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Just a little exposure to secondhand smoke may increase your risk for the heart rhythm disorder atrial fibrillation (A-Fib), a new, large study suggests. People who have A-Fib, the world’s most common heart rhythm disorder, are five times more likely to have a stroke than their healthy peers. While passive smoking has been linked to heart disease and early death, links between secondhand smoke and A-Fib have been unclear, researchers said in a European Society of Cardiology news release. This large study appears to make a direct connection. “The dangers of secondhand smoke were significant regardless of whether individuals were at home, outdoors or at work, indicating that exposure universally elevates the risk of atrial fibrillation,” said study author Dr. Kyung-Yeon Lee, of Seoul National University Hospital in South Korea. The study included more than 400,000 people between the ages of 40 and 69 who were part of the UK Biobank, a large biomedical and research database. Current smokers and those who already had A-Fib were excluded. Participants answered questions about their exposure to other people’s smoke at home and elsewhere in the past year. One in five (86,000) said they had been exposed to secondhand smoke, with an average exposure of 2.2 hours. In all, 6% of participants developed A-Fib over a median followup of 12.5 years. (Median means half were followed longer, half… read on > read on >

People preparing to watch Monday’s total eclipse of the sun need to protect their vision during the event, eye doctors say. Powerful ultraviolet rays can do permanent damage to the eyes if people look directly at the sun as the moon is sliding into place before it, said Starr Schroeder, an emergency department nurse at Penn State Health Lancaster Medical Center. Special solar viewing glasses are required to watch the solar eclipse progress, Schroeder said. “At no point during a partial eclipse is it safe to look at the sun without special eye protection,” Schroeder said in a Penn State news release. “Not even the darkest sunglasses are safe.” Observing a solar eclipse without proper protection can damage both the cornea and the retina, said Dr. Ajay Soni, a pediatric ophthalmologist at Penn State Health Children’s Lancaster Pediatric Center. One potential condition is photo-keratitis, which is damage to the cornea from UV rays. The cornea is the clear, dome-shaped covering at the front of the eye. “It’s a sunburn on the cornea, and is quite painful because the cornea is so sensitive,” Soni said. Soni added that patients typically recover on their own within a few days. A more serious risk is solar retinopathy, which can cause permanent eye damage. There’s no pain associated with solar retinopathy, which causes scarring on the retina, which is… read on > read on >

Obese folks are less likely to benefit from a nerve-stimulation treatment for sleep apnea that’s recently been made available to them, a new study reports. The treatment is likely to be 75% less effective among obese people with BMIs of 32 to 35, compared to patients with lower BMIs, researchers found. “Our study shows that the more overweight you are, the less likely it is that nerve-stimulation treatment will be effective in treating your sleep apnea,” said senior researcher Dr. Eric Landsness, an assistant professor of neurology with the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t put this device in patients with a BMI of 38 or 40,” Landsness added in a university news release. “But my job as a physician is to help overweight patients make an informed decision, to better understand their odds of success and realize that the chances of it working for them may be a lot less.” The increasingly popular therapy, known as hypoglossal nerve stimulation, originally was approved in 2014 for sleep apnea patients whose weight was in the healthy range, researchers said in background notes. But that approval has now been extended to patients with BMIs up to 40, which is considered severely obese. Healthy BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9, and 25 to 29.9 is considered overweight. Sleep apnea occurs… read on > read on >

People with Long COVID might be able to exercise to improve their health, something that up to now has been discouraged, a new study suggests. “The World Health Organization [WHO] and other major bodies have said that people with post-COVID should avoid intense exercise,” said lead researcher Andrea Tryfonos, a postdoctoral investigator with the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. But the new findings show that Long COVID patients do just as well after exercise as healthy people, “even though they had more symptoms to begin with,” Tryfonos said in an institute news release. “By equally well, I mean that they did not worsen their symptoms or negatively affect their body during the 48 hours we observed them.” Early observations suggested that exercising with Long COVID could be harmful, researchers noted. Folks with Long COVID often experience symptoms like extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, elevated heart rate and muscle weakness, and these are often exacerbated by exertion. To see whether exercise helps or harms, researchers recruited 31 people with Long COVID and matched them to 31 healthy people. All participants completed three different exercise sessions consisting of high-intensity interval training and moderate-intensity aerobic exercise — both on an exercise bike – as well as strength training. The sessions happened in random order a few weeks apart, researchers said. All participants underwent a battery of medical exams before,… read on > read on >

