Tag: blood tests

Parenting 101: #MyTealPumpkin : Making Halloween safe for Quebec’s 100,000 children with food allergies

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Halloween can be difficult for children with allergies, who are often left out due to the distribution of risky treats. Once again this year, for the 9th edition of #MyTealPumpkin, parents, neighbors, friends, and businesses are invited to participate in large numbers so that every child can feel fully included in the celebration. Launched in the United States in 2014, the initiative now shines in about fifteen countries.

On October 31st, painting a pumpkin turquoise or displaying the visual on your door (available here) signals to families that non-food treats are available for children with allergies, ensuring a safe and inclusive Halloween.

“Food allergies represent a major and growing health issue in Quebec. When we know that up to 8% of young children in Quebec live with food allergies, and that this segment of the population has increased by 18%, I believe the #MyTealPumpkin initiative takes on its full meaning at Halloween. This activity provides us with a wonderful opportunity to raise awareness among young and old alike,” said Dominique Seigneur, Communications Director at Allergy Quebec, in a press release.

Anaphylaxis is a severe reaction that can be fatal in just minutes. It is estimated that up to 75% of people allergic to peanuts will be accidentally exposed during their lifetime. In Canada, ten so-called “priority” allergens have been identified (peanuts, wheat, milk, mustard, tree nuts, eggs, fish and shellfish, sesame, soy, and sulfites) as they cause the majority of severe reactions. In total, more than 160 allergenic foods are listed in the country.

– JC

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October 30, 2025
Older Americans Are About to Lose a Lot of Weight

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Imagine an older man goes in to see his doctor. He’s 72 years old and moderately overweight: 5-foot-10, 190 pounds. His blood tests show high levels of triglycerides. Given his BMI—27.3—the man qualifies for taking semaglutide or tirzepatide, two of the wildly popular injectable drugs for diabetes and obesity that have produced dramatic weight loss in clinical trials. So he asks for a prescription, because his 50th college reunion is approaching and he’d like to get back to his freshman-year weight.

He certainly could use these drugs to lose weight, says Thomas Wadden, a clinical psychologist and obesity researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, who recently laid out this hypothetical in an academic paper. But should he? And what about the tens of millions of Americans 65 and older who aren’t simply trying to slim down for a cocktail party, but live with diagnosable obesity? Should they be on Wegovy or Zepbound?

Already, seniors make up 26.6 percent of the people who have been prescribed these and other GLP-1 agonists, including Ozempic, since 2018, according to a report from Truveta, which draws data from a large network of health-care systems. In the coming years, that proportion could rise even higher: The bipartisan Treat and Reduce Obesity Act, introduced in Congress last July, would allow Medicare to cover drug treatments for obesity among its roughly 50 million Part D enrollees above the age of 65; in principle, about two-fifths of that number would qualify as patients. Even if this law doesn’t pass (and it’s been introduced half a dozen times since 2012), America’s retirees will continue to be prescribed these drugs for diabetes in enormous numbers, and they’ll be losing weight on them as well. One way or another, the Boomers will be giving shape to our Ozempic Age.

Economists say the cost to Medicare of giving new drugs for obesity to just a fraction of this aging generation would be staggering—$13.6 billion a year, according to an estimate published in The New England Journal of Medicine last March. But the health effects of such a program might also be unsettling. Until recently, the very notion of prescribing any form of weight loss whatsoever to an elderly patient—i.e., someone 65 or older—was considered suspect, even dangerous. “Advising weight loss in obese older adults is still shunned in the medical community,” the geriatric endocrinologist Dennis Villareal and his co-authors wrote in a 2013 “review of the controversy” for a medical journal. More than a decade later, clinicians are still struggling to reach consensus on safety, Villareal told me.

