2024 in review: What were this year’s biggest medical breakthroughs?

From research on new weight-loss drugs to the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in medicine, 2024 has been marked by important scientific advances, especially in health.

Euronews Health covered research that provided hope that new treatments or studies could improve people’s health through better diagnosis, drugs, and knowledge.

Here are some of the advances in health over the past year and the topics that received the most attention from researchers.

New diabetes drugs linked to other benefits besides weight loss

A class of diabetes drugs called GLP-1 receptor agonists has been making waves over the last few years, and this year is no exception, with several new studies analysing the impact of these blockbuster drugs.

Besides helping patients with type 2 diabetes and obesity, these drugs are now linked to a host of additional benefits.

Research released this year found that semaglutide – marketed as Ozempic or Wegovy – reduced cardiovascular events such as stroke and heart attack in adults with preexisting disease.

These drugs have also been linked to reduced kidney failure and another drug in the same class – Tirzepatide – appeared to reduce the severity of sleep apnoea.

Dr Elizabeth Loder, head of research at the British Medical Journal (BMJ), told Euronews Health it will be interesting to see if these drugs’ weight loss benefits “over a lifetime translate into reductions in all of these other outcomes”.

But, she added, “we don’t know what the long-term consequences might be” or if people will need to keep taking these drugs or risk regaining the weight.

Twice-yearly HIV injection works better than a daily pill

New research was released this year about a twice-weekly human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) injection that is more effective than the daily oral pill (preexposure prophylaxis) at preventing the virus.

HIV, which has killed an estimated 42 million people globally, can today be prevented and managed as a chronic health condition. Yet out of the nearly 39.9 million people globally who are living with the virus, more than 9 million are not accessing treatment, according to UNAIDS.

A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July found that no woman who received the twice-yearly injection contracted HIV in a randomised trial.

Results published in November then found that the injection was 96 per cent effective in preventing HIV infections in men.

HIV experts have described the research as both “stunning” and “unprecedented”.

New blood tests for Alzheimer’s disease

A Swedish study released this year found that a blood test was 90 per cent accurate in determining if a person had Alzheimer’s disease.

This could make the process of diagnosing the condition less cumbersome, as patients currently need a sample of cerebrospinal fluid or a PET scan to determine if they have Alzheimer’s. 

The neurodegenerative disease is the most common form of dementia, which impacts an estimated 7.8 million people in the European Union.

New treatments for certain Alzheimer’s patients were also approved this year.

European regulators gave a green light to the Alzheimer’s drug Lecanemab, for instance, after initially rejecting it. The drug was shown in a trial to slow cognitive decline related to the disease.

AI and cancer therapies

Loder at the BMJ told Euronews Health that the scientific journal sees a lot of research submissions on using artificial intelligence (AI) and seeing how doctors compare to the technology on diagnosis but that they are often related to a single disease entity.

She also said there was a lot of interest in “new cancer therapies,” such as immune checkpoint inhibitors – a type of immunotherapy – and more personalised cancer therapies.

“We are seeing personalised therapy or somewhat personalised therapy come in and change outcomes, not necessarily cure people, but extend life in a meaningful way. So I would say that needs to be an area of emerging interest,” she said.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) notably launched a trial for personalised cancer vaccines this year.

Dr Eric Rubin, editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, said in an e-mail to Euronews Health that along with research on weight-loss drugs, the “impact of AI in medicine” was another area with several journal articles and news coverage.

Rubin also highlighted studies published this year related to specific treatments for breast cancer and Hodgkin lymphoma that were “practice-changing” for physician readers.

Continued fallout from COVID and the impact of climate change

The ongoing effects of long COVID, which a recent study found can endure for years in young people, as well as research on the links of ultra-processed foods to several adverse health outcomes are also important topics, experts say.

Climate change and its impact on health is also a key area of interest for researchers, with more studies linking air pollution to health problems or looking at the climate impact of the healthcare industry, Loder said.

A large Danish study published in the BMJ this year, for instance, found that air pollution was linked to infertility in men and noise pollution was linked to infertility in women.

Rubin added that New England Journal of Medicine readers were “particularly interested in the emergence of bird flu (H5N1) and other flares of infectious disease outbreaks around the globe”.