Suicides among U.S. college athletes have doubled over the past two years, according to data from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Suicide is now the second most common cause of death for college athletes after accidents, results show. “Athletes are generally thought of as one of the healthiest populations in our society, yet the pressures of school, internal and external performance expectations, time demands, injury, athletic identity and physical fatigue can lead to depression, mental health problems and suicide,” wrote the research team led by Bridget Whelan, a research coordinator with the University of Washington in Seattle. For the study, Whelan and colleagues analyzed suicides among NCAA athletes from June 2002 to June 2022. During the two decades, 1,102 athletes died. Of those, 128 took their own lives, including 98 men and 30 women. The suicide rate among college athletes doubled comparing the first decade and the second, rising from 7.6% to 15.3%. At the same time, the overall U.S. suicide rate rose just 36%. Suicides among males increased each year throughout the study period, while suicides among females increased from 2010 onwards. Male suicides increased from 31 during the first 10 years to 67 in the second decade, results show. Female suicides increased from 9 to 21 between the two decades. There were nine deaths every two years in male athletes and three… read on > read on >

Overuse of marijuana is increasingly being linked to dangerous bouts of psychosis, and a new study finds that antipsychotics may be needed to keep such patients out of the hospital. Psychotic episodes involve a dangerous psychiatric state in which people lose their connection with reality. These episodes can get so out of control that people may need hospitalization. However, new research finds that people who overuse marijuana and then experience their first psychotic episode may be helped by the quick use of injected antipsychotics. “These findings encourage the early use of second-generation, long-acting injectables as an important secondary prevention strategy to reduce rates of hospitalization” in such patients, reports a team led by Dr. Alexander Denissoff, of the University of Turku in Finland. His team tracked outcomes for 1,820 people who had a first psychotic episode and also had cannabis use disorder between 2006 and 2021. Just over 1,100 of these patients ended up being hospitalized due to “psychotic relapse,” according to the American Psychiatric Association news release. However, folks who had received any antipsychotic med were a third less likely to require hospitalization due to relapse, compared to those who hadn’t gotten these drugs. Comparing the effectiveness of various antipsychotics, risperidone came out on top, cutting the odds for relapse-linked hospitalization by 60%, the researchers found, followed by aripiprazole (58% reduction), oral clozapine (57%),… read on > read on >

A test to gauge if it’s safe to prescribe a patient an addictive opioid may have been approved too soon by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, claims a letter sent to the agency by a group of experts. The test, called AvertD, is meant to screen for genetic markers suggesting that a person has a higher likelihood of developing an opioid use disorder (OUD). If the test result is positive, doctors could try alternative medications. However, the FDA approved the test in December against the advice of its own advisory panel, the experts noted in their letter. They claim that AvertD is inaccurate and could actually lead to more opioid dependencies, not less. “This test will make the opioid crisis worse,” said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, medical director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University in Massachusetts and one of the those who signed the letter. “It will contribute to overprescribing, it will contribute to an increased incidence of opioid use disorder,” he told NBC News. “In other words, more people becoming newly addicted to opioids.” He and the letter co-authors asked FDA Commissioner Robert Califf to revoke the agency’s approval. Neither the FDA nor the test’s maker, California-based SOLVD Health, responded to NBC News for comment. According to data from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, over 6.1 million Americans were reported… read on > read on >

