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A new study provides the most conclusive evidence yet that COVID-19 can damage the brain, even in people who weren't severely ill.

The study, published Monday in Nature, used before-and-after brain images of 785 British people, ages 51 to 81, to look for any changes. About half the participants contracted COVID-19 between the scans – mostly when the alpha variant was circulating – which left many people at least temporarily without a sense of smell.

Analysis of the "before" and "after" images from the UK Biobank showed that people infected with COVID-19 had a greater reduction in their brain volumes overall and performed worse on cognitive tests than those who had not been infected.

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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Tuesday issued new COVID-19 mRNA vaccine guidance, expanding the recommended time between the initial two vaccine doses to eight weeks for some people over the age of 12, particularly young men.

New guidance on prescribing opioids unveiled Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention avoids the strict limits found in a 2016 version that accelerated a nationwide drop in pain pill prescriptions but led to backlash from chronic pain patients.

The 229-page document advises doctors to limit new opioid prescriptions and discuss alternative therapies with patients. But the new guidance largely avoids figures on dosage and length of prescription and warns against abruptly or rapidly discontinuing pain pills for some chronic pain patients.

"We've built in flexibility so that there's not a one-size-fits-all approach," said Christopher Jones, acting director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.

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A new injectable treatment for HIV pre-exposure prevention, or PrEP, has been approved by the Federal Drug Administration.

The drug, Apretude, is approved for at-risk adults and adolescents who weigh at least 77 pounds to reduce the risk of sexually acquired HIV, the FDA announced Monday.

“Today’s approval adds an important tool in the effort to end the HIV epidemic by providing the first option to prevent HIV that does not involve taking a daily pill,” Debra Birnkrant, director of the Division of Antivirals in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said in the announcement.

After the initial two injections, Apretude is administered one month apart, then every two months after that. The hope is that high-risk individuals, like men who have sex with men, will have better adherence to taking the PrEP injectable option every two months versus taking a pill everyday.

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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday it had received reports of eight cases of myocarditis, a type of heart inflammation, in children aged 5-11 years who received Pfizer (PFE.N) and BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine.

The CDC had previously said that reporting rates of myocarditis for boys aged 16 to 17 could be more than 69 cases per million second doses administered and around 40 cases per million second doses in boys aged 12-15 years old.

The CDC did not say whether it believes there is a link between the myocarditis cases and the vaccine, or disclose the rate of myocarditis in the age group without vaccination.

The agency said there had been over 7 million vaccine doses in the 5-11 age group at the time it examined the data, with 5.1 million first doses and 2 million second doses. The cases had a mild clinical course, the CDC said.

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