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Long left to the fringes of the recreational drug culture, psilocybin — the hallucinatory ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — has recently been making inroads as a legitimate (and fast-acting) antidepressant. Research published Dec. 18 in Cancer shows its benefits may extend to people battling cancer, who often experience the added burden of depression. “As an oncologist for many years, I experienced the frustration of not being able to provide cancer care that treats the whole person, not just the tumor,” said study lead author Dr. Manish Agrawal. “This was a small, open-label study and more research needs to be done, but the potential is significant and could have implications for helping millions of patients with cancer who are also struggling with the severe psychological impact of the disease,” he added in a journal news release. Agrawal is CEO of Sunstone Therapies, based in Rockland, Md, which funded the phase 2 trial. In the trial, 30 people with cancer who were experiencing moderate-to-severe depression got a single, 25 milligram dose of synthesized psilocybin. They also received one-on-one sessions with a therapist and group therapy sessions before, during and after the treatment. Key to patient outcomes was the fact that people were prepped for the treatment beforehand and then received the therapy in these small groups of three to four people, researchers said. Sharing the overall… read on > read on >

Exposure to a common chemical group found in many household products may delay or even prevent a woman from becoming pregnant, a new study says. Phthalates can lower a woman’s odds of becoming pregnant by up to 18% in any given month, researchers report in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives. Phthalates are chemicals found in products like shampoo, makeup, soaps, hair sprays, toys, vinyl flooring and medical devices. These chemicals are known “endocrine disruptors,” substances that can influence and alter the way hormones function in the human body. “Phthalates are ubiquitous endocrine disruptors and we’re exposed to them every day,” lead researcher Carrie Nobles said in a news release. She’s an assistant professor of environmental health sciences in the University of Massachusetts Amherst School of Public Health and Health Sciences. For their study, Nobles and her colleagues analyzed data on more than 1,200 women who were followed through six menstrual cycles as they attempted to get pregnant, as part of previous research on the effect of low-dose aspirin on birth rates. “We were able to look at some environmental exposures like phthalates and how that relates to how long it takes to get pregnant,” Nobles said. “There was detailed data for each menstrual cycle, so we had a good handle on the date of ovulation and the timing of pregnancy when that happened.” The body… read on > read on >

Women struggling with fertility and using in vitro fertilization (IVF) to conceive sometimes turn to supplements for help. Unfortunately, a new study finds only weak evidence to support that strategy. In contrast, the same research found that the heart-healthy Mediterranean diet does boost the odds that a woman will become a mother. Compared to the fat- and sugar-rich Western diet, adopting a Mediterranean regimen appears to be a “straightforward approach” to boosting fertility, according to a team led by Roger Hart. He’s a fertility specialist and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Western Australia, in Perth. The new study was published Dec. 20 in Reproductive Biomedicine Online. As Hart explained in a journal news release, “nutritional supplements are usually not prescribed” for women using IVF. Instead, women typically try them out on their own. Such women are, therefore, “self-medicating” with supplements. “Our information is largely anecdotal but it’s quite clear from online IVF discussion forums that they [supplements] are widely used and of great public interest,” Hart said. But can supplements help women become pregnant? To find out, the new study examined the collected evidence regarding the following products: dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), melatonin, co-enzyme Q10 (CoQ1O), carnitine, selenium, Vitamin D, myo-inositol, Omega-3 and Chinese herbs. Researchers also analyzed data on various diets and whether they might help women on IVF conceive. … read on > read on >