Ample research shows that interventions for seniors with obesity can resolve associated complications. Wadden helped run a years-long, randomized trial of dramatic calorie reduction—using liquid meal replacements, in part—and stringent exercise advice for thousands of overweight adults with type 2 diabetes. “Clearly the people who were older did have benefits in terms of improved glycemic control and blood-pressure control,” he told me. Other, smaller studies led by Villareal find that older people who succeed at losing weight through diet and exercise end up feeling more robust.

Such outcomes are significant on their own terms, says John Batsis, who treats and studies geriatric obesity at the UNC School of Medicine. “When we talk about older adults, we really need to be thinking about what’s important to older adults,” he told me. “It’s for them to be able to get on the floor and play with their grandchildren, or to be able to walk down the hallway without being completely exhausted.” But weight loss can also have adverse effects. When a person addresses their obesity through dieting alone, as much as 25 percent of the weight they lose derives from loss of muscle, bone, and other fat-free tissue. For seniors who, through natural aging, are already near the threshold of developing a functional impairment, a sudden drop like this could be enfeebling. Wadden’s trial found that, among the people who were on the weight-loss program for more than a decade, their risk of fracture to the hip, shoulder, upper arm, or pelvis increased by 39 percent. An analogous increase has turned up in studies of patients who undergo bariatric surgery, Batsis told me.

Read: Ozempic makes you lose more than fat

The effect of dieting on muscle and bone can be attenuated, but not prevented, through resistance training. And obesity itself—which is associated with higher bone density, but perhaps also reduced bone quality—may pose its own fracture risks, Batsis said. But even when a weight-loss treatment benefits an older patient, what happens when it ends? People tend to regain fat, but they don’t recover bone and muscle, Debra Waters, the director of gerontology research at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, told me. That makes the long-term effects of these interventions for older adults very murky. “What happens when they’re 80? Are they going to have really poor bone quality, and be at higher risk of fracture? We don’t know,” Waters said. “It’s a pretty big gamble to take, in my opinion.”

Villareal told me that doctors should apply “the general principle of starting slow and going slow” when their older patients are trying to lose weight. But that approach doesn’t necessarily square with the rapid and remarkable weight loss seen in patients who are taking semaglutide or tirzepatide, which may produce a greater proportional loss of muscle and bone. (For semaglutide, it appears to be about 40 percent.)

Then again, when given to laboratory animals, GLP-1 drugs seem to tamp down inflammation in the brain; and they’re now in clinical trials to see whether they might slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Their multiple established benefits could also help seniors address several chronic problems—diabetes, obesity, fatty liver disease, and kidney disease, for instance—all at once. “Such a ‘one-stop shop’ approach can lead to reduction of medication burden, adverse drug events, hypoglycemic episodes, medication costs, and treatment nonadherence,” one team of geriatricians proposed in 2019.

Overall, Batsis remains optimistic. “As a clinician, I’m very excited about these medications,” he told me. As a scientist, though, he’s inclined to wait and see. It’s surely true that some degree of weight loss is a great idea for some older patients. “But the million-dollar question is: What’s the sweet spot? How much weight is really enough? Is it 5 to 10 percent? Or is it 25 percent? We don’t know.” Waters said that if Medicare is going to pay for people’s Wegovy, then it should also cover scans of their body composition, to help predict how weight loss might affect their muscles and bones. Wadden said he thinks that treatments should be limited to people who have specific, weight-related complications. For everyone else—as for the hypothetical 72-year-old man who is prepping for his college reunion—he counsels prudence.

To some extent, such advice is beside the point. Older people are already on Ozempic, and they’re already on Trulicity, and some of them are already taking GLP-1 drugs as a treatment for obesity. Truveta reported that the patients in its member health-care systems who are over 65 have received 281,000 prescriptions for GLP-1 drugs across the past five years. Given the network’s size, one can assume that at least 1 million seniors, overall, have already tried these medications. Millions more will try them in the years to come. If we still have questions about their use, mass experience will start providing answers.

