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People with autism are over three times more likely than their peers without the developmental disorder to experience self-injury, suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, or death by suicide, new research shows. “In general, I think there needs to be more support for individuals with autism. And this shows that there are life-threatening consequences in terms of suicide and self-harm,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer for the Autism Science Foundation. She was not involved in the study. The researchers agreed. “The presence of psychiatric illnesses substantially accounts for these increased risks,” said lead study author Dr. Meng-Chuan Lai, staff psychiatrist and clinician scientist with the Child and Youth Mental Health Collaborative at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) at the University of Toronto. “We know that many self-harm and suicide-related events could be prevented when people have access to tailored mental health supports and services, and this is crucial for autistic people,” he said in a CAMH news release. Megan Pilatzke is an advocate and a woman living with autism. ”Autistic people are continually forced to mask and hide who we are to accommodate a world that generally does not accept our traits,” Pilatzke said in the release. “I want people to understand that autistic people are struggling because our needs are just not being met throughout society.” Broken down by gender, females with… read on > read on >

Modern antidepressants could be effective for long-term treatment of some patients with bipolar disorder, a new trial suggests. Current guidelines discourage use of antidepressants in these patients, over concerns that the drugs will trigger a manic episode. But bipolar patients who remained on antidepressants for a whole year had fewer mood episodes than those who were switched to a placebo after two months, the investigators found. These results “should change practice and it should convert more people that were nonbelievers to saying, yeah, at least for some patients, continuing antidepressants is a good strategy,” said lead researcher Dr. Lakshmi Yatham, head of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, in Canada. However, the clinical trial doesn’t provide cut-and-dried support for antidepressants. The trial failed its primary goal of showing a statistically significant benefit for using antidepressants long-term versus short-term, because too few patients participated, noted Dr. Michael Thase, a psychiatrist with Penn Medicine in Philadelphia. “You have an effect on the main primary outcome that is in the direction of a clinically meaningful effect in favor of staying on the antidepressants, but it’s below the threshold of statistical significance because the study didn’t get to the size that it was supposed to be,” explained Thase, who was not part of the research. Depressive episodes are of great concern to doctors because they bring with them… read on > read on >

Microplastics appear to be everywhere, including within the tissues of the human heart. A new Chinese report describes doctors finding microplastics in heart tissue both before and after heart surgery. The researchers also noted there is evidence suggesting that microplastics may have been unexpectedly introduced during the heart procedures. The researchers, who included Kun Hua and Xiubin Yang from Capital Medical University in Beijing, collected heart tissue samples from 15 people during cardiac surgeries. They also gathered blood samples from the patients both before and after surgery. These plastic fragments, about the size of a pencil eraser or smaller, can enter the human body through mouths, noses and other body cavities. The full extent of microplastics inside the body isn’t known because most organs and tissues are fully enclosed within the body. In this study, the team analyzed the samples with laser direct infrared imaging, identifying 20- to 500-micrometer-wide particles made from eight types of plastic. These included polyethylene terephthalate, polyvinyl chloride and poly(methyl methacrylate). Most tissue samples had tens of thousands of individual microplastic pieces. The blood samples also contained plastic particles. However, the average size of those particles decreased after surgery. The findings were reported recently in the American Chemical Society’s Environmental Science & Technology journal. The study was small but provides preliminary evidence that microplastics can accumulate and persist in the heart.… read on > read on >

It may not get the publicity of some better-known vitamins like D, but vitamin K — found in leafy green vegetables — may boost lung health. A new, large study — published Aug. 10 in ERJ Open Research — suggests that people who have low levels of this vitamin also have less healthy lungs. They are more likely to report having asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and wheezing. “Our results suggest that vitamin K could play a part in keeping our lungs healthy,” said researcher Dr. Torkil Jespersen of Copenhagen University Hospital and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. “On their own, our findings do not alter current recommendations for vitamin K intake, but they do suggest that we need more research on whether some people, such as those with lung disease, could benefit from vitamin K supplementation,” Jespersen said in a journal news release. In addition to leafy greens, vitamin K is found in vegetable oils and cereal grains. It has a role in blood clotting, helping the body heal wounds, but researchers know very little about its role in lung health. To study this, the Danish researchers recruited more than 4,000 Copenhagen residents, ages 24 to 77. Study participants underwent lung function testing, called spirometry, which measures the amount of air a person can breathe out in one second (forced expiratory volume… read on > read on >

If you’re one of the millions of folks bent on racking up at least 10,000 steps a day, read on. A new study finds that heart health starts to improve with as few as 2,300 steps a day. The research also indicates your risk of dying from any disease starts to decrease with only about 4,000 daily steps. However, the more daily steps you get, the bigger the benefit becomes, the study also found. “Ten thousand steps per day is, in fact, still a correct way of thinking if we take into account the most pronounced [death] reduction,” said study author Dr. Maciej Banach. He is a professor of cardiology at the Medical University of Lodz in Poland, and an adjunct professor at the Center for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Ten thousand steps equates to about 4-5 miles of walking, experts say. For the study, researchers analyzed 17 prior studies involving about 227,000 people. They were followed for roughly seven years. Adults over age 60 saw risk of death reduced by 42% if they clocked between 6,000 and 10,000 steps a day. Among younger adults, there was a 49% reduction when they walked between 7,000 and 13,000 steps a day, the study showed. “Every increase of steps by 1,000 steps/day is associated with a 15% reduction in… read on > read on >

