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Antipsychotics can substantially increase dementia patients’ risk of many serious health problems, a new study warns. Dementia patients prescribed antipsychotics have increased risk of stroke, blood clots, heart attack, heart failure, bone fractures, pneumonia and kidney damage, researchers reported April 17 in the BMJ. “A move away from the overprescription of antipsychotics is overdue,” concluded the research team led by Pearl Mok, a research fellow with the University of Manchester in England. The study adds impetus to an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services into the overuse of antipsychotic drugs in nursing homes. The investigation, announced last year, was launched in response to reports that some nursing homes might be falsely labeling patients as schizophrenic so they can be given antipsychotic drugs. For the new study, researchers analyzed data on nearly 174,000 people in England diagnosed with dementia between January 1988 and May 2018, at an average age of 82. More than 35,500 of those dementia patients had been prescribed an antipsychotic, and their health profiles were compared against up to 15 randomly selected patients who hadn’t used an antipsychotic. Antipsychotic use more than doubled the risk of pneumonia among dementia patients, researchers found. About 4.5% of dementia patients on antipsychotic drugs wound up developing pneumonia within three months of starting the meds, versus 1.5% of non-users. The drugs were also… read on > read on >

Two-thirds of homeless people are experiencing some form of mental health disorder, a large, new review of data on the subject. The analysis found that men who are homeless are more likely to be battling mental illness than women, although rates were high for both genders compared to the general population. There are signs that rates of mental illness may be on the rise among homeless populations, especially in the United States and Canada, said researchers led by Rebecca Barry, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calgary in Canada. “The most common mental disorders included substance use disorders, antisocial personality disorders, major depression and general mood disorders,” Barry and colleagues reported April 17 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. Her team looked at thousands of published studies worldwide on homelessness and mental illness. They settled on 85 of the most rigorous studies. Overall, more than 48,000 homeless individuals were included in those studies, which were largely based in affluent countries such as the United States, Canada and Germany. The mental health of participants in the studies was assessed using standard psychiatric tests. Barry’s team found that, overall, 67% of homeless people currently have some form of mental illness, while 77% were found to have experienced mental illness at least sometime during their lives. Rates of current mental illness were significantly higher among men (67%) than… read on > read on >

Two implanted heart devices used by patients in end-stage heart failure are now under a strict U.S. Food and Drug Administration recall, after being tied to 273 known injuries and 14 deaths, the agency said Tuesday. The HeartMate II and HeartMate 3 are manufactured by Thoratec Corp., a subsidiary of Abbott Laboratories. About 14,000 of the devices are thought to be under recall, but as of now the two devices not being removed from the market. “The HeartMate II and 3 are used for both short- and long-term support in adult patients with severe left ventricular heart failure,” the FDA explained in a statement. “It can be used while waiting for a heart transplant, to help the heart recover, or as a permanent solution when a transplant isn’t an option.” The devices replace the blood-pumping action of the heart’s main pumping chamber, the left ventricle. They divert blood flow from that weakened chamber and propel it into the aorta, where it flows to the rest of the body. However, in rare cases a type of clot can form from “biological material” that builds up in a particular area of the devices. “This buildup can obstruct the device, making it less effective in helping the heart pump blood,” the FDA explained. “It can trigger alarms indicating low blood flow and affect the device’s ability to help… read on > read on >

There’s no evidence that a COVID infection increases the risk of asthma in children, the first study to date on the subject finds. “We knew from a number of really nice studies over the last decade or more that respiratory viral infections are a risk factor for the development of asthma in children,” said senior study author Dr. David Hill, an attending physician with the division of allergy and immunology at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “So there was good rationale to think that potentially SARS-COV-2 infection could also increase the risk of asthma. That’s what we thought we were going to find,” he said. “And what we actually found was that there was no association. It did not increase the risk of children developing asthma, and it did not decrease the risk of children developing asthma.” In the study, the team analyzed data from more than 27,000 children who underwent polymerase chain reaction (PCR) testing for SARS-COV-2 between March 1, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021. They were followed over an 18-month period. Over 3,100 of the children tested positive, and more than 24,000 tested negative for SARS-COV-2. The researchers found that testing positive for SARS-COV-2 had no significant effect on the likelihood of a new asthma diagnosis. The study did confirm that children with known risk factors for asthma, such as race, food allergies,… read on > read on >

