Chronic stress can increase young women’s risk of stroke, a new study says. Moderate stress increases risk of stroke by 78% in women but not in men, researchers reported in the journal Neurology. “More research is needed to understand why women who feel stressed, but not men, may have a higher risk of stroke,” said senior researcher Dr. Nicolas Martinez-Majander, a neurologist at Helsinki University Hospital in Finland. “In addition, we need to further explore why the risk of stroke in women was higher for moderate stress than high stress,” Martinez-Majander added in a news release. “Knowing more about how stress plays a role could help us to create better ways to prevent these strokes.” For the study, researchers examined health data for 426 Europeans between 18 to 49 who’d suffered a stroke with no known cause, and compared them to 426 healthy people who hadn’t suffered a stroke. All participants completed a 10-question survey about their stress levels, and stroke patients were asked to recall the stress they’d faced in the month prior to their stroke. The survey included questions like, “In the last month, how often have you felt that you were unable to control the important things in your life?” Stroke patients were more likely to have at least moderate stress levels, researchers found. About 46% had moderate or high stress levels, compared…  read on >  read on >

Bad meetings don’t just waste time — they can leave workers with a “meeting hangover,” new research shows. More than 90% of employees surveyed by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte said they sometimes experience these “hangovers” — lingering frustration and distraction after unproductive meetings. More than half said these “hangovers” hurt their overall productivity. “A meeting hangover is the idea that when we have a bad meeting, we just don’t leave it at the door. It sticks with us and it negatively affects our productivity,” said Steven Rogelberg, a professor of management at UNC- Charlotte and author of “The Surprising Science of Meetings.“ The study found that these bad meetings don’t just affect you, they can also spread negativity across teams. Colleagues also tend to vent to coworkers, sharing their frustrations in a process called “co-rumination” — which can hurt the overall atmosphere and make productivity issues even worse. Factors that can lead to negative experiences include: Meetings that could have been handled by email Unclear or irrelevant agendas Poor facilitation or meetings that run over alloted time No clear decisions made Rogelberg offered CBS several strategies to improve meetings and reduce hangovers. “Keep the attendee list as small as possible,” he said. “Remember that the more the leader talks, the lower the rating of effectiveness. Thus, the meeting leader needs to talk…  read on >  read on >

Race plays a role in whether a child is quickly and accurately diagnosed with asthma, a new study suggests. Outdated and flawed studies previously led to the belief that white children had “naturally higher” lung function compared to other races, researchers said. Diagnostic procedures based on that assumption have caused asthma to be dramatically underdiagnosed among Black children, researchers reported Feb. 28 in JAMA Open Network. About 2.5 to 4 times more Black children with asthma symptoms are diagnosed with reduced lung function when doctors use updated formulas, or equations, that exclude race, researchers found. “These findings have significant clinical implications and further support the universal use of race-neutral equations to increase the likelihood of identifying reduced lung function and improving the detection of asthma, particularly in Black children, promoting health equity,” the research team led by Dr. Gurjit Khurana Hershey, director of asthma research at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, concluded. Diagnosis of asthma requires lung function testing using a calculation built into U.S. spirometers, researchers said in background notes. This calculation follows a standard formula using age, sex, body size and race. Because of those earlier studies, the racial component of the formula adjusted lung function by 10% to 15% for Black people and 4% to 6% for Asian people, researchers said. In 2022, the Global Lung Initiative Network updated lung function reference equations to…  read on >  read on >

More than half of adults and a third of children and teens worldwide will be overweight or obese by 2050, a comprehensive global analysis has concluded. Overweight and obesity rates in adults, children and teens more than doubled over the past three decades, afflicting 2.1 billion adults and 493 million young people with excess weight, researchers reported in The Lancet. And unless something changes, about 60% of adults (3.8 billion) and a third of children and teens (746 million) will be overweight or obese by 2050, researchers project. “The unprecedented global epidemic of overweight and obesity is a profound tragedy and a monumental societal failure,” lead author Emmanuela Gakidou said in a news release. She’s a professor of health metrics sciences with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington in Seattle. Among high-income countries, America had the highest rates of obesity, results show. About 42% of men and 46% of women in the U.S. were obese in 2021. More than half of adults with excess weight now live in just eight countries, researchers found: China (402 million), India (180 million), the United States (172 million), Brazil (88 million), Russia (71 million), Mexico (58 million), Indonesia (52 million) and Egypt (41 million). The largest number of adults with overweight and obesity in 2050 are expected to be in China (627 million),…  read on >  read on >