(HealthDayNews) — Following disappointing trial results, the maker of a controversial ALS drug said it is pulling the medication off the market. In a statement issued Thursday, Amylyx Pharmaceuticals said that Relyvrio failed to help patients in a large follow-up study, and the drug “will no longer be available for new patients as of today.” The medication is sold as Albrioza in Canada. “The decision to remove RELYVRIO/ALBRIOZA from the market and provide therapy free of charge for those who wish to continue was informed by the PHOENIX trial results, engagement with regulatory authorities and discussions with the ALS community,” Joshua Cohen and Justin Klee, co-CEOs of Amylyx, said in the statement. “Thank you to each and every person who shared feedback with us and continues to support our commitment to the ALS community.” The company added that, as of Thursday, “patients currently on therapy in the U.S. and Canada who, in consultation with their physician, wish to continue can be transitioned to a free drug program.” Relyvrio combines two older drugs: a prescription medication for liver disorders and a dietary supplement associated with traditional Chinese medicine. According to the New York Times, about 4,000 patients battling ALS are currently using Relyvrio, which has a list price of $154,000 per year. Relyvrio was first approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in September 2022,… read on > read on >

A good night’s sleep is often hampered by caffeine, hunger, alcohol or chronic pain. Now, America has a new cause of poor sleep: the sound of gunfire on city streets. New research shows that gunshots are twice as likely to occur at night, mostly affecting the sleep of people in low-income neighborhoods. In fact, nearly three out of four gunshots (72%) occur at night in major U.S. cities, mostly on Saturday and Sunday, researchers found. “A nighttime gunshot likely disrupts the sleep of nearby community residents due to the sheer sound of the shot, which is then followed by a cacophony of sirens from police vehicles and ambulances,” said researcher Rebecca Robbins, an assistant professor of sleep medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. For the study, researchers analyzed more than 72,000 records on the time and location of gunshots in six major cities around the United States, including Baltimore, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., and Washington, D.C., between 2015 and 2021. The team tracked how many gunshots occurred during the day versus at night, and then created maps to show which neighborhoods are most plagued by nighttime gunfire. They also estimated the number of people who lived near a location where gunshots occurred. As many as 12.5 million nights of sleep were ruined by gunfire across the six cities, given the number… read on > read on >

Women who enter menopause before their 50s and who also have heart disease risk factors may be at especially high risk for thinking declines and later dementia, new research shows. “While cardiovascular risk factors are known to increase a person’s risk for dementia, what is lesser known is why women have a greater risk for Alzheimer’s disease than men,” said study lead author Jennifer Rabin, of the University of Toronto. “We examined if the hormonal change of menopause, specifically the timing of menopause, may play a role in this increased risk.” Rabin’s team found that it did. “We found that going through this hormonal change earlier in life while also having cardiovascular risk factors is linked to greater cognitive problems when compared to men of the same age,” she explained in a news release from the American Neurological Association. Maintaining good blood flow to and within the brain is a known factor in neurological health. High blood pressure, smoking and diabetes can all impair brain blood flow. In the new study, Rabin’s team tracked the cognitive health of 16,720 people, averaging 65 years of age, evenly divided as to gender. They further divided the female participants into three subgroups: Those who experienced earlier menopause between the ages of 35 and 48; those who entered menopause between ages 49 and 52 (which is typical); and those… read on > read on >

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All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

Even a Little Secondhand Smoke Ups Odds for A-Fib

Eclipse Viewing Safety: Keeping Your & Your Kid’s Vision Safe

Nerve Zap Treatment for Sleep Apnea Less Effective in Obese People

It May Be Fine to Exercise During Long COVID

Suicide Rates Have Doubled in 20 Years Among U.S. College Athletes

Antipsychotics Help Ease Episodes of Marijuana-Induced Psychosis

Was the FDA Too Quick Approving Test for Opioid Addiction Risk?

Maker Is Pulling Controversial ALS Drug Relyvrio Off the Market

Rising Threat to Americans’ Healthy Sleep: Neighborhood Gunfire

Early Menopause, Heart Disease a Bad Combo for Women’s Brains