditory perception and compensation, reducing cognitive resources for interpersonal dynamics. Alternatively, conversation or the shared attention to an auditory stimulus could be part of what drives heart rate synchrony. According to the authors, interpersonal physiological synchrony emerges in naturalistic social settings and can be used as a reliable marker of real-world social engagement.

 

Noise levels (represented by sound pressure level, in decibels) logged each minute and pooled across students.

Credit

Jeppe Høy Christensen

Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

Heart rate synchrony as a marker of real-world social engagement

Article Publication Date

23-Jun-2026

COI Statement

J.H.C. and J.M.S. are employed by Oticon A/S. Oticon A/S sponsored the study trip but had no other commercial involvement in the design or conduct of the study.

 

Restoring African landscapes with indigenous food-bearing trees

PNAS Nexus

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Natal orange, Nkhata Bay, Malawi, November 2021.

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Credit: Emilie Vansant

Deforestation is a major problem across Africa. It is widely recognized that deforestation harms biodiversity, but tree loss also harms dietary quality, as nutritious fruits, nuts, seeds, and leaves disappear from the landscape. Over $1 billion has been pledged for landscape restoration in Africa, but Emilie C. Vansant and colleagues report in a Perspective that many projects tend to focus on planting fast-growing, exotic tree species rather than native species. Such low-diversity plantations are vulnerable to pests, wildfires, droughts, and other extreme weather events, and introduced species can sometimes outcompete local vegetation. 

The authors see the growing momentum around landscape restoration as a missed opportunity to restore native biodiversity, and in doing so, to restore sources of nutritious foods that are embedded in local cultures and traditional knowledge systems. The authors focus on Malawi as a case in point, as the country has pledged to restore more than 40% of its total land area. Increases in food prices in recent years have made a healthy diet unaffordable for 92% of the Malawian population, according to United Nations data. 

Through knowledge co-creation workshops and consultations with representatives from 21 civil society organizations engaged in community-based restoration projects, the authors found that although the idea of planting and naturally regenerating native food trees is very appealing to people, technical knowledge on these trees is harder to access than knowledge about more common exotic species. In response, the authors worked with local experts to co-produce an illustrated tree-planting guide for indigenous edible tree species, such as wild loquat, Mbula plum, and sour plum. According to the authors, the goals of landscape restoration and combating malnutrition can both be served by planting and caring for native food trees. 

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Journal

PNAS Nexus

Article Title

Restoring indigenous trees can help combat malnutrition in Africa

Article Publication Date

23-Jun-2026

 

Tree seedlings, Nkhata Bay, Malawi, March 2025

Credit

Emilie Vansant

 

The authors worked with the local experts to co-produce an illustrated tree-planting guide for indigenous edible tree species, such as wild loquat, Mbula plum, and sour plum.

Credit

Vansant et al

 

Workshop activities around centering nutrition in landscape restoration were held in Ekwendeni, Malawi, in March 2025. 

Credit

Emilie Vansant

 

A baobab tree in a farmer’s field, Mulanje, Malawi, November 2021.

Credit

Emilie Vansant

 

A mini robot to simplify dental treatment

University of Basel

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A miniature robot developed at the University of Basel could help prepare teeth for a crown.

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Credit: University of Basel, Catherine Weyer

Researchers at the University of Basel have developed a miniature dental robot that could one day automatically prepare teeth for crowns. The technology could help reduce the number of appointments needed for dental treatment.

A routine check-up at the dentist ends with bad news: tooth decay has left a large cavity, and the tooth needs a crown. The treatment requires several follow-up appointments. During the first appointment, the dentist removes the decay, fills the cavity and prepares the tooth for the crown. She then takes an impression and fits a temporary crown. The permanent crown is produced based on the impression and can only be placed at a later appointment.

In future, this process could become much faster thanks to a small dental robot developed by researchers at the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Basel. The prototype is about the size of a wine cork, measuring just 43 by 26 by 28 millimeters. Its motors and control system are located outside the robot and connected to it via flexible drive shafts, cables and tubes. “It is designed to be small enough to fit comfortably into an open mouth,” says Dr Yukiko Tomooka, first author of the paper in IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics, in which the research team presents the robot.

Fewer appointments at the dentist

The prototype, called “MIR” — short for “Miniature Intraoral Robot” — is designed to prepare teeth precisely according to a digital plan. The idea is that, after a scan during the first appointment, dentists could plan exactly how the robot should remove the tooth material and order the crown straight away, rather than waiting until a second appointment.

The scan is used not only to plan the crown, but also to produce a custom-fitted dental splint to which the mini dental robot is attached. “Even if the patient turns their head, the MIR moves with them,” says Tomooka.

Remarkably precise dental robot

The researchers tested their dental robot on tooth models made of synthetic resin and on a ceramic material with a hardness similar to that of tooth enamel. The robot prepares the tooth in two steps: first, it uses a wide drill to reduce the tooth surface, removing material from above. In the second step, a longer, thinner drill works on the sides of the tooth.

What is remarkable is how precisely the dental robot already works, even though it does not yet have any sensors to measure or even correct its position directly. In tests, the positional error was less than 0.2 millimeters, which will be further reduced after sensors are integrated into the system.

In addition to precision, the researchers are also measuring the forces generated during drilling. In the tests, these remained below five newtons, roughly equivalent to the gravitational force of a half-liter bottle of water. The team is also investigating the noise produced by the system in order to better assess its suitability for use in dental practice.

Sensors and camera to follow

Further work is still needed before MIR can be used in dental practices. As a next step, the researchers plan to integrate sensors and a camera into the robot so that the system can monitor its position and the progress of the treatment. “Even after a power outage, MIR would know where it is and where it needs to continue based on the sensor data,” explains research group leader Professor Georg Rauter. The aim is to achieve this without making the mini robot any larger.

Rauter’s team regularly works closely with practicing physicians and dentists to develop robots for medical applications. The dental robot was developed as part of an Innosuisse-funded project in collaboration with the Center for Dentistry at the University of Zurich, Basel-based Camlog Biotechnologies GmbH and the University of Bern.

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Journal

IEEE Transactions on Medical Robotics and Bionics

DOI

10.1109/TMRB.2026.3682629 

 

The dental robot is mounted on a custom-fitted dental splint. Even if the patient moves their head, the robot can keep working precisely where it ought to.

Credit

University of Basel, Catherine Weyer

The dental robot in action [VIDEO]