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 >

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 >

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 >