Advances

The Health Care Affordability Lab at Yale University addresses the crisis in U.S. health care costs.

“The Health Care Affordability Lab is a bridge between academic scholars and policymakers seeking to slow spending growth without harming quality,” said the lab’s director Dr. Zack Cooper, PhD, an associate professor at Yale School of Public Health.

“To make this happen, we need to do two things at once: Generate world-class research rooted in academic rigor and transparent methods, and translate and deliver that research to policymakers through communication, engagement, and the development of practical tools that can aid informed decision-making,” Cooper said.

To mark its launch on March 9, 2026, the lab released a hospital markets data visualization tool to help regulators track hospital consolidation in all 50 states over time, as well as a “Just The Facts” memo on Medicare Advantage to provide essential information for policymakers weighing changes to the program.

The new Health Care Affordability Lab is based within Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy in partnership with YSPH.

Older individuals can and do improve over time, and their mindset toward aging plays a major role in their improvement.

Analyzing more than a decade of data from a large, nationally representative study of older Americans, lead author Dr. Becca Levy, PhD, professor of social and behavioral sciences, found that nearly half of adults aged 65 and older showed measurable improvement in cognitive function, physical function, or both, over time.

The improvements were not limited to a small group of exceptional individuals and, notably, were linked to a powerful but often overlooked factor: how people think about aging.

“Many people equate aging with an inevitable and continuous loss of physical and cognitive abilities,” said Levy, an international expert on psychosocial determinants of aging health. “What we found is that improvement in later life is not rare, it’s common, and it should be included in our understanding of the aging process.”

The findings are published in the journal Geriatrics.

In the summer of 2019, before most of the world had heard the word “coronavirus,” two postdoctoral researchers at Georgetown University were thinking about the next pandemic.

“We were building models of cross-species transmission using math and machine learning. What people would now call AI,” recalled Dr. Colin Carlson, PhD, assistant professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) at YSPH.

Then a novel coronavirus emerged in Wuhan, China.

Out of that moment grew the Viral Emergence Research Initiative (Verena) to predict viral threats. Headquartered at YSPH, it is one of the largest pandemic prevention research and training programs in the United States.

What began as a collaboration among postdocs has evolved into an eight-institution network spanning Yale, the University of Oklahoma, Washington State University, Colorado State University, Tulane University, and others. Verena relocated from Georgetown to Yale in 2024, an acknowledgment of both Carlson’s research leadership and Yale’s growing prominence in pandemic science.

A saliva-based test could improve tuberculosis (TB) detection worldwide, reducing delays in diagnosis that allow the disease to spread and make treatment more difficult.

Improving TB detection is one of the most important steps toward controlling the disease. “If we can diagnose TB with something as simple as a saliva sample, we could dramatically expand access to testing and reach people who might otherwise go undiagnosed,” said Dr. J. Lucian (Luke) Davis, MD, associate professor of epidemiology (microbial diseases) at YSPH and of medicine at Yale School of Medicine.

Tuberculosis testing has long relied on sputum, or phlegm, the mucus coughed up from lower airways, which can be difficult for people to produce, Davis said.

Tuberculosis remains one of the world’s leading infectious disease killers. In 2023, an estimated 10.8 million people developed TB, and roughly one quarter of cases went undetected. Delays in diagnosis allow the disease to spread. The new results suggest that saliva testing could help close that diagnostic gap.

Among 190 participants included in the analysis — 95 patients with confirmed TB and 95 without — the saliva test demonstrated 90.5% sensitivity and 95.8% specificity, meaning it correctly detected TB in most infected individuals while accurately ruling it out in others.

Oral swabs, by comparison, detected about 72% of TB cases, making them significantly less sensitive than saliva samples.

The study was published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases.

In addition to Davis, co-authors of the study include Dr. Lauretta Grau, PhD, YSPH; Dr. Beatriz Ferro, PhD, Universidad Icesi. And from CIDEIM research institute: Dr. Jairo Palomares, PhD; Dr. Alejandro Vargas, PhD; and Dr. Alvaro Martinez, MD.