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Daniel Engber

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February 7, 2024
America’s Concussion Problem Is Way Bigger Than Sports

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The months of haze began in an instant, when the horse I was riding stumbled at the exact moment I was shifting my seat. I don’t remember falling, though I do remember the feeling of the leather reins moving through my hand. I hit my thigh on the ground. Then the flat of my back hit the wall of the indoor arena so hard it felt like I’d popped every vertebrae in my spine. After a few minutes, I got back on the horse (everyone always asks if I got back on the horse), but I haven’t ridden since.

Only on the way home did my thoughts begin to feel sluggish, like a fog was rolling across my brain. I heard ringing in my ears when I tried to think. Everything became too bright and too loud. I slept 17 to 20 hours each of the next three days. I woke up, ate, used the bathroom, and then wandered back to bed, exhausted.

I suspected I had a concussion as soon as the brain fog began. Just the week before, I had heard on a podcast that people could get one without hitting their head. The day after the accident, my doctor confirmed my suspicion. The force of my back against the wall had given me whiplash, my neck jerking forward and back after the collision. My brain, jostling around in my skull, had been injured too.

In my mind, the dangers of concussions were most acute for people who got too many of them—football players, boxers, military veterans, and others who underwent repeated trauma to the brain and had chronic traumatic encephalopathy. A single bump on the head? That was no big deal—except when it was.

For months, a five-minute phone call made me exhausted, as though I’d been swimming laps for an hour. I couldn’t drive, and even as a passenger, looking out the window made me nauseous. Observing anything felt like work; my eyes skipped, as though the world was a slowed-down film reel. My real work—the writing I got paid to do—was impossible. Fun, too, was out of the question. Trying to retrieve thoughts felt like rummaging through one empty file cabinet after another. My self, that person who exists in the wiring in my brain, had gone missing. I worried that she might be gone for good.

During that time, I started to rage against a system that leaves people suffering from concussions or “mild traumatic brain injuries” wading through bad or outdated advice. Studies keep showing that getting targeted rehabilitation for concussion symptoms can lead to a faster recovery, but that’s not what the average patient hears. Many people are still being told by doctors to simply wait a concussion out, when early treatment can make a big difference.

My doctor told me to rest—that most concussion symptoms resolve within a few days. Three days later, the doctor said not to worry until it had been seven to 10 days. Later she updated that range to a month.

When I was awake, I ate and used the little mental energy I had to search for information about concussions online and send emails to specialists. I wanted to know what was actually happening in my brain and if I could do anything to speed the recovery process along. I learned that a helmet can’t completely protect against a concussion because simply accelerating and decelerating quickly can exert enough force on the brain to injure it.

Then I took a nap.

I learned that researchers were working on blood tests that could detect a concussion by measuring protein fragments from damaged nerve fibers. (The first commercial product got FDA approval in March.) Douglas Smith, the director of the Center for Brain Injury and Repair at the University of Pennsylvania, describes these nerve fibers as the electrical grid for the city that is the brain. “Having a concussion is like having a brownout,” he told me. The brain’s connections aren’t gone, “but the signals aren’t going through.” And long-term symptoms after a single concussion aren’t uncommon. They happen to roughly 20 percent of concussion patients, Smith said.

I rested again.

I read books about concussions, a few chapters at a time. Most described people being told that, because their CT scan showed nothing, nothing could be done for them. (Concussions rarely show up on imaging.) Or they described people being discharged from hospitals while their brains felt so broken, they could hardly speak. Conor Gormally, the executive director of Concussion Alliance, told me that he believes concussions are treatable injuries that just aren’t being treated by the average medical professional. “The biggest problem people face are barriers to the care that they need, which is out there,” he said.

I closed my eyes in the dark room.

Every time I would spend a little while awake and active, a sensation of pressure would build up behind my ears, in a way that made me feel like my brain was swelling. I’d always been able to push through feeling tired and keep working. Now I couldn’t. When I reached my limit, I’d hear buzzing, as though a bug was stuck inside my eardrums.

