All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

In a win for telemedicine, new research shows that folks fighting high cholesterol benefit just as much from online coaching as they do from in-person visits with a dietitian. “This study reinforces the idea that comparable clinical outcomes can be achieved using the virtual format,” said lead researcher Dr. Shannon Zoulek, a resident physician at University of Michigan Health. “Improving cholesterol levels may reduce cardiovascular events, and having additional options to access treatment will benefit patients who seek treatment,” Zoulek added in a Michigan news release. More than 20% of American adults are currently using telemedicine, taking their health appointments online rather than traveling to an office, the researchers said in background notes. For the study, the investigators tracked more than 250 patients seen by a registered dietitian between early 2019 and late 2022 at the Preventative Cardiology Clinic of the University of Michigan’s Frankel Cardiovascular Center. Around one in five patients opted for a virtual visit, while the rest had face-to-face visits with their dietitian, the researchers said.  Patients who received this diet coaching experienced significant declines in their “bad” LDL cholesterol and triglycerides, both of which decrease the risk of heart disease. In the end, the researchers found no significant difference in results between telemedicine and in-person visits. The new study was published recently in the Journal of Clinical Lipidology. “Access to nutrition…  read on >  read on >

Exercise can boost the quality of life of women who are battling advanced breast cancer, a new study has found. Women who took part in a nine-month structured exercise program reported less fatigue and a better overall quality of life, according to results presented Thursday at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. “Optimizing quality of life is, of course, important for everybody, but especially for patients living with metastatic disease who undergo continuous treatment,” said researcher Anne May, a professor at the Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care at the University Medical Center, Utrecht, in the Netherlands. “By improving quality of life through enhanced symptom management, we can help patients better enjoy their personal, social, and, if applicable, working life,” May added in a meeting news release. Previous studies have found that exercise can help people with less advanced cancers, but whether those benefits also apply to patients whose cancers have spread has not been rigorously tested, May noted. For the study, May and her colleagues enrolled 357 people with advanced breast cancer, in a collaboration between institutions in Germany, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands and Australia. All participants received a physical activity tracker and generic exercise advice. But 178 patients were also randomly selected to receive more help – twice-weekly supervised exercise sessions for nine months that involved balance, resistance and aerobic…  read on >  read on >

Acne can be terribly embarrassing for a teenager, but a new study has found that adults’ blemishes might have even greater consequences for their social and professional reputation. People are less likely to want to be friends, have close contact or post a pic on social media with a person who has severe acne, researchers found. “Our findings show that stigmatizing attitudes about acne can impair quality of life, potentially by affecting personal relationships and employment opportunities,” said researcher Dr. John Barbieri, a dermatologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Acne is often wrongly perceived as merely a cosmetic issue,” Barbieri added. “It’s important that people with this medical problem get access to treatment, just like any other condition.” Acne occurs in a person’s hair follicles and oil glands, according to Johns Hopkins. Normally, oil from the glands travels up the hair follicles to the skin, keeping the skin moist. But if skin cells plug the follicles and block the oil, bacteria growing inside the follicles can cause pimples and cysts. For this study, Barbieri and his colleagues obtained stock photos of four adults, including men and women with either light or dark skin tone. The researchers digitally altered the pictures to create two additional versions of each, adding either mild or severe acne to the people’s faces. They then performed an experiment with…  read on >  read on >

The newly approved weight-loss medication known as Zepbound is now available for patients to take, drug maker Eli Lilly announced Tuesday. “Today opens another chapter for adults living with obesity who have been looking for a new treatment option like Zepbound,” Rhonda Pacheco, group vice president of Lilly Diabetes and Obesity, U.S., said in a company news release.  “The availability of Zepbound in U.S. pharmacies is the first step, but we have to work hand-in-hand with employers, government and healthcare industry partners to remove barriers and make Zepbound available to those who need it,” Pacheco added. “We are excited to see growing [insurance] coverage in the marketplace, giving millions of Americans access to Zepbound.” It was only last month when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved Zepbound as a weight-loss medication. Tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Zepbound, had already been approved by the FDA as a treatment for type 2 diabetes called Mounjaro. To trigger weight loss, tirzepatide mimics two hormones, GLP-1 and GIP, which stimulate the release of insulin in the body. It quells appetite and slows the rate at which food moves through the stomach, helping patients feel full. Novo Nordisk’s weight-loss medication, Wegovy, uses semaglutide, which only focuses on GLP-1. That difference translated to greater weight loss with Zepbound than Wegovy, a recent study found. Zepbound has been found to prompt up to a 20.9%…  read on >  read on >

In sickness and in health — and in blood pressure, too? A new international study finds that if your blood pressure rises with time, your spouse’s might, also. “Many people know that high blood pressure is common in middle-aged and older adults, yet we were surprised to find that among many older couples, both husband and wife had high blood pressure in the U.S., England, China and India,” said study senior author Dr. Chihua Li, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Michigan. “For instance, in the U.S., among more than 35% of couples who were ages 50 or older, both had high blood pressure,” Li said in a news release from the American Heart Association (AHA). Li’s team published its findings Dec. 6 in the Journal of the American Heart Association. High blood pressure is a common complaint among Americans, and the risk of hypertension rises with age. According to the AHA, almost half (about 47%) of adult Americans had high blood pressure in 2020, and it contributed to 120,000 deaths that year. In the new study, Li and colleagues looked at rates of high blood pressure among nearly 34,000 heterosexual couples worldwide: 4,000 U.S. couples, 1,100 couples in England, more than 6,500 Chinese couples and over 22,000 Indian couples. Data was collected between 2015 and 2019, depending on the country. High blood pressure…  read on >  read on >

