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A pregnant woman’s mental health might have profound effects on the mind of her unborn child, a new evidence review warns. Children appear to be at higher risk for mental health and behavior issues if their moms were highly stressed, anxious or depressed during pregnancy, researchers report. In particular, children were more likely to have ADHD symptoms or exhibit aggressive or hostile behavior if their moms reported more anxiety, depression or stress while pregnant. “Our research suggests that psychological distress during the pregnancy period has a small but persistent effect on children’s risk for aggressive, disinhibited and impulsive behaviors,” said researcher Irene Tung, an assistant professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. For the review, Tung and her colleagues pooled and analyzed data from 55 studies involving more than 45,000 participants. All the studies measured women’s psychological distress during pregnancy, and then later measured their children’s “externalizing behaviors” — mental health symptoms directed toward others. The researchers also included only research where the mothers’ distress was measured both during and after pregnancy, to control for the potential effects of postpartum mental health problems on developing newborns. They found that even after controlling for mom’s postnatal distress, psychological symptoms during pregnancy independently raise children’s risk of mental health problems. The effect held true for both boys and girls. It was strongest in early childhood…  read on >  read on >

FRIDAY, Nov. 17, 2023 (Healthday News) — Scams are nothing new and older folks are known to be vulnerable to them, but a new poll adds another sad fact to the familiar story. Among people aged 50 to 80, those who reported being in fair or poor physical or mental health, those with disabilities and those who rated their memory as fair or poor were more likely than their healthier peers to say they’d been the victim of fraud. The study “adds important new data to ongoing efforts to reduce the devastating toll of scams on older adults’ finances and well-being,” poll director Dr. Jeffrey Kullgren said in a news release. “We also found that no matter what their health status, older adults feel strongly that government and businesses should do more to educate and protect against scams.” Overall, three of every four older adults said they have experienced a fraud attempt by phone, text, email, mail or online in the past two years, while 39% said they’ve been victims of at least one scam. But the poll uncovered an especially strong link between poor health and their vulnerability to scams – both being able to spot one and becoming the victim of one. Even if they’d hadn’t been scammed, older adults with health issues were more likely to lack confidence in their ability to…  read on >  read on >

Good news is fun to share, but you get more of a charge from it if you keep it under your hat for a while, a new study says. Keeping good news a secret for a bit before telling someone else appears to make people feel more energized and alive, according to findings published Nov. 13 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research provides a positive spin on secrecy, which up to now has only been researched in the context of hiding bad news, said lead researcher Michael Slepian, an associate professor of business at Columbia University in New York City. “Is secrecy inherently bad for our well-being, or do the negative effects of secrecy tend to stem from keeping negative secrets?” Slepian said in an American Psychological Association news release. “While negative secrets are far more common than positive secrets, some of life’s most joyful occasions begin as secrets, including secret marriage proposals, pregnancies, surprise gifts and exciting news.” In all, 3 in 4 people say the first thing they would do upon learning good news is share it with someone, according to a survey of 500 people conducted prior to the study. But five experiments with more than 2,500 participants indicate that keeping a positive secret could have mental health benefits. In one experiment, participants were shown a list of…  read on >  read on >

THURSDAY, Nov, 16, 2023Young adults are now more likely to vape than to smoke cigarettes, with more becoming addicted to nicotine through vaping than traditional smoking, researchers say. Nearly three in five young adults who vape (56%) have never regularly smoked cigarettes, according to data from an ongoing federal study of tobacco use. This is the first time that there are more young people who began to use nicotine through vaping rather than smoking, researchers said in a research letter published Nov. 13 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. “We now have a shift such that there are more ‘never smokers’ who vape than established smokers,” said researcher Benjamin Toll, director of the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) Health Tobacco Treatment Program. “That is a massive shift in the landscape of tobacco.” “These ‘never smokers’ are unlikely to start smoking combustible cigarettes – they’re likely to vape and keep vaping,” Toll added in a university news release. “And it’s this group, ages 18 to 24, who are going to forecast future e-cigarette users.” E-cigarettes could be a less harmful option than smoking, but it’s not harm-free, researchers said. Because of that, it’s disheartening to see young non-smokers begin to vape. “If you currently smoke and you’ve smoked combustible tobacco cigarettes for a few decades — those people are at very high risk of cancer,…  read on >  read on >

Shrinkage of one of the brain’s key memory centers appears to herald thinking declines, a new study finds. The region in question is the hippocampus, a two-sided structure located roughly above each ear and embedded deep within the brain’s temporal lobe. It’s long been known to play a crucial role in the storage and transference of short- and long-term memory. The new research was published Nov. 15 in the journal Neurology. It focused on brain scan data collected from 128 people averaging 72 years of age. A team led by Dr. Bernard Hanseeuw, of Harvard Medical School in Boston, used the scans to track changes in brain levels of amyloid plaques or tau tangles. Both are linked to the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. The team also used the scans, which were taken annually, to chart any changes in the size of an individual’s hippocampus over the course of seven years. People who showed the most significant shrinkage in their hippocampus were also most likely to display thinking declines over the study period, Hanseeuw’s group reported. This seemed to occur independently of changes in levels of either amyloid or tau, they noted. They estimated that hippocampus shrinkage might account for 10% of thinking declines. “These results suggest that neurodegenerative diseases other than Alzheimer’s are contributing to this decline, and measuring the hippocampus volume may help us…  read on >  read on >