I rested again.

This went on for weeks. I started looking up treatments for concussions in my area and found page after page of listings for chiropractors or special centers that didn’t always take insurance but promised that they’d be able to fix my brain. I joined support groups on Facebook where patients shared what had and hadn’t worked for them. Sometimes the posts were hopeful—people got better—but many of the people who remained in the groups did so because years had gone by and they still had problems. What if I never recovered?

After five weeks with no answers, I started sobbing in the middle of the day. I’m a journalist who believes in evidence-based medicine, yet I found so few resources that I started looking into alternative therapy. At a particularly low point, I went to see a doctor whose website looked like it hadn’t been updated since the early 2000s. Over the phone, he’d made multiple mentions of “clean eating” and similar things that gave me pause. I ignored my misgivings because he’d also all but promised he could make me better. I wanted so badly to be myself again. He sold tablets that promised to fight 5G radiation at the front desk. I considered walking away then but didn’t. His alternative treatments, which included wearing tinted glasses and a blanket that blocked electric radiation, didn’t help. They did cost $500.

I went back to bed.

No one really knows how many people get mild traumatic brain injuries every year. Emergency- room data don’t capture everybody, Elizabeth Sandel, a brain-injury-medicine specialist and the author of Shaken Brain, told me, because “a lot of people just go to their primary-care doctor.” The statistic of 3.8 million Americans a year gets bandied about, sometimes linked to mild head injuries from sports and other times to brain injuries of all kinds. Falls, recreational activities, car crashes, and domestic violence all can cause head trauma.

One of the reasons a concussion is so hard to treat is that every brain injury is a little bit different. There are more than 30 concussion symptoms, Smith told me: Some people get severe headaches; others have troubles with cognition, balance, vision, and so on. The treatment might be different for each of these symptoms.

Until recently, Sandel said, doctors often recommended that people with a brain injury spend the first days “cocooning,” or resting in a dark room. Now experts better understand that, for some patients, resting may be beneficial, but for others activities that don’t overly exacerbate symptoms might speed healing. The latest guidelines for concussion recovery, which came out in October 2022, continue to shift toward suggesting better rehab, sooner. If dizziness, neck pain, or headaches persist after 10 days, the guidelines now recommend “cervicovestibular rehabilitation”—exactly the kind of therapy that ultimately helped me recover. It’s a combination of manual therapy on key muscles and rehab for the vestibular, or balance, system. Multiple studies have shown the benefits of this type of rehab, including a 2014 study that found that 73 percent of treated patients recovered after eight weeks, compared with 7 percent in the control group.

By the time I got an appointment at a multidisciplinary brain-injury-rehab center near where I lived, more than two months had passed. After a lot of phone calls with my eyes closed—I could focus longer if I limited external stimulation—I found a vestibular therapist. This kind of therapy focuses on restoring the balance system through a combination of physical and eye exercises. My eyes not working in tandem was a classic sign that this area needed rehab.

The therapist gave me exercises where I tracked my finger with my eyes to help them get back in sync. At my first appointment with him, I could hardly stand on one leg with my eyes open without falling over. After practicing the balance exercises he gave me for a few weeks, I could once again stand on one leg with my eyes closed.

Manual physiotherapy, especially for the back and neck, can help restabilize and strengthen muscles after an accident. For me, this meant targeted physical therapy, strengthening exercises, and visits to a specialized chiropractor who used X-rays and gentle adjustments to put my neck back where it belonged.

Some of the things I’d found through trial and error, like using a stationary bike for an hour each day, the brain-rehab center would have been recommended for me anyway. But long waitlists to get into places like that aren’t uncommon—and having the right doctors made a significant difference.

Soon I noticed my stamina increasing every day. The neighbor’s dog didn’t seem so loud anymore. I could drive for 20 minutes, and then a full hour. I could even talk on the phone with friends and family whom I hadn’t been able to connect with for months. I read or went outside and did not need to nap. I wasn’t recovered but, finally, I was recovering.

