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Deaths among Americans dropped by a significant 6.1% between 2022 and 2023, a new government tally finds. Much of this was due to COVID-19’s ebbing effect on deaths. During the pandemic, over a million Americans lost their lives, and in 2021 it was the third leading cause of death. However, new data shows that as vaccinations and natural immunity levels rose, the illness had dropped to 10th position in terms of lethality by 2023. Still, more than 76,000 people lost their lives either directly or indirectly from COVID last year, so it remains a dire threat, concluded a team of researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nevertheless, that’s a nearly 69% decline compared to the nearly 246,000 lives lost to COVID in 2022. The pandemic’s impact on U.S. mortality has changed, concluded a team led by Farida Bhuiya Ahmad, of the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. “In 2020, COVID-19 altered the rankings of leading causes of death substantially. The mortality burden of COVID-19 has decreased since then,” the researchers said. Her team looked at U.S. death data for the years 2019 through 2023, compiled by the U.S. National Vital Statistics System. The leading cause of death by far during all those years was heart disease, which in 2019 killed nearly 2.85 million Americans. That number rose during the pandemic, to… read on > read on >

Newly developed battery-powered electric bandages could help wounds heal more quickly, a new study reports. In animal testing, wounds treated with electric bandages healed 30% faster than wounds treated with conventional bandages, researchers reported Aug. 7 in the journal Science Advances. The bandages could be a game-changer in treating slow-healing wounds caused by diabetes and other chronic illnesses, researchers say. Those sorts of wounds significantly increase a person’s risk of amputation and death. “Our goal here was to develop a far less expensive technology that accelerates healing in patients with chronic wounds,” said researcher Amay Bandodkar, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “We also wanted to make sure that the technology is easy enough for people to use at home, rather than something that patients can only receive in clinical settings,” Bandodkar noted in a university news release. The study is part of a larger Defense Department-funded effort to accelerate wound healing through different types of innovative dressings, researchers said. These electric bandages have electrodes on one side and a small water-powered battery on the other, researchers said. The dressing is applied so that the electrodes contact the wound, and the battery is activated with a drop of water. The bandage then produces an electric field for several hours. “That electric field is critical, because it’s well established… read on > read on >

People with a genetic predisposition for high cholesterol can lower their levels by taking fish oil supplements, a new study shows. The results indicate that lifestyle can be a powerful influence on artery-clogging cholesterol, even if a person’s genetics tends to make those levels higher, researchers said. “Recent advances in genetic studies have allowed us to predict someone’s genetic risk of high cholesterol,” said lead researcher Yitang Sun, a doctoral graduate from the University of Georgia’s Department of Genetics. “But the current prediction has room for improvement because it does not consider individual differences in lifestyles, such as taking fish oil supplements,” Sun added in a university news release. About 1 in 4 Americans — more than 86 million — have high cholesterol, the researchers said in background notes. Millions more are at risk for high cholesterol because of their genetics, the researchers added. For the study, researchers used genetic data on more than 441,000 British residents to calculate each person’s genetic likelihood of high levels of cholesterol. The study participants are taking part in a large-scale research project called the UK Biobank. As part of that project, the people also reported in a questionnaire whether they take fish oil supplements and provided a blood sample for a cholesterol check. Results show that participants taking fish oil had lower blood cholesterol levels than would be… read on > read on >

Kids and teens around the world are consuming more sugary drinks, increasing their risk of future health problems, a new study finds. Young people consumed nearly 23% more sugar-sweetened beverages in 2018 compared to 1990, according to the report published Aug. 7 in the BMJ. “Sugary beverages increase weight gain and risk of obesity, so even though kids don’t often develop diabetes or cardiovascular disease when they are young, there could be significant impacts later in life,” said lead researcher Laura Lara-Castor. She’s a postdoctoral scholar in nutritional epidemiology at the University of Washington. The study provides the first global estimates of sugary drink intake by kids and teens, researchers said. For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 1,200 surveys completed during the three-decade study period. The data assessed the dietary habits of children from 185 countries. The research team specifically looked at consumption of soda, juice drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks and home-sweetened fruit drinks like aquas frescas. Their definition of sugary drinks did not include 100% fruit juices, diet sodas or sweetened milks. Sugar-sweetened beverage intake averaged 3.6 servings a week globally, and ranged from 1.3 servings a week in South Asia to 9.1 in Latin America and the Caribbean. Children and teens in 56 countries representing 238 million young people – about 10% of the global youth population – averaged… read on > read on >