For many women with breast cancer, struggles with sexual issues becomes a hidden burden, new research shows. Because most patients don’t feel comfortable talking over these issues with a doctor, many turn to online patient-support forums for advice. The new study found that three-quarters of breast cancer patients admitted to some form of sexual dysfunction, most often vaginal dryness or pain upon penetration. However, instead of going to physicians for advice, “women with breast cancer are taking the initiative to fill the gap in their care for sexual symptoms by seeking, innovating and sharing solutions amongst themselves,” concluded a team led by Christiana von Hippel. She’s a graduate researcher at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in Boston. In the study, von Hippel’s group conducted a survey of 501 adult members of the popular Breastcancer.org online forum community. Seventy percent said they had remained sexually active at the time they completed the survey. About two-thirds identified as heterosexual, and about two-thirds were partnered. Forty-seven percent said they’d been very or extremely satisfied with their sex lives prior to cancer treatment, but 44 percent also said they’d experienced a significant worsening of their sex life post-diagnosis.  Vaginal dryness and/or pain upon penetration were the most common issues cited, and 57% of respondents said they’d never discussed the sexual side effects of…  read on >  read on >

New mothers living in states with generous mandated paid family and medical leave are less likely to experience postpartum depression, a new study indicates. They also are more likely to breastfeed their newborns. “By increasing mothers’ ability to breastfeed and reducing postpartum-depressive symptoms, strong state paid family and medical leave laws provide a major boost to the health of postpartum women and infants,” said senior study author Joe Feinglass, a research professor of general internal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The United States remains one of the few wealthy countries without federally mandated paid parental leave. For this study, researchers used data gathered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to compare pregnancy outcomes in 43 states, taking into account each state’s level of support for parental leave. Women living in the eight states with the most generous paid family leave had a 9% greater chance of breastfeeding at six months postpartum, compared to the 26 states with little to no paid leave. And those living in states with moderate leave coverage had a 10% lower likelihood of developing symptoms related to postpartum depression. “Mental health conditions are the leading cause of maternal mortality in the U.S., with perinatal depression symptoms affecting about one in eight new mothers,” researcher Dr. Madeline Perry, a fourth-year resident in obstetrics and…  read on >  read on >

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 15, 2023 (Healthday News) — As U.S. suicide rates continue to rise, new government data shows older men have become the most susceptible. In a report published Wednesday, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found there were about 30 suicide deaths for every 100,000 men aged 55 and older in 2021. That number is more than double the overall rate of just over 14 suicide deaths for every 100,000 people that year. The older a man, the greater his risk for suicide: Those 85 and older saw 56 suicide deaths for every 100,000 people, a statistic that surpassed any other age group. Suicide is complex, Dr. Yeates Conwell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Rochester, told CNN. Five factors can fuel suicide risk — depression, disease, disability, disconnection and deadly means — and these risk factors can be “relatively more salient for older adults,” he said. “Imagine a Venn diagram with these five circles, each representing one of those ‘Ds’ that overlap. The more of the intersecting circles one is in, the greater the risk,” said Conwell, who also leads a geriatric psychiatry program and co-directs the university’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide. A combination of more physical illness and disability, along with more social isolation and more loss, leaves older adults more vulnerable to suicide, he…  read on >  read on >

Oral nicotine pouches might be marketed as an alternative to cigarettes, but they do little to curb smokers’ nicotine cravings, a new study finds. The pouches – which contain nicotine powder and other flavorings, but no tobacco leaf – take too long to provide the nicotine “spike” that eases cravings, researchers report in the Nov. 15 issue of journal Addiction. Current smokers still get a much greater nicotine spike and much sharper relief from craving symptoms when they take a puff than when they use either low- or high-dose nicotine pouches, the results showed. The spike of nicotine from smoking occurs within about five minutes, said lead researcher Brittney Keller-Hamilton, of Ohio State University’s Cancer Control Program. By comparison, nicotine pouches take 30 minutes to an hour to hit peak effectiveness, researchers said. It’s reasonable to see how the instant gratification from cigarette smoking would be more appealing than oral nicotine pouches for smokers deep in the need for a nicotine fix, Keller-Hamilton said. At the same time, researchers are concerned that the pouches could appeal to young people, increasing nicotine addiction in a younger population while doing nothing to stem cancer risk among smokers. “Our challenge is to approach regulation of nicotine pouches to limit their appeal among young people while making them more appealing to adult smokers who would see health benefits by…  read on >  read on >

Retatrutide, an experimental weight-loss drug that could compete against blockbusters Wegovy and Zepbound, may work wonders for obese folks with liver disease, new research shows. A wider study, published in June, found that retatrutide helped obese people lose about a quarter of their starting weight over an 11-month period. Now, findings from a subset of participants in that trial showed that retatrutide also culled excessive fat from around the livers of obese people — essentially curing many from a dangerous condition called fatty liver disease. The research was funded by Eli Lilly and Co., which is developing retatrutide. “The implications of this trial are, we could wipe out the fat very early in the course of this disease, before it becomes a real threat to the liver and, potentially, reduce the long-term cardiac, metabolic, renal [kidney] and liver-related harm from obesity,” said sub-study lead Dr. Arun Sanyal, of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) in Richmond. “We are encouraged by these results and how they can potentially help tackle a disease that is currently without any approved therapies,” added Sanyal, who directs VCU’s Stravitz-Sanyal Institute for Liver Disease and Metabolic Health. The weight-loss results from the larger trial were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in June. The newer data, from a subset of patients with liver disease, was presented Nov. 13 at a meeting…  read on >  read on >