Folks with a family history of heart disease might benefit from eating more oily fish like salmon, mackerel, herring and sardines, a new study finds. Oily fish contain high levels of omega-3 fatty acids, which cannot be produced by the body and must be obtained from the diet. People’s risk of heart disease increased by more than 40% if they had low levels of omega-3 fatty acids plus a family history of heart problems, a large international study concluded. However, if a person has adequate levels of omega-3 fatty acids, their family heart history increased their risk by just 25%. The results show that heathy habits can overcome genetic risk in some cases, researchers said. “The study suggests that those with a family history of cardiovascular disease have more to gain from eating more oily fish than others,” said lead researcher Karin Leander, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Omega-3 fatty acids have been linked to a stronger immune system, reduced inflammation, lower blood pressure and improved cholesterol counts, according to the American Heart Association. For the study, Leander and her colleagues pooled data from more than 40,000 people, nearly 8,000 of whom developed heart problems like unstable angina, heart attack, cardiac arrest and stroke. Levels of omega-3 fatty acids were measured in all study participants. These levels are a…  read on >  read on >

Patients in the earliest stages of multiple sclerosis might develop certain symptoms that offer an early clue to the degenerative nerve disease, researchers report. Depression, constipation, urinary tract infections and sexual problems are all more likely in MS patients five years before their official diagnosis, compared with people who never develop MS, researchers found. Those conditions are also more likely to occur in people with other autoimmune diseases like lupus or Crohn’s disease, results show. These early signs “would not necessarily lead to earlier diagnosis of the disease in the general population, since these conditions are common and could also be signs of other diseases, but this information could be helpful for people who are at a higher risk of developing MS, such as people with a family history of the disease or those who show signs of MS on brain scans but do not have any symptoms of the disease,” said researcher Dr. Celine Louapre, an associate professor of neurology at  Sorbonne University in Paris. MS occurs when the immune system attacks the protective sheath that covers nerve fibers, causing progressive interruption of nerve signals between the brain and the body. For the study, Louapre and her colleagues compared more than 20,000 people newly diagnosed with MS with nearly 55,000 people who do not have MS. Each MS patient was matched with three healthy people…  read on >  read on >

New research challenges a long-held notion that human newborns enter the world with brains that are significantly less developed than those of other primates. Babies are born extremely helpless and with poor muscle control, and human brains grow much larger and more complex than other species following birth, investigators said. Because of those observations, it’s long been believed that human newborns have brains comparatively less developed than other primates at birth. But that’s a false impression, researchers report in the Dec. 4 issue of the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. Analysis of brain development patterns in 140 different mammal species has provided new insight into the evolution of human brains, by taking into account factors like fetal gestation and comparative brain size of newborns to adults. “This new work changes the overall understanding around the evolution of human brain development,” said lead researcher Aida Gomez-Robles, an associate professor of anthropology at University College London. “Humans seem so much more helpless when they’re young compared to other primates, not because their brains are comparatively underdeveloped but because they still have much further to go,” Gomez-Robles added in a university news release. Scientists typically judge brain development of different species by comparing the size of their brains as newborns to their brain size as adults, researchers said in background notes. Humans are born with a brain that’s relatively…  read on >  read on >

Hispanic women who experience spikes in blood pressure while pregnant may also face higher heart risks years later, new research shows. These “hypertensive disorders of pregnancy” (HDP) — conditions such as preeclampsia, eclampsia and gestational hypertension — may even have a greater role to play in certain heart risks than regular high blood pressure, the researchers noted. “These findings emphasize the importance of recognizing HDP as an important risk factor for these future problems,” said researcher Jasmina Varagic. She’s a program officer in the Vascular Biology and Hypertension branch at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health. According to Varagic’s team, rates of HDP more than doubled among pregnant women in the United States between 2007 and 2019. The increase was highest among pregnant Hispanic women, resulting in 60 cases of some form of hypertensive disorder per every 1,000 live births. High blood pressure during pregnancy does not bode well for blood pressure long after the baby is born, the researchers noted. Prior studies have shown that HDP raises the odds of having chronic high blood pressure 10-fold. In the new study, Varagic’s group tracked the health of nearly 5,200 Hispanic women who’d had at least one child and who averaged about 59 years of age. The researchers took special scans of each woman’s heart, looking at…  read on >  read on >

People with epilepsy suffer quicker declines in thinking than people without the brain disorder, particularly if they also have risk factors like high blood pressure or diabetes, a new study finds. The difference was significant: Over the course of the 14-year study, those with epilepsy experienced a 65% to 70% faster decline in memory and thinking skills. On top of that, having risk factors for heart disease pushed that percentage 20% higher. “While epilepsy itself is associated with [mild cognitive impairment] and dementia, this risk is substantially magnified in those who also have high blood pressure, diabetes or other cardiovascular risk factors,” said lead researcher Dr. Ifrah Zawar, an assistant professor of neurology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Researchers said their study is unique because it tracked the transition to mild cognitive impairment and dementia in more than 13,700 people who started the study with healthy brains. The participants were recruited at 39 Alzheimer’s disease centers across the United States between September 2005 and December 2021. Fewer than 1% had epilepsy, researchers said. The rate of decline from mild cognitive impairment to dementia was the same in patients with or without epilepsy. The researchers speculate that’s probably because heart risk factors play a much bigger role than epilepsy in the later stages of dementia. The findings were presented Friday at the American Epilepsy…  read on >  read on >