Many people with Parkinson’s disease may fear dementia as a common consequence of the disease. But new research suggests dementia is not inevitable with Parkinson’s, and in fact is less common than presumed. If dementia does occur, it typically does so much later in life than was previously assumed, the study also found. “These results provide more hopeful estimates of the long-term risk of dementia for people with Parkinson’s disease, suggesting that there is a longer window to intervene to prevent or delay cognitive decline,” said study lead author Dr. Daniel Weintraub, of the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in Philadelphia. The findings were published Aug. 7 in the journal Neurology. As Weintraub noted in a journal news release, “the development of dementia is feared by people with Parkinson’s, and the combination of both a movement disorder and a cognitive disorder can be devastating to them and their loved ones.” Prior studies had suggested that 80% of Parkinson’s patients might develop dementia within 15 to 20 years of being diagnosed with Parkinson’s. “While these studies were important in highlighting the issue of cognitive decline in Parkinson’s disease, the studies were conducted many years ago, were relatively small and had other limitations, so we wanted to re-evaluate these findings,” noted Weintraub, an assistant professor of psychiatry at UPenn. To get a clearer picture of the incidence of… read on > read on >

Remember your besties from high school? Sure, they made a lasting impression, but science suggests they influenced the trajectory of your health, too. It’s not that far-fetched: Your friends carry genes that may or may nor predispose them to mental health issues ranging from addiction to anxiety and depression. That can influence the mental health of the people in their friend circle, according to researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Peers’ genetic predispositions for psychiatric and substance use disorders are associated with an individual’s own risk of developing the same disorders in young adulthood,” said study lead author Jessica Salvatore. “What our data exemplifies is the long reach of social genetic effects,” she said in a Rutgers news release. Salvatore is an associate professor of psychiatry at the university. It’s a relatively new field of research called socio-genomics: How one person’s genetic makeup (“genotype”) can influence a wider network of people. Just how powerful is the socio-genomic effect? To find out, Salvatore’s group looked at Swedish data on over 1.5 million individuals born in Sweden between 1980 and 1998. They then pinpointed exactly where everyone went to school in their teen years. That was followed up by a deep dive into local medical, pharmacy and legal registries that documented any history of substance use and mental health disorders for the same individuals in adulthood.… read on > read on >

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 7, 2024 (HealthDay news) — Medicare and Medicaid patients are less likely to get cutting-edge weight-loss drugs than people with private insurance are, a new study finds. Medicaid accounted for less than 10% of semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) prescription fills in 2023, researchers found. Similarly, Medicare Part D accounted for less than 29% of Ozempic fills and a little more than 1% of Wegovy fills. “If only certain patient populations get access to these medications — those primarily with private insurance, more generous health plans — then there’s a huge percentage of the U.S. population that isn’t getting access to these medications. And that brings up a very significant equity issue,” said lead researcher Dr. Christopher Scannell, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Center for Health Policy & Economics. For the study, researchers reviewed a pharmaceutical database that captures about 92% of prescriptions filled and dispensed at retail pharmacies in the United States. Ozempic is a once-weekly semaglutide injection approved for use in treating type 2 diabetes in 2017. A higher-dose version called Wegovy was approved in 2021 specifically for weight loss. Ozempic costs about $1,000 a month, while Wegovy is $1,350 a month, researchers noted. Prescription fills for semaglutide drugs skyrocketed by more than 400% between 2021 and 2023, reaching 2.6 million by December 2023, researchers found. However, most… read on > read on >

