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Almost half of American parents surveyed say they face “overwhelming” levels of stress on a daily basis, and in an advisory issued on Wednesday U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy called parental stress an urgent public health issue. Murthy said he issued the advisory — meant to draw attention to a health issue of national importance — to “highlight the stressors that impact the mental health and well-being of parents and caregivers, the critical link between parental mental health and children’s long-term well-being, and the urgent need to better support parents, caregivers and families.” As outlined in the new report, data from 2023 show a third of parents saying they faced high levels of stress over the past month, compared to 20% of other adults. Nearly half (48%) of parents surveyed last year said that, “most days, their stress is completely overwhelming,” according to the new advisory. That’s compared to 26% of other adults expressing that same level of daily stress. According to the new advisory, some of the major stressors plaguing moms and dads include: Financial strain, economic instability and poverty Time demands Children’s health Children’s safety Parental isolation and loneliness Technology and social media Cultural pressures and children’s futures Murthy believes there’s a dangerous trickle-down effect of parental stress, because it can impact the mental health of their kids. In 2021, Murthy issued an… read on > read on >

Diabetes can age the brain by up to four years, a new study based on MRI scans shows. There was one silver lining: Healthy lifestyle changes could help prevent that neurological aging, the Swedish researchers said. “Having an older-appearing brain for one’s chronological age can indicate deviation from the normal aging process and may constitute an early warning sign for dementia,” warned study lead author Abigail Dove. “On the positive side, it seems that people with diabetes may be able to influence their brain health through healthy living,” added Dove, a graduate student of neurobiology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Her team published its findings Aug. 28 in the journal Diabetes Care. As Dove’s group noted, type 2 diabetes has long been acknowledged to be a risk factor for dementia. However, the impact of prediabetes and diabetes on the brain health of people without dementia wasn’t known. The new study sought to remedy that, analyzing MRI brain scans of over 31,000 people ages 40 to 70 who were all enrolled in a British database called the U.K. Biobank. Dove and her colleagues used AI technology to gauge the relative “brain age” for each individual. They found that folks whose medical records showed them to be in a prediabetic state had an average brain age that was half a year older than people without the… read on > read on >

The trees and shrubs in your neighborhood could be giving you a big health boost, a new study finds. People have lower levels of inflammation in neighborhoods where the number of trees and shrubs is more than doubled compared to other nearby locales, University of Louisville researchers reported this week at the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology annual meeting in Santiago, Chile. “Trees are beautiful, but these results show that the trees around us are also beneficial to individual and community health,” said University of Louisville President Kim Schatzel. For the study, researchers added more than 8,000 large trees and shrubs to some neighborhoods in Louisville, Ken., but not others. The plantings occurred from 2019 through 2022 within a four-square-mile section of south Louisville, in low- to middle-income neighborhoods. The team then compared 745 residents’ health data, to see how more greenery might have improved their overall well-being. Results show that residents in the greener neighborhoods had 13% to 20% lower levels of a biomarker associated with inflammation called high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP). Higher levels of this marker are strongly associated with heart risks, and can be an even stronger indicator of an impending heart attack than cholesterol levels, researchers noted. It also indicated a higher risk of diabetes and some cancers. The reduction in hsCRP found in greener neighborhoods corresponds to a 10% to… read on > read on >

“Rolling stop” laws that let bicyclists treat stop signs as yield signs are not dangerous, a new study demonstrates. Both bike riders and drivers perform safely in intersections once they’ve been informed about how the law works, results from lab experiments involving bicycle and motor vehicle simulators show. “The focus of previous research has been crash-data analysis and why riders are motivated to do a rolling stop even when it’s illegal in their state,” said lead researcher David Hurwitz, a transportation engineering professor with Oregon State University. “No one has looked at how well bicycle rolling-stop laws work, or what happens when you educate people about them.” Also known at the “Idaho stop,” rolling stop laws for bicyclists have been approved by eight states, researchers said. Idaho led the way back in 1982, followed by Oregon in 2019 and Washington in 2020. The other states are Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah. The laws allow riders to keep their momentum, theoretically reducing congestion at intersections and crash risk because cyclists move through the stop more efficiently, researchers said. Nearly half of all bicycle-car crashes happen at intersections, Hurwitz noted. In 2022, 1,105 U.S. bicyclists were killed in collisions with motor vehicles, a 13% increase from the previous year. For this study, researchers observed 60 people in pairs as they operated separate bicycle and motor… read on > read on >