There are plenty of reasons to steer clear of sugary drinks, and new research highlights yet another one: Women who drink sodas and other sweetened drinks have a higher risk of developing liver cancer and chronic liver disease. Looking at data on nearly 100,000 women, researchers found that nearly 7% of women consumed one or more sugar-sweetened beverages daily. Those women had an 85% higher risk of liver cancer and 68% higher risk of chronic liver disease death compared to those who had fewer than three sugar-sweetened beverages a month. “To our knowledge, this is the first study to report an association between sugar-sweetened beverage intake and chronic liver disease mortality,” said study co-author Longgang Zhao, a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Network Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Our findings, if confirmed, may pave the way to a public health strategy to reduce risk of liver disease,” Zhao said in a hospital news release. Researchers used data on the postmenopausal women from the large Women’s Health Initiative study. Participants reported their usual consumption of soft drinks or fruit drinks (not fruit juice), and then reported artificially sweetened beverage consumption after three years. The study followed the women for a median of more than 20 years (half more, half less). The authors looked at self-reported liver cancer incidence as well as deaths… read on > read on >

A large new study challenges the long-held idea that depression makes people more vulnerable to cancer, finding no association between the mental health condition and most types of cancer. The study, of more than 300,000 adults, found that neither depression nor chronic anxiety were linked to increased odds of developing cancer in the coming years. And when researchers looked at specific types of cancer, the findings were largely the same. The one exception was a slightly increased risk of cancers that are strongly linked to smoking, including lung cancer. And the analysis suggests that smoking — as well as alcohol and heavy body weight — are the real culprits, rather than depression or anxiety themselves. Experts said the study, published online Aug. 7 in the journal Cancer, may offer reassurance to people who’ve blamed a cancer diagnosis on their mental health struggles. “Our findings show that there is no evidence for this,” said study leader Lonneke van Tuijl, a health psychology researcher at University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, that kind of self-blame “comes up a lot,” said Dr. William Breitbart, chief of psychiatry at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “There are many patients who feel guilt, who say ‘I gave this to myself,’” said Breitbart, who was not involved in the study. The reality, he said, is that… read on > read on >

It seems obvious that texting and walking can be a dangerous duo, but now a new Australian study offers solid evidence of the dangers. Emergency room doctors Dr. Michael Levine and Dr. Matthew Harris, who were not involved in the study, weren’t surprised by the findings. “I think we’ve had, this summer, several people who either have been distracted while walking and have been hit by a car or been hit by a bicycle,” said Harris, from Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, N.Y. “I’ve definitely seen people stepping off curbs when they were not supposed to, not seeing cars come… because they were too busy looking at their phone when they should have realized where the sidewalk ended,” added Levine, from UCLA Health. “So, I’ve seen all different permutations of people getting injured from texting and walking across the street.” For the study, Australian researchers recruited 50 students from the University of New South Wales and had them go through four exercises. One was to text while sitting, another was to walk without texting, another was to have them walk and text, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” and the last one was to have students walk and text the same message while going through a walkway specifically designed by one of the scientists to have tiles slip out of place.… read on > read on >

It’s already known that the “healthy glow” of a tan actually represents damage to skin cells. But a new study of people on vacation has found that sunbathing also can disrupt the skin’s microbiome, altering the populations of bacteria that live on the skin in ways that could be harmful to health. The microbiome recovers within a month, but during that time a person will be more vulnerable to skin problems, said senior researcher Abigail Langton. She is a lecturer with the University of Manchester’s Center for Dermatology Research, in England. “During this 28-day post-holiday period of recovery skin may have reduced health, making it more susceptible to infection or irritation due to the loss of Proteobacteria [a type of bacteria that lives on the skin] and the overall change in skin microbiota balance,” Langton said. For this study, researchers analyzed the skin of 21 healthy volunteers prior to scheduled vacations in sunny locales. The team noted the makeup of the skin’s microbiota, specifically the three main bacterial communities found there. The research team then analyzed participants’ skin the day they got back, and at 28 and 84 days post-vacation. The investigators sorted the vacationers into groups based on sun exposure — eight “seekers” who picked up a tan while away, seven “tanners” who already had a tan before they left, and six “avoiders” who… read on > read on >

Patients being treated for ovarian cancer often experience peripheral neuropathy, a side effect from their chemotherapy that can cause both pain and numbness for months, or even years. Now, a new study suggests that six months of aerobic exercise may ease this unpleasant side effect. “The results from this trial hold the potential to transform supportive care for ovarian cancer survivors by offering a new approach to managing CIPN [chemotherapy-induced peripheral neuropathy],” said senior study author Leah Ferrucci, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health and a member of Yale Cancer Center. “These findings provide compelling evidence that a structured, home-based aerobic exercise program can significantly improve CIPN in ovarian cancer survivors who have completed chemotherapy,” Ferrucci said in a Yale news release. The structured aerobic exercise intervention in the study had already been found to improve physical health-related quality of life. For this new research on patients with ovarian cancer who received chemotherapy, the investigators evaluated the impact of the exercise program and compared it to a control group of patients not in the exercise program. Patients in the exercise intervention arm of the study had a reduction of 1.3 points in CIPN symptoms at the end of the six-month program. Those in the control group, who only received weekly health education phone calls, had a minor increase in… read on > read on >

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People With Autism Face Much Higher Risk for Self-Harm, Suicide

Extended Use of Antidepressants May Help People With Bipolar Disorder

Surgeons Are Finding Microplastics in Human Hearts

Vitamin K May Kickstart Healthy Lungs

How Many Daily Steps to Lengthen Your Life? Fewer Than You Might Think

Sugary Drinks Raise Women’s Odds for Liver Disease, Cancer

Stress, Depression Won’t Raise Your Odds for Cancer: Study

Study Confirms it: Texting While Walking Is Dangerous

Vacations in the Sun Aren’t Good for Your Skin’s Microbiome

Aerobic Exercise Might Ease Pain for Women Who’ve Survived Ovarian Cancer