After three months, I began taking some writing assignments again. I’d been struggling to hold more than one thought in my head at a time, but now it was like my brain had rebooted. I was again the person I remembered.

Six months after falling off the horse, my final, lingering symptom—the feeling of pressure in my head when I’d been working for too long—went away. I recovered but was left wondering why it had taken so much time for me to be routed to the care that I needed. I’ll never know if I would have gotten better without it, but I suspect recovery would have, at the very least, taken much longer. Why had I—a patient with a brain injury—been the one sifting through scientific papers and online support groups rather than getting these referrals from my doctor? In our American health-care system, many patients are expected to be their own advocates, but in this case, when a better, clearer path to recovery is so well established, it seems like that should have been unnecessary.

I often think wistfully about returning to riding, but then think again of that one moment when I slipped from the saddle and the months it took to recover. We brush off the dangers of a single concussion, but sometimes one fall or bad knock to the head is all it takes to turn your life upside down.

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Tove Danovich

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October 6, 2023
The rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes: A timeline | CNN Business

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CNN
—

More than three years after Elizabeth Holmes was first indicted and nearly four months after her trial kicked off, the founder and former CEO of failed blood testing startup Theranos was found guilty on four out of 11 federal fraud and conspiracy charges.

The verdict comes after a stunning downfall that saw Holmes, once hailed as the next Steve Jobs, go from being a tech industry icon to being a rare Silicon Valley entrepreneur on trial for fraud.

A Stanford University dropout, Holmes – inspired by her own fear of needles – started the company at the age of 19, with a mission of creating a cheaper, more efficient alternative to a traditional blood test. Theranos promised patients the ability to test for conditions like cancer and diabetes with just a few drops of blood. She attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, a board of well-known political figures, and key retail partners.

But a Wall Street Journal investigation poked holes into Theranos’ testing and technology, and the dominoes fell from there. Holmes and her former business partner, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were charged in 2018 by the US government with multiple counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. (Both pleaded not guilty.)

Here are the highlights of the rise and fall of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.

Holmes, a Stanford University sophomore studying chemical engineering, drops out of school to pursue her startup, Theranos, which she founded in 2003 at age 19. The name is a combination of the words “therapy” and “diagnosis.”

Balwani joins as chief operating officer and president of the startup. Balwani, nearly 20 years her senior, met Holmes in 2002 on a trip to Beijing through Stanford University. The two are later revealed to be romantically involved.

A decade after first starting the company, Holmes takes the lid off Theranos and courts media attention the same month that Theranos and Walgreens announce they’ve struck up a long-term partnership. The first Theranos Wellness Center location opens in a Walgreens in Palo Alto where consumers can access Theranos’ blood test.

The original plan had been to make Theranos’ testing available at Walgreens locations nationwide.

Holmes is named to the magazine’s American billionaire list with the outlet reporting she owns a 50% stake in the startup, pinning her personal wealth at $4.5 billion.

Theranos has raised more than $400 million, according to a profile of the company and Holmes by The New Yorker. It counts Oracle’s Larry Ellison among its investors.

The FDA clears Theranos to use of its proprietary tiny blood-collection vials to finger stick blood test for herpes simplex 1 virus – its first and only approval for a diagnostic test.

The Wall Street Journal reports Theranos is using its proprietary technique on only a small number of the 240 tests it performs, and that the vast majority of its tests are done with traditional vials of blood drawn from the arm, not the “few drops” taken by a finger prick. In response, Theranos defends its testing practices, calling the Journal’s reporting “factually and scientifically erroneous.”

A day later, Theranos halts the use of its blood-collection vials for all but the herpes test due to pressures from the FDA. (Later that month, the FDA released two heavily redacted reports citing 14 concerns, including calling the company’s proprietary vial an “uncleared medical device.”)