Eli Lilly, maker of one of the blockbuster GLP-1 weight-loss drug Zepbound, says it will now offer the medication in single-dose vials at half the price currently available to consumers. The new 2.5 milligram (mg) and 5 mg weekly dose vials differ from the standard preloaded injector pens that are used to administer Zepbound (tirzepatide) and competitors such as Wegovy (semaglutide). Instead, patients will use a syringe to withdraw the liquid drug from the vial. A four-week supply of the 2.5 mg vials will be priced at $399, and a similar supply of the 5 mg vials at $529 — about half what a month’s supply of other GLP-1 obesity meds cost. There’s one catch: Consumers can only order the new vials by paying out of pocket via LillyDirect, a company platform that coordinates telehealth services and fills prescriptions for patients, the company said in a statement. Lilly said buying the vials direct from the company cuts cost by “removing third-party supply chain entities and allowing patients to access savings directly outside of insurance.” According to Lilly, the new, cheaper product fulfills two goals: Widening access to the sometimes tough-to-get meds, and thwarting what it says are potential unsafe copycat versions made by compounding pharmacies. “We are excited to share that the Zepbound single-dose vials are now here, further delivering on our promise to increase… read on > read on >

Good sleep is important for the health of overweight men and women, a new study shows. Heavy-set people who stay awake too late tend to have a higher risk of metabolic syndrome — a cluster of conditions that increase the risk of heart disease, diabetes, stroke and other chronic health problems. “Our research shows that disruptions in the body’s internal biological clock could contribute to negative health consequences for people who may already be vulnerable due to weight,” said lead investigator Brooke Shafer, a postdoctoral researcher with the Oregon Health & Science University’s (OHSU) Sleep, Chronobiology and Health Laboratory. What’s more, poor sleep produces different health risks between men and women, results show. For the study, researchers recruited 30 people with a BMI greater than 25, which put them into an overweight or obese category. The research team used saliva samples to figure out the time in the evening when each person’s body started producing the hormone melatonin, which kicks off the process of falling asleep. The participants then logged their sleep habits over the following seven days. Researchers used the sleep diaries to determine who had a narrow versus wide window between melatonin onset and sleep. A narrow window means that someone falls asleep shortly after melatonin onset, and a wide window means the opposite. A narrow window suggests the person is staying awake… read on > read on >

Your heart health before and after a heart attack might be influenced by how loud your neighborhood is, new research suggests. One study found that people under 50 were more prone to heart attack if they lived in a noisy area, while another study showed the prognosis for heart attack survivors was worse if neighborhood noise was an issue. “These data provide some of the first insights that noise exposure can affect prognosis,” said Marianne Zeller from the University of Burgundy and Hospital of Dijon, in France. She’s the lead author of the second study. Both studies were presented Tuesday in London as part of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) annual meeting. Construction, cars honking, crowd noise: It can all be a chronic source of stress for urban dwellers, and stress is a known heart risk factor. To determine the impact of a noisy neighborhood on cardiovascular health, doctors in Bremen, Germany, assessed the neighborhood noise levels of 430 people aged 50 or younger who were brought to a hospital for a heart attack (clinically known as a myocardial infarction). People with low levels of heart risk factors — issues such as diabetes or smoking — were more likely to be admitted to the hospital with a heart attack if they happened to live in a noisy neighborhood, said a team led by Hatim… read on > read on >

