Everyone’s seen the automatic blood pressure reader wedged unobtrusively into a corner of their local pharmacy. These sit-down machines can pay huge dividends when it comes to helping people learn their heart health risks, a new study says. Setting up these health stations at community pharmacies – and one international sporting event – led to nearly 7 in 10 young adults learning they had one or more uncontrolled risk factors for heart disease, researchers reported Aug. 15 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. “Heart health checks in the community can identify risk factors for future heart disease that can be managed by lifestyle changes or early preventive medications and save lives down the road,” said senior researcher Stephen Nicholls, director of the Victorian Heart Institute at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. “We saw in this study that screening in a variety of places in the community not only works to identify risk but showed that different types of risk were more prevalent depending on screening location, screening day and screening time,” Nicholls said in a news release. For the study, researchers made heart risk screening devices available at 311 pharmacies across Australia between mid-December 2023 and the end of January 2024. The health stations were available during the pharmacies’ operating hours. The team also made screening stations available for nine hours a…  read on >  read on >

Everyone’s seen the automatic blood pressure reader wedged unobtrusively into a corner of their local pharmacy. These sit-down machines can pay huge dividends when it comes to helping people learn their heart health risks, a new study says. Setting up these health stations at community pharmacies – and one international sporting event – led to nearly 7 in 10 young adults learning they had one or more uncontrolled risk factors for heart disease, researchers reported Aug. 15 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. “Heart health checks in the community can identify risk factors for future heart disease that can be managed by lifestyle changes or early preventive medications and save lives down the road,” said senior researcher Stephen Nicholls, director of the Victorian Heart Institute at Monash University in Victoria, Australia. “We saw in this study that screening in a variety of places in the community not only works to identify risk but showed that different types of risk were more prevalent depending on screening location, screening day and screening time,” Nicholls said in a news release. For the study, researchers made heart risk screening devices available at 311 pharmacies across Australia between mid-December 2023 and the end of January 2024. The health stations were available during the pharmacies’ operating hours. The team also made screening stations available for nine hours a…  read on >  read on >

Some kids are helped by exposure therapy to food allergens like peanuts, with their allergies gradually diminishing as they eat small amounts of their food nemesis. For others, such treatment – also called oral immunotherapy — causes severe allergic reactions. Researchers now think they know why some kids do well with exposure therapy while others struggle. Some children with food allergies have highly responsive immune systems, and this makes them less likely to benefit from exposure therapy, researchers reported in the journal Allergy. “Children who responded well to the therapy already had a less reactive immune system before treatment began,” lead researcher Aleix Arnau-Soler said in a news release. He’s a scientist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. The blood of children who benefit from exposure therapy specifically has lower levels of immunoglobulins, which are allergy-related antibodies, and cytokines, which are biochemicals that promote inflammation, researchers said. These results could help identify in advance which children could benefit from exposure therapy, and those who are apt to have an extreme allergic reaction to such therapy, researchers said. “Some children respond well to this treatment, but others don’t benefit at all,” said senior researcher Young-Ae Lee, group leader of the Molecular Genetics of Allergic Diseases lab at the Max Delbrück Center. “In some cases, the therapy – based on gradually increasing doses…  read on >  read on >

Some kids are helped by exposure therapy to food allergens like peanuts, with their allergies gradually diminishing as they eat small amounts of their food nemesis. For others, such treatment – also called oral immunotherapy — causes severe allergic reactions. Researchers now think they know why some kids do well with exposure therapy while others struggle. Some children with food allergies have highly responsive immune systems, and this makes them less likely to benefit from exposure therapy, researchers reported in the journal Allergy. “Children who responded well to the therapy already had a less reactive immune system before treatment began,” lead researcher Aleix Arnau-Soler said in a news release. He’s a scientist at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin. The blood of children who benefit from exposure therapy specifically has lower levels of immunoglobulins, which are allergy-related antibodies, and cytokines, which are biochemicals that promote inflammation, researchers said. These results could help identify in advance which children could benefit from exposure therapy, and those who are apt to have an extreme allergic reaction to such therapy, researchers said. “Some children respond well to this treatment, but others don’t benefit at all,” said senior researcher Young-Ae Lee, group leader of the Molecular Genetics of Allergic Diseases lab at the Max Delbrück Center. “In some cases, the therapy – based on gradually increasing doses…  read on >  read on >