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 >

Being evicted can have a significant impact on a person’s health, according to new research. In U.S. counties where eviction rates were elevated, death rates were higher for all causes, especially if those areas were home to a higher proportion of Black residents and women. Study author Dr. Andrew Sumarsono, assistant professor of internal medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said this study was the first to evaluate and identify a link between county eviction and death rates. “Affordable, stable housing is a public health concern. If you’re worried about where you’re going to live next week, caring about your health can easily become a lesser priority,” Sumarsono said in a center news release. “Policies that increase affordable housing and cushion against life events that lead to housing instability could translate to better health outcomes.” To study this, researchers analyzed both eviction rates and deaths in nearly 700 U.S. counties using data from 2016. In counties where the proportion of women was above the median (meaning half had fewer, half more), death rates were five times higher than in counties with a lower proportion of women. Although death rates in areas with a higher proportion of Black residents were also higher, just 2% of those in the study were Black so the findings may be limited, researchers said. The county data…  read on >  read on >

While 8 of 10 mothers breastfeed their newborns for a short time, the number plummets despite recommendations from experts, in part because milk production falls off. Researchers investigating why that happens found that in women who are obese, inflammation may be the culprit. Prior research has shown that when a person is obese, chronic inflammation starts in the fat and spreads to organs and systems throughout the body. And that inflammation may disrupt absorption of fatty acids from the blood into body tissues. These fatty acids are the building blocks for the fats needed to feed a growing infant. “Science has shown repeatedly that there is a strong connection between the fatty acids that you eat and the fatty acids in your blood,” said lead author Rachel Walker, postdoctoral fellow in nutritional sciences at Penn State University. “If someone eats a lot of salmon, you will find more omega-3s in their blood. If someone else eats a lot of hamburgers, you will find more saturated fats in their blood.” The study is among the first to examine whether fatty acids in blood are also found in breast milk, Walker said. “For women who are exclusively breastfeeding, the correlation was very high; most of the fatty acids that appeared in blood were also present in the breast milk,” she said in a university news release. But…  read on >  read on >

Living in tight-knit communities where neighbors are connected to one another helped improve health outcomes for older Chinese Americans, a new study found. Rutgers University researchers used data from a study of more than 3,100 elderly Chinese people in the Chicago area to investigate whether the perception of trust and connection among neighbors had an impact on their risk of death. The study found folks who lived alone and reported low interaction or connection with neighbors had a 48.5% higher risk of premature death than those who lived with someone else. However, participants who lived alone but had strong neighborhood ties had a similar risk of death compared to those with housemates. The presence of helpful neighbors seemed to make a difference, researchers said. “Older Chinese Americans who lived by themselves in neighborhoods with low cohesion were much more likely to die earlier than those who lived by themselves in neighborhoods with strong cohesion,” said study author Yanping Jiang, an instructor at the Rutgers Institute for Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research in New Brunswick, N.J. About 27% of people ages 60 and up in the United States live alone, according to Pew Research Center. Living alone has been linked to depression, heart disease, dementia, poor biological health and premature death. Social policies can help create better neighborhood environments for promoting health of older…  read on >  read on >

It’s a scenario no parent would ever want to witness: Their child suffers a mental health crisis and is taken to the emergency room, only to have to wait 12 hours or more for the right medical care. Sadly, it is what 1 in 5 of these young patients now face, new research finds. “For kids with mental health conditions, long waits in the emergency department have been a compounding problem for decades,” said lead researcher Dr. Alexander Janke, a visiting research scientist at Yale University Medical School in New Haven, Conn. The long waits are a symptom of a larger problem: Between numerous bottlenecks in the mental health care system and poor access to counseling services in settings like clinics and schools, “the system we have built to take care of some of our most vulnerable children is not adequately resourced,” Janke said. For the study, Janke and his colleagues turned to data from the American College of Emergency Physicians Clinical Emergency Data Registry. The researchers looked specifically at 107 emergency departments in 29 states from January 2020 through December 2021. The investigators found that the rate of visits where a child stayed longer than 24 hours more than doubled in some months during the pandemic. According to the report, kids who remained in the emergency department for more than 24 hours accounted for…  read on >  read on >