FRIDAY, Dec. 30, 2022 (HealthDay News) – The United States could see a huge rise in diabetes among young people over the next several decades, a new modeling study finds. As many as 220,000 young people under the age of 20 could have type 2 diabetes in 2060, which would represent a nearly eight-fold increase, a research team that included scientists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Type 1 diabetes cases could increase, too, by as much as 65% in the next 40 years. Even if the rate of new diabetes diagnoses among young people stayed unchanged, type 2 cases could increase nearly 70% and type 1 cases by 3% by 2060. “This new research should serve as a wake-up call for all of us. It’s vital that we focus our efforts to ensure all Americans, especially our young people, are the healthiest they can be,” CDC Acting Principal Deputy Director Dr. Debra Houry said in an agency news release. “The COVID-19 pandemic underscored how critically important it is to address chronic diseases, like diabetes. This study further highlights the importance of continuing efforts to prevent and manage chronic diseases, not only for our current population but also for generations to come.” The study authors used findings from the Search for Diabetes in Youth survey, which was funded by the CDC…  read on >  read on >

A new study confirms what many believe: Women tend to be better than men at imagining or understanding what another person is feeling or thinking. Using a test that measures empathy, researchers evaluated more than 300,000 people in 57 countries around the world to come to that conclusion. “Our results provide some of the first evidence that the well-known phenomenon — that females are, on average, more empathic than males — is present in a wide range of countries across the globe. It’s only by using very large data sets that we can say this with confidence,” said study author David Greenberg, from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. The study was led by Cambridge University in England and included collaborators from Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities in Israel, as well as Harvard and Washington universities in the United States, and IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy. The test used in the study is one of the most widely used for measuring empathy. It asks participants to choose a word best describing what a person in a photo is thinking or feeling just by viewing photos of the eye region of the face. This new study found that females scored significantly higher than males, on average, in 36 countries. Females scored similarly to males in 21 countries. In no country did males score significantly higher than…  read on >  read on >

Most working-age Americans get health insurance through their employer, but even they are finding it tougher to afford medical care these days, a new study shows. Researchers found that over the past 20 years, a growing number of Americans with job-based health insurance have been skipping medical care due to costs. Women have been particularly hard-hit. The study, published Dec. 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, could not get at the reasons. But experts said there are some likely explanations, including rising health care costs and moves by insurance plans to foist more payment responsibility onto consumers. “The U.S. health care system is unique in how privatized it is,” said lead researcher Avni Gupta, a PhD student at the NYU School of Global Public Health in New York City. About 61% of Americans younger than 65 get health insurance through their employer, and businesses use that benefit to help attract workers, Gupta pointed out. “It’s the most important fringe benefit of employment,” she said. But increasingly, the new findings show, that fringe benefit is falling short. By 2020, the study found, about 6% of U.S. women with employer-sponsored insurance said they’d been forced to skip needed medical care in the past year due to costs. That was double the percentage 20 years before, at 3%. The figures were lower among men, but…  read on >  read on >

Made infamous as the club drug Special K, ketamine is nowadays being seen as a wonder drug for some folks with hard-to-treat depression. However, a new study finds that some types of patients are more likely to gain a rapid and significant benefit from ketamine than others. Overall, while most patients did benefit from the drug, about one-third experienced a “rapid improvement” in their depression symptoms, the researchers said. Certain patient characteristics appeared to predict that level of benefit. “Severely depressed individuals with a history of childhood trauma may have a better likelihood of a rapid and robust response to ketamine,” concluded lead researcher Brittany O’Brien, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. In 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a ketamine derivative called esketamine (Spravato) for depression that has failed to respond to at least two conventional antidepressants. Given as a nasal spray, esketamine is different from ketamine, which is an injectable anesthetic that can have mind-altering effects. The new study included nearly 300 people with major depression who were treated with three infusions of ketamine at an outpatient clinic. Participants were 40 years old, on average, and most were men. They had not responded to at least two antidepressants in the past. Mood changes were measured using a standardized depression scale over six…  read on >  read on >