People with multiple sclerosis appear to have a lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, a new study suggests. MS patients are far less likely to have elevated blood levels of toxic proteins that form amyloid plaques in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s, researchers report. “Our findings imply that some component of the biology of multiple sclerosis, or the genetics of MS patients, is protective against Alzheimer’s disease,” said lead researcher Dr. Matthew Brier, an assistant professor of neurology and radiology with Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “If we could identify what aspect is protective and apply it in a controlled way, that could inform therapeutic strategies for Alzheimer’s disease,” Brier added in a university news release. Researchers undertook the study after noticing that MS patients under their care didn’t develop Alzheimer’s as they grew older, even if they had a family history of the disease. “I noticed that I couldn’t find a single MS patient of mine who had typical Alzheimer’s disease,” said senior researcher Dr. Anne Cross, chair of neuroimmunology at the Washington University School of Medicine. “If they had cognitive problems, I would send them to the memory and aging specialists here at WashU Medicine for an Alzheimer’s assessment, and those doctors would always come back and tell me, ‘No, this is not due to Alzheimer’s disease,’” Cross said.… read on > read on >

New Medicare rules could make 3.6 million Americans — or even more — eligible for treatment with the pricey weight-loss drug Wegovy, a new study finds. Under the new rules, the government will pay for Wegovy treatment if a person with high BMI also has heart disease. Until now, federal regulations have restricted Medicare from covering drugs prescribed solely for weight loss, researchers noted. For this study, researchers analyzed data from people 65 and older who took part in a federal health and nutrition survey between 2011 and 2020. Maximum annual costs to Medicare could be as high as $34 billion if Wegovy is prescribed to all patients with high BMI and a history of heart attack, stroke, hardened arteries or chest pain, the data show. Wegovy has a list price of about $1,350 for a 28-day supply, according to GoodRx.com. But even if heart disease is more narrowly defined by federal regulators, covering Wegovy (semaglutide) looks to be a budget-buster for the Medicare program, researchers said. Under a narrow definition of heart disease, “only 1 in 7 Medicare beneficiaries with elevated BMI are likely to be eligible to receive semaglutide, but costs to Medicare could still exceed $10 billion per year,” said lead researcher Dr. Alexander Chaitoff with the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences. The findings were published Aug. 26… read on > read on >

Researchers now have a better idea where love resides in the human brain — and which types of love are the most powerful. MRI scans show that love mainly resides in areas of the brain associated with the processing of social cues, researchers reported Aug. 26 in the journal Cerebral Cortex. Love for one’s children generated the most intense brain activity — so intense that it actually bled over into other parts of the brain, researchers found. “In parental love, there was activation deep in the brain’s reward system in the striatum area while imagining love, and this was not seen for any other kind of love,” said researcher Parttyli Rinne, at Aalto University in Finland. Romantic love also generated lots of brain activity, but that activity confined itself to the social regions of the brain, researchers found. Love of nature and animals activated the reward system and visual areas of the brain, but not the social regions involved in love of other humans. “We now provide a more comprehensive picture of the brain activity associated with different types of love than previous research,” Rinne said in a university news release. For the study, researchers asked 55 parents involved in loving relationships to mull over brief stories related to six different types of love. “You see your newborn child for the first time. The baby… read on > read on >

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All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

U.S. Surgeon General Calls Parental Stress an Urgent Public Health Issue

Diabetes Can Age Your Brain, But Lifestyle Change Can Reverse That

Adding Greenery to Neighborhoods Brings Big Health Boost

‘Rolling Stop’ Laws for Bicyclists Are Safe, Study Suggests

Weight-Loss Drug Zepbound Now in Single-Dose Vials at Half the Price

Overweight? Good Sleep Is Even More Crucial to Your Health

Noisy Neighborhoods Might Raise Heart Attack Risk

Could Having MS Help Shield Against Alzheimer’s Disease?

3.6 Million Americans Could Be Covered for Wegovy Under New Medicare Rules

Science Probes Where Love Lives in the Brain