One week after the Journal report, Holmes is interviewed on-stage at the outlet’s conference in Laguna Beach. “We know what we’re doing and we’re very proud of it,” she says.

Amid the criticism, Theranos reportedly shakes up its board of directors, eliminating Henry Kissinger and George Shultz as directors while moving them to a new board of counselors; the company also forms a separate medical board.

Safeway, which invested $350 million into building out clinics in hundreds of its supermarkets to eventually offer Theranos blood tests, reportedly looks to dissolve its relationship with the company before it ever offered its services.

Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) sends Theranos a letter saying its California lab has failed to comply with federal standards and that patients are in “immediate jeopardy.” It gives the company 10 days to address the issues.

In response, Walgreens says it will not send any lab tests to Theranos’ California lab for analysis and suspends Theranos services at its Palo Alto Walgreens location.

CMS threatens to ban Holmes and Balwani from the laboratory business for two years after the company allegedly failed to fix problems at its California lab. Theranos says that’s a “worst case scenario.”

Balwani departs. The company also adds three new board members as part of the restructuring: Fabrizio Bonanni, a former executive vice president of biotech firm Amgen, former CDC director William Foege, and former Wells Fargo CEO Richard Kovacevich.

Theranos voids two years of blood test results from its proprietary testing devices, correcting tens of thousands of blood-test reports, the Journal reports.

Forbes revises its estimate of Holmes’ net worth from $4.5 billion to $0. The magazine also lowers its valuation for the company from $9 billion to $800 million.

Walgreens, once Theranos’ largest retail partner, ends its partnership with the company and says it will close all 40 Theranos Wellness Centers.

CMS revokes Theranos’ license to operate its California lab and bans Holmes from running a blood-testing lab for two years.

Holmes tries to move past recent setbacks by unveiling a mini testing laboratory, called miniLab, at a conference for the American Association for Clinical Chemistry. In selling the device, versus operating its own clinics, Theranos seeks to effectively side-step CMS sanctions, which don’t prohibit research and development.

Theranos investor Partner Fund Management sues the company for $96.1 million, the amount it sunk into the company in February 2014, plus damages. It accuses the company of securities fraud. Theranos and Partner Fund Management settled in May, 2017, for an undisclosed amount.

The company also lays off 340 employees as it closes clinical labs and wellness centers as it attempts to pivot and focus on the miniLab.

Walgreens sues the blood testing startup for breach of contract. Walgreens sought to recover the $140 million it poured into the company. The lawsuit was settled August, 2017.

Theranos downsizes its workforce yet again following the increased scrutiny into its operations, laying off approximately 155 employees or about 41% of staffers.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Theranos failed a second regulatory lab inspection in September, and that the company was closing its last blood testing location as a result.

Theranos settles with the CMS, agreeing to pay $30,000 and to not to own or operate any clinical labs for two years.

Theranos also settles with the Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich over allegations that its advertisements misrepresented the method, accuracy, and reliability of its blood testing and that the company was out of compliance with federal regulations governing clinical lab testing. Theranos agrees to pay $4.65 million back to its Arizona customers as part of a settlement deal.

The SEC charges Holmes and Balwani with a “massive fraud” involving more than $700 million from investors through an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”

The SEC alleges Holmes and Balwani knew that Theranos’ proprietary analyzer could perform only 12 of the 200 tests it published on its patient testing menu.

Theranos and Holmes agree to resolve the claims against them, and Holmes gives up control of the company and much of her stake in it. Balwani, however, is fighting the charges, with his attorney saying he “accurately represented Theranos to investors to the best of his ability.”

Reporter John Carreyrou, who first broke open the story of Theranos for the Wall Street Journal, publishes “Bad Blood,” a definitive look at what happened inside the disgraced company. Director Adam McKay (who directed “The Big Short”) secures the rights to make the film, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Holmes, by the same name.

Holmes and Balwani are indicted on federal wire fraud charges over allegedly engaging in a multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, as well as a scheme to defraud doctors and patients. Both have pleaded not guilty.

