The Trump administration could soon issue a final rule scaling back the Affordable Care Act's coverage requirements for birth control by permitting more employers to stop covering contraceptives on moral and religious grounds, despite injunctions issued by courts in California and Pennsylvania targeting an interim final rule. The rule is now being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, and an HHS spokesperson didn't provide a timeline for its release.

Less than 20 days before the election, President Donald Trump tweeted Thursday that all Republicans support people with pre-existing conditions, and "if they don't, they will after I speak to them." Trump sent the tweet as GOP candidates are under fire across the country for their efforts to repeal or scale back the Affordable Care Act and its protections for people with pre-existing illnesses.

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam said the state will start accepting applications for enrollment in its newly expanded Medicaid program on Nov. 1, with coverage scheduled to begin next year. About 400,000 low-income adults are now qualified to enroll in the program.

Companies are sponsoring access to boutique fitness studios as a voluntary benefit or as part of an employee wellness program because it may help employees adopt long-term healthy behaviors, writes benefits consultant Nicholas Park. Boutique fitness studios are a good fit for a diverse workforce and can offer employees flexibility and better access to fitness classes.

Spanish researchers analyzed data on 3,896 adults ages 60 and older and found that any of the components of the FRAIL scale -- fatigue, illness, limitation in ambulation, low resistance and weight loss -- was associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality, while pre-frail and frail people were at a higher risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, compared with robust individuals. The findings in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society showed that CVD-related death rates among physically active but frail individuals were the same as those for pre-frail and physically inactive people.

A study in the Journal of Diabetes and its Complications showed an association between adverse experiences in childhood and an increased risk for developing prediabetes indicators in adulthood, such as higher body mass index, insulin resistance or waist circumference. Researchers used a cohort of 1,054 individuals with a mean age of 55 and found that physical abuse was tied to increased fasting insulin levels and waist circumference, while sexual abuse and financial strain correlated with an increased BMI.

Older adults with higher pulse wave velocity readings, indicating elevated arterial stiffness, had 60% increased odds of developing dementia after 15 years, compared with those who had lower PWV values, according to a study in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease. The findings also showed that arterial stiffness, which can be curbed by healthy lifestyle changes and antihypertensive drugs, better predicted dementia than minor brain disease symptoms, prompting researcher Rachel Mackey, Ph.D., MPH, to suggest that dementia onset may be prevented or delayed even in old age.

The rate of patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer who were found to have therapeutically targeted mutations rose from 20.5% to 35.8% after the integration of plasma next-generation sequencing in standard care, researchers reported in JAMA Oncology. The findings also showed partial or complete treatment response or stable disease among 85.7% of those who underwent plasma NGS result-based targeted therapy.

Novartis is seeking to expand its radiopharmaceutical business with a $2.1 billion acquisition of Endocyte, which develops the Lu-177-PSMA-617 investigational radioligand therapy for patients with metastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer.

RefleXion will showcase its novel biology-guided radiotherapy technology, which is used with FDG-PET scans to send radiation to tumors through the tracer's emission pathways, at the American Society for Radiation Oncology meeting.