David Lynch, who transformed television and film with series such as “Twin Peaks” and movies like “Blue Velvet” and “Mulholland Drive,” announced Monday that he is battling the lung disease emphysema. Lynch, 78 and a former long-time smoker, first spoke about his illness in an article for Sight and Sound, a magazine from the British Film Institute. Although emphysema is limiting his mobility, Lynch said that he could continue directing, just remotely. He confirmed his diagnosis on a social media post. “Yes, I have emphysema from my many years of smoking,” Lynch said. “I have to say that I enjoyed smoking very much, and I do love tobacco — the smell of it, lighting cigarettes on fire, smoking them — but there is a price to pay for this enjoyment, and the price for me is emphysema.” He added that he quit smoking two years ago. “Recently, I had many tests and the good news is that I am in excellent shape except for emphysema,” Lynch said. “I am filled with happiness, and I will never retire.” According to the American Lung Association, over 3 million Americans are living with emphysema. “Emphysema causes damage to the lung tissue and alveoli or tiny air sacs. Over time, this damage causes the tiny air sacs to break and create one big air pocket instead of small ones,” the… read on > read on >

There’s a hint of good news for parents concerned about teen mental health: After 57% of U.S. teen girls surveyed in 2021 said they felt “persistent sadness,” that number declined somewhat by 2023, to 53%, new government data show. In the latest biennial poll of over 20,000 high school students nationwide, called the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that pandemic-era rates of despair may be ebbing, although they remain high. “One of our main priorities at CDC is improving Americans’ mental health,” Dr. Debra Houry, the CDC’s chief medical officer and deputy director for program and science, said in an agency news release. “The data released today show improvements to a number of metrics that measure young people’s mental well-being — progress we can build on. However, this work is far from complete.” In general, girls tend to feel persistent sadness more than boys: About 28% of boys surveyed in both the 2021 and 2023 surveys said they felt that way. In other survey findings, suicide risk among girls did not change between the two surveys. However, a rise in suicide attempts among Black students that appeared in 2021 has now declined significantly. “These data show that we’ve made some progress in tackling these issues in recent years, which proves that they are not insurmountable.… read on > read on >

Fireworks displays can cause worse air quality than wildfire smoke, a new study reveals. About 60,000 firework shells exploded over Manhattan’s East River as part of Macy’s Fourth of July show in 2023, researchers said. The colorful bursts caused air pollution in New York City to spike dramatically, with levels many times higher in the hours after the display than was caused by smoke from a Canadian wildfire that had blanketed the region a month before. Particle pollution levels peaked at 3,000 micrograms per cubic meter of air at a sampling site near the display, and 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter at two other nearby sites, results show. For comparison, New York City’s average daily particle pollution levels are 15 micrograms per cubic meter, researchers said. Those levels reached just 460 micrograms per cubic meter when wildfire smoke choked and reddened the Manhattan skies in June 2023. In addition to air pollution, water samples collected from the East River contained more than double the usual level of metals sometimes used to make fireworks explode in brilliant colors. These include nickel, lead and antimony. “Our findings suggest that major firework displays can create a temporary spike in air pollution that may pose a health risk to both humans and the environment,” said lead researcher Terry Gordon, a professor with the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Fireworks… read on > read on >

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All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

U.S. Deaths Dropped 6% Last Year, as COVID Fell From 3rd to 10th Leading Killer

Cheap, High-Tech ‘Electric Bandage’ Speeds Wound Healing

Fish Oil Might Help Keep Cholesterol in Check

Kids Worldwide Are Consuming More Sugary Drinks

Dementia May Not Be as Common Among Parkinson’s Patients as Thought

Your Friends’ Genes May Harm or Help You

Cost Keeps Many Who Need Them From Getting New Weight-Loss Meds

Filmmaker David Lynch Has Emphysema

Fewer U.S. Teen Girls Are Reporting ‘Persistent Sadness’

Too Much Fun? Fireworks Displays Quickly Harm Air Quality