Minutes before the charges were made public, Theranos announced that Holmes has stepped down as CEO. The company’s general counsel, David Taylor, takes over as CEO. Holmes remains chair of the company’s board.

Taylor emails shareholders that Theranos will dissolve, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Taylor said more than 80 potential buyers were not interested in a sale. “We are now out of time,” Taylor wrote.

Alex Gibney, the prolific documentary filmmaker behind “Dirty Money,” “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room,” and “The Armstrong Lie,” debuts “The Inventor” on HBO, following the rise and fall of Theranos.

A new court document reveals Holmes may seek a “mental disease” defense in her criminal fraud trial. Later, in August 2021, unsealed court documents reveal Holmes is likely to claim she was the victim of a decade-long abusive relationship with Balwani. The allegations led to the severing of their trials. His trial is slated to begin in 2022.

Initially set to begin in July 2020, Holmes’ criminal trial is further delayed til July 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

News surfaces that Holmes’ is expecting her first child, once more further delaying her criminal trial. Holmes’ counsel advised the US government that Holmes is due in July 2021, a court document revealed. She gave birth in July.

More than 80 potential jurors are brought into a San Jose courtroom for questioning over the course of two days to determine if they are fit to serve as impartial, fair jurors for the criminal trial of Holmes. A jury of seven men and five women is selected, with five alternatives.

After three months of testimony from 32 witnesses, the criminal fraud case of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes makes its way to the jury of eight men and four women who will decide her fate. The jury would go on to deliberate for more than 50 hours before returning a verdict.

Holmes is found guilty of one count of conspiracy to defraud investors as well as three wire fraud counts tied to specific investors. She is found not guilty on three additional charges concerning defrauding patients and one charge of conspiracy to defraud patients. The jury returns no verdict on three of the charges concerning defrauding investors. Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison as well as a fine of $250,000 plus restitution for each count.

“The Dropout,” a scripted miniseries about Theranos produced by ABC, debuts on Hulu. Amanda Seyfried stars as Holmes and Naveen Andrews plays Balwani. Their romantic and professional relationship features prominently in the show.

Following delays due to Holmes’ prolonged trial then a surge of Covid-19, jury selection for Balwani’s trial gets underway. On March 22, opening arguments are held and the government’s first witness, a former Theranos employee turned whistleblower, is called to the stand.

After four full days of deliberations, a jury finds Balwani guilty of ten counts of federal wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Like Holmes, Balwani faces up to 20 years in prison as well as a fine of $250,000 plus restitution for each count of wire fraud and each conspiracy count.

Holmes asks for a new trial after claiming that a key witness visited her house unannounced and allegedly said he “feels guilty” about his testimony.

In a court filing with the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, Holmes’ attorneys said Adam Rosendorff, a former Theranos lab director who was one of the government’s main witnesses, arrived at her home on August 8 asking to speak with her. According to the filing, Rosendorff did not interact with Holmes but did speak to her partner Billy Evans, who recounted the exchange in an email to Holmes’ lawyers shortly after.

“His shirt was untucked, his hair was messy, his voice slightly trembled,” Evans wrote about Rosendorff. According to Evans’ email, Rosendorff “said when he was called as a witness he tried to answer the questions honestly but that the prosecutors tried to make everybody look bad.”

The former Theranos lab director also “said he felt like he had done something wrong,” Evans wrote.

Rosendorff takes the stand again to address concerns from Holmes’ defense team and their claims he had shown up at her home after the trial concluded asking to speak with her and expressed regrets about his testimony.

At the hearing, Rosendorff reaffirmed the truthfulness of his testimony at Holmes’ trial and said that the government did not influence what he said.

A federal judge denies Elizabeth Holmes’ request for a new trial, according to court filings, paving the way for the founder of failed blood testing startup Theranos to be sentenced later in the month.

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November 20, 2022