Active women using the pill appear to receive an added bonus from their birth control, a new study says. These women are less likely to suffer sprains and strains than women not on birth control, researchers reported recently in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Women taking oral contraceptives had significantly fewer tendon and muscle injuries than women not on the pill or men, results show. These sorts of injuries are among the most common in sports, researchers said. “This understanding holds promise for informing the development of targeted preventive strategies and interventions aimed at reducing injury risk in women, benefiting both athletic and nonathletic populations,” said lead researcher Luis Rodriguez. He’s a doctoral candidate with the Joint Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program at University of Texas-Dallas and University of Texas-Southwestern. For the study, researchers analyzed health data for more than 126,000 men and women between the ages of 18 and 39 who were either normal weight or overweight and had sustained an orthopedic injury. About 0.5% of women on the pill had a sprain or strain, versus 2.5% of women not taking birth control and 3.5% of men, researchers found. Overall, women taking the pill were 85% less likely than men to suffer a sprained muscle or strained tendon, results show. Meanwhile, women not taking the pill were only about 26% less likely… read on > read on >

Zepbound, one of the wildly popular weight-loss drugs that millions of Americans now take, eased sleep apnea in obese adults in two company trials, drug maker Eli Lilly announced Wednesday. First approved to treat obesity by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last November, Zepbound’s power was significant: It reduced sleep apnea severity by nearly two-thirds in patients. Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) “impacts 80 million adults in the U.S., with more than 20 million living with moderate-to-severe OSA. However, 85% of OSA cases go undiagnosed and therefore untreated,” Dr. Jeff Emmick, senior vice president of product development at Lilly, said in a company news release announcing the results. “Addressing this unmet need head-on is critical, and while there are pharmaceutical treatments for the excessive sleepiness associated with OSA, tirzepatide [Zepbound] has the potential to be the first pharmaceutical treatment for the underlying disease,” he added. Importantly, the results have not yet been published in a medical journal. In the two studies, researchers looked at whether Zepbound worked better than a placebo in reducing how many times per hour, on average, a person partly or fully stopped breathing while sleeping. In the first study, sleep apnea patients did not use CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) machines, which blow air into the airway to keep it from collapsing during sleep. Patients in the second study did use the machines. After 52 weeks, Zepbound… read on > read on >

Eating healthy can lower the risk of heart disease in breast cancer survivors, a new study has found. Heart disease is a top cause of death in women who’ve survived breast cancer, likely due to the toxic effects of chemo, radiation and targeted cancer therapy on the heart, researchers said. Breast cancer and heart disease also share some common risk factors, including aging, lack of exercise and smoking. But following a heart-healthy DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) diet appears to blunt this risk, according to findings published April 17 in the journal JNCI Cancer Spectrum. “Our findings suggest that we need to begin talking to breast cancer survivors about the potential heart benefits of the DASH diet,” lead researcher Isaac Ergas, a staff scientist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, said in a journal news release. For the study, researchers analyzed data for more than 3,400 women diagnosed with invasive breast cancer at Kaiser Permanente Northern California between 2005 and 2013. The women were monitored through 2021. Women whose diets were most similar to DASH at the time of their breast cancer diagnosis had a 47% lower risk of heart failure, a 23% lower risk of irregular heart rhythm or cardiac arrest, a 21% lower risk of valve heart disease, and a 25% lower risk of deep vein thrombosis, results show. A DASH… read on > read on >