Hospital coffee machines have received some side-eye as a potential source of spreading infection, but a new study debunks the belief. “To our great relief…a general ban on coffee makers doesn’t seem necessary,” concluded researchers led by Dr. Sarah Victoria Walker, head of the Institute for Clinical Microbiology and Hospital Hygiene in Ludwigsburg, Germany. For their study, German researchers swabbed 25 automatic capsule coffee makers and espresso machines. Of the machines, 17 were from break rooms and offices in a university hospital in Cologne, Germany, and the other eight were in the homes of staff members. All of the coffee makers had been in use for at least a year. Researchers swabbed them in five specific places – the drip tray, the outlet, the buttons, the handle of the water tank and the inside of the water tank. The researchers focused on what the World Health Organization calls its high-priority ESKAPE pathogens — Enterococcus faecium, Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Enterobacter species. Those bacteria all pose an increasing threat because they are antibiotic-resistant and can lead to fatal blood infections in a hospital setting. Unsurprisingly, bacterial growth was detected on every coffee machine. What’s more, hospital machines were about three times as heavily colonized with microbes as home machines, with 360 strains isolated from 72 swabs compared to 135 strains from… read on > read on >

The average U.S. adult eats a meal’s worth of snacks every day, a new study suggests. Americans average about 400 to 500 calories in snacks daily, often more than what they ate at breakfast, according to data from more than 23,000 people. These extra calories offer little in the way of actual nutrition, said senior researcher Christopher Taylor, a professor of medical dietetics with Ohio State University’s School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences. “Snacks are contributing a meal’s worth of intake to what we eat without it actually being a meal,” Taylor noted in a university news release. “You know what dinner is going to be: a protein, a side dish or two,” Taylor added. “But if you eat a meal of what you eat for snacks, it becomes a completely different scenario of, generally, carbohydrates, sugars, not much protein, not much fruit, not a vegetable. So it’s not a fully well-rounded meal.” There’s one bright spot – people with type 2 diabetes tended to eat fewer sugary foods and snacked less overall than either those without diabetes or with prediabetes. “Diabetes education looks like it’s working, but we might need to bump education back to people who are at risk for diabetes and even to people with normal blood glucose levels to start improving dietary behaviors before people develop chronic disease,” Taylor said. For… read on > read on >

Elite athletes who suffer a sudden cardiac arrest might have genetics that make them more vulnerable to heart disease, a new study suggests. Analysis of more than 280 top-level endurance athletes revealed that 1 in 6 have measures that would normally suggest heart disease and reduced heart function, researchers report in the journal Circulation. Those athletes also carried a rich load of genes associated with heart disease, researchers said. “The phenomenon of the athletes’ heart has long been known, but we were the first team to investigate the role an athlete’s genetic makeup plays in their heart function and structure,” researcher Dr. Diane Fatkin, a molecular cardiologist at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute in Sydney, said in a news release. “What we have found is that there are far more profound changes than thought and that a high number of these athletes do have altered heart function,” she continued. A series of recent near-tragedies on playing fields and in gymnasiums have prompted increased interest in how heavy exercise can affect the hearts of elite athletes. In late July, University of Southern California freshman guard Bronny James – son of Lakers basketball star LeBron James — collapsed from a cardiac arrest during an offseason workout. And Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered an on-field cardiac arrest during a 2022 football game, following a hit to… read on > read on >

Heat coupled with smog can be a particularly lethal mix, especially for older adults, a new study finds. Unfortunately, both hot temperatures and air pollution are going to increase as the planet warms, and so will deaths, researchers report. “We are experiencing more and more frequent wildfires, which cause pollution, and wildfires happen during the hotter days. So, there will be more of these occurrences in the future,” said lead researcher Md Mostafijur Rahman, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. Although extreme heat and air pollution each increase the risk of dying, the combination increases the risk exponentially, he noted. Extremely hot days increase the risk of dying by just over 6%. On days when air pollution is high, death risk increases by 5%. However, on very hot, highly polluted days, that risk increases 21%, Rahman said. To come to that conclusion, his team used death certificates from California’s Department of Public Health to analyze more than 1.5 million deaths across the state between 2014 and 2019. They also used data on air temperature and levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5). PM2.5 is known to cause health problems. They found that on days when both heat and air pollutions were high, the risk of dying from heart conditions jumped nearly 30%, and the risk of dying from respiratory… read on > read on >