Changes in gut bacteria have been linked to a variety of different diseases, including type 2 diabetes, obesity and inflammatory bowel disease. Now, a new study indicates that gut bacteria also might play a role in a person’s risk of developing heart disease. Certain species of bacteria actively consume cholesterol in the gut, which might help lower cholesterol levels and heart disease risk in people, researchers reported recently in the journal Cell. In particular, people with higher levels of Oscillibacter bacteria in their gut have lower levels of cholesterol, because those bacteria drink in and process cholesterol from their surroundings, results show. These findings could serve as “starting points to improve cardiovascular health” by tweaking a person’s gut bacteria, also known as the microbiome, said senior researcher Ramnik Xavier, co-director of the Broad Institute Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program in Boston. Prior studies have linked the gut microbiome to heart disease risk factors like triglyceride or blood sugar levels, but they have failed to completely explain the means by which these bacteria affect heart health. For the study, researchers analyzed the gut bacteria of more than 1,400 participants in the Framingham Heart Study, a decades-long effort to investigate risk factors for heart disease. They found that people with several Oscillibacter species tended to have lower cholesterol than those who didn’t. They also found that Oscillibacter… read on > read on >

In a new study, people living with HIV who got standard meds to keep the virus at bay also had much lower rates of Alzheimer’s disease — suggesting the drugs might also lower risks for the brain illness. It’s early-stage research, but it’s possible that mechanisms used by these HIV drugs work at a genetic level to thwart Alzheimer’s in the brain, concluded a team led by Dr. Jerold Chun. He’s a professor in the degenerative disease program at the nonprofit research group Sanford Burnham Prebys, in La Jolla, Calif. In the study, Chun’s group looked at rates of Alzheimer’s disease among nearly 80,000 HIV-positive individuals over the age of 60. More than 46,000 of them had been prescribed a form of HIV-suppressing medications known as reverse transcriptase (RT) inhibitors. Among this subgroup, Alzheimer’s diagnoses occurred in about 2.5 people per 1,000 — much less frequently than the 6.15 per 1,000 observed in a control group of older people without HIV, the researchers found. The study wasn’t designed to prove that RT inhibitors directly prevent Alzheimer’s disease. However, the finding was intriguing and there are genetic mechanisms that might explain the link, the scientists said. In findings first published in the journal Nature in 2018, Chun’s lab showed that, in Alzheimer’s patients, a gene found in neurons undergoes mutations that can produce thousands of new… read on > read on >

Keeping blood pressure under control could be crucial for women in preventing uterine fibroids, new research shows. Middle-aged women tracked for up to 17 years in a new study were 37% less likely to develop these painful growths if they treated their high blood pressure with medication. On the other hand, “patients with new-onset hypertension had a 45% increased risk of newly reported fibroids,” said a team led by Susannah Mitro, a research scientist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif. The findings were published April 16 in JAMA Network Open. As outlined in the study, uterine fibroids are benign but painful tumors that arise in the uterus and affect up to 80% of women by the age of 50. Fibroids can trigger pain and bleeding, but right now there are no known means of preventing them. In the new study, Mitro’s group analyzed 1996-2013 data for 2,570 U.S. women who enrolled in the Study of Women’s Health Across the Nation, beginning at the age of 45. All of these women had no prior history of fibroids when they joined the study, but over the following 17 years, 20% did receive such a diagnosis. The women’s blood pressure was tracked over time, as well. The researchers found strong correlations been blood pressure and a woman’s odds for uterine growths. For example, those who were found to… read on > read on >

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Antipsychotics May Do Great Harm to People With Dementia: Report

Most Homeless Americans Are Battling Mental Illness

FDA Recalls Heart Failure Devices Linked to Injuries and Deaths

COVID Does Not Spur Asthma in Kids, Study Finds

Birth Control Pill Might Lower Odds for Sports Injuries

Weight-loss Drug Zepbound Eases Sleep Apnea in Company Trials

Why Healthy Eating Is Key for Breast Cancer Survivors

Some Gut Bugs May Help Lower Your Cholesterol

Could Some HIV Meds Also Fight Alzheimer’s?

Good Blood Pressure Control Could Prevent Fibroids