Severe obesity appears to be on the rise among young U.S. children, based on data from a federal supplemental nutrition program. About 2% of children between 2 and 4 years of age in the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) nutrition program were severely obese by 2020, a new study reports. That’s about 33,000 of the more than 1.6 million kids in the program. The data dashes hopes that progress had been made within the program against severe obesity, which is defined as a BMI that’s either above 35 or at least 20% greater than that of the heaviest 5% of kids, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). BMI is short for body mass index, an estimate of body fat based on height and weight. Severe obesity among WIC kids had dropped to 1.8% in 2016 from 2.1% in 2010, according to findings published Dec. 18 in the journal Pediatrics. This jibes with other studies that have noted an uptick in severe obesity among young kids, as high as 2.9% of 2- to 4-year-olds in 2018, the researchers said in background notes. “We were doing well and now we see this upward trend,” researcher Heidi Blanck, chief of the CDC’s Obesity Prevention and Control Branch, told the Associated Press. “We are dismayed at seeing these findings.” In all, 20 states saw… read on > read on >

Cinnamon used in applesauce pouches that have been tied to high lead levels in kids may have been deliberately tainted with the toxic element, a source at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration says. “We’re still in the midst of our investigation,” Jim Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, told Politico. “But so far all of the signals we’re getting lead to an intentional act on the part of someone in the supply chain and we’re trying to sort of figure that out.” The applesauce pouches under recall so far are from three brands — Weis, WanaBana and Schnucks. Each is tied to the same manufacturing facility in Ecuador, which the FDA said it is now inspecting. “My instinct is they didn’t think this product was going to end up in a country with a robust regulatory process,” Jones said. “They thought it was going to end up in places that did not have the ability to detect something like this.” As of the latest FDA update on Dec. 12, 65 children under 6 years of age had been diagnosed with symptoms of lead poisoning tied to the recalled applesauce. According to Politico, the FDA suspect the deliberate adulteration of cinnamon included in the applesauce products was “economically motivated.” Typically, that involves boosting the perceived quality of a product while producing it at… read on > read on >

If you’re one of the 50 million Americans with asthma or allergies, 2024 is another year to redouble efforts to manage them. But how? “It’s not always easy to get allergies and asthma under control,” allergist Dr. Gailen Marshall, president of the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI), said in a tip sheet from the organization. “The new year is a great time to take stock of how you’re feeling and assess what kind of changes you might want to make to feel better overall. They might be small changes, which taken together, can mean big improvements in how you navigate your day.” He and the ACAAI offered up a handful of ways you can handle things. Top 5 Resolutions: 1) Update your prescriptions: What worked last year to keep your allergies at bay might not be working by next year: Check in with your board-certified allergist or asthma specialist to make sure you’re up-to-date on the latest meds, the ACAAI said. 2) Ward off respiratory viruses: Folks with asthma and allergies can be at high risk for a lot of germs that hamper breathing, the ACAAI said. Be sure to get up-to-date on your seasonal flu shot, the COVID-19 vaccine and the newly approved respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) shot. The very young and the very old face even higher risks. 3) Keep your… read on > read on >

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All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

‘Magic Mushroom’ Psilocybin Can Ease Depression in Cancer Patients: Study

Phthalates, Found in Everyday Products, Might Lower Fertility

Supplements vs. the Mediterranean Diet for IVF Success: Which Works Best?

Hospital Coffee Machines Aren’t Germ-Spreaders, Study Finds

You’re Probably Eating a Meal’s Worth of Snacks Each Day

Genes Hold Clues to ‘Athlete’s Heart’ Syndrome

High Heat, Heavy Smog a Deadly Combo: Study

Rate of Severe Obesity in Kids Is Rising Again

Cinnamon in Applesauce That Sickened Kids May Have Been Deliberately Tainted With Lead

Resolve to Keep Your Allergies, Asthma in Check in 2024