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Robot-assisted total knee replacements tend to have better outcomes on average, a new study reports. Unfortunately, there’s a downside – having a surgical robot assist a human surgeon can make the procedure much more costly. Patients who had a robot-assisted knee replacement stayed in the hospital nearly a half-day less, and were significantly less likely to develop complications like infections, excessive blood loss, and fractures, dislocations or mechanical complications of their prosthetic, researchers report. However, robotic knee replacements cost an average $2,400 more than the conventional procedure, researchers found. Researchers said they hope the study will help doctors and patients make educated decisions regarding the best option for knee surgery. “As the population continues to age, there will be a greater demand for safe and effective total knee replacement surgery, also known as total knee arthroscopy (TKA),” lead researcher Dr. Senthil Sambandam, an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, said in a news release. In knee replacement procedures, surgeons cut away bone damaged by arthritis and replace it with metal and plastic parts. Surgeons perform most knee replacements by hand, judging how much bone to remove based on training and expertise. However, a growing number of these procedures are performed using surgical robots that rely on imaging scans or anatomical landmarks to determine where to cut. Using a robot… read on > read on >

Antibiotic-resistant meningitis or severe, long-lasting joint infections: That’s what three U.S. “medical tourists” brought home after seeking out unapproved stem cell treatments in Mexico, according to a new report. The germ involved in all three cases was Mycobacterium abscessus, explained a team led by Dr. Minh-Vu Nguyen, an infectious disease specialist at National Jewish Health in Denver. “Stem cell treatments have been linked to bacterial infections, and procedure-related infection risks associated with medical tourism are known,” Nguyen and colleagues warned in their report. All three patients contracted their infections in late 2022 or early 2023, and “as of March 28, 2024, treatment is ongoing for all three,” according to the report. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, M. abscessus “is part of a group of environmental mycobacteria and is found in water, soil, and dust. It has been known to contaminate medications and products, including medical devices.” The bacterium typically infects soft tissue under the skin, but can also trigger serious lung infections, as well. It’s very difficult to transmit M. abscessus person-to-person, but “people with open wounds or who receive injections without appropriate skin disinfection may be at risk for infection by M. abscessus,” the CDC explained. “Infection with this bacterium usually does not improve with the usual antibiotics used to treat skin infections,” it noted. The cases outlined in… read on > read on >

People who eat large amounts of ultra-processed foods have a slightly higher risk of premature death than those who mostly shun the industrially produced eats, a new 30-year study says. Those who ate the most ultra-processed foods – an average of seven servings a day – had a 4% higher risk of death overall, and a 9% higher risk of death from causes other than cancer or heart disease. These higher risks of death “were mainly driven by meat/poultry/seafood based ready-to-eat products, sugar and artificially sweetened beverages, dairy based desserts, and ultra-processed breakfast foods,” wrote the team led by senior researcher Mingyang Song, an associate professor of epidemiology and nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. Ultra-processed foods are made mostly from substances extracted from whole foods, like saturated fats, starches and added sugars. They also contain a wide variety of additives to make them more tasty, attractive and shelf-stable, including colors, emulsifiers, flavors and stabilizers. Examples include packaged baked goods, sugary cereals, ready-to-eat or ready-to-heat products, and deli cold cuts, researchers said. Mounting evidence has linked these foods to higher risks of obesity, heart disease, diabetes and bowel cancer, researchers said. However, few long-term studies have examined these products’ links to a person’s overall risk of death. For this study, researchers tracked the long-term health of nearly 75,000 female registered… read on > read on >

Colon cancer steadily increased among young people in the United States over the past two decades, with tweens enduring the most dramatic leap in cancer rates, a new study says. The rate of colon cancer grew 500% among kids 10 to 14 between 1999 and 2020, researchers will report at the Digestive Disease Week medical meeting in Washington, D.C., later this month. The rate also increased 333% among 15- to 19-year-olds, and 185% among 20- to 24-year-olds, researchers found. “Colorectal cancer is no longer considered just a disease of the elderly population,” lead researcher Dr. Islam Mohamed, an internal medicine resident physician at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said in a news release. For the study, researchers calculated 1999-2020 trends in colon cancer for people between 10 and 44 years of age, using U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data. Even though the rates rose among children and young adults, they still are much lower in sheer numbers than those of older adults, results show. Among 10- to 14-year-olds, 0.6 children per 100,000 were diagnosed with colon cancer in 2020, up from just 0.1 children per 100,000 in 1999. Similarly, diagnoses in 15- to 19-year-olds went from 0.3 to 1.3 per 100,000, and those among 20- to 24-year-olds rose from 0.7 to 2 per 100,000. The most common colon cancer symptoms were constipation,… read on > read on >

Every cold and flu season, folks are flooded with ads for zinc lozenges, sprays and syrups that promise to shorten their sniffles. Zinc might indeed reduce the duration of common cold symptoms by about two days, a new evidence review says. However, the evidence is not conclusive, and taking zinc can come with some unpleasant side effects, researchers said. “The evidence on zinc is far from settled,” senior researcher Susan Wieland, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, said in a news release. “We need more research before we can be confident in its effects.” The theory behind zinc is that the essential mineral, which is found in many foods, might interfere with the cold virus’ ability to replicate in the nose, mouth and throat, researchers said. Lab studies have shown zinc can do this in petri dishes and mice, but human studies are needed to show if it will work in real people. For this review, researchers evaluated 19 human trials examining zinc as a cold treatment and 15 as a means of preventing colds. In particular, eight studies with nearly 1,000 participants combined investigated zinc as a treatment to reduce cold duration. The pooled results of those studies showed that it might help reduce the length of a cold by about two days, down from an average week-long duration… read on > read on >

Smoking cigarettes while pregnant has long been known to harm the fetus, but new research shows things get even worse when marijuana is in the mix. The study by a team at Oregon Health & Science University (OSHU) in Portland involved more than 3 million pregnancies. It found heightened risks for underweight newborns, preterm delivery and even infant death among women who used tobacco and cannabis while pregnant. “With the growing legalization of cannabis around the country, there is often a perception that cannabis is safe in pregnancy,” study co-author Dr. Jamie Lo said in an OSHU news release. “Because we know that many people who use cannabis often use tobacco or nicotine products, we wanted to better understand the potential health implications on both the pregnant individual and the infant,” she explained. Lo is associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology (maternal-fetal medicine) at OHSU. The findings were published May 7 in JAMA Network Open. Lo’s team analyzed hospital discharge data and vital statistics on more than 3 million pregnant women in California averaging about 29 years of age. Of those women, just over 23,000 (0.7%) said they had used cannabis while pregnant; close to 57,000 (1.8%) had smoked tobacco; and more than 10, 300 (0.3%) had used both substances while pregnant. Compared to women who abstained from cigarettes or marijuana during pregnancy, the… read on > read on >

New mothers who like to smoke marijuana might wind up exposing their babies to THC through their own breast milk, a new study says. THC, the intoxicating compound in cannabis, dissolves in the fats contained in human milk, researchers found. Mother’s milk produced by weed users always had detectable amounts of THC, even when the mothers had abstained for 12 hours, results show. The amounts detected were low – infants receive an average of 0.07 milligrams of THC per day through breast milk, researchers estimate. By comparison, a common low-dose edible contains 2 milligrams of THC. However, researchers emphasize that no one knows how any amount of THC might affect an infant or its development. “Breastfeeding parents need to be aware that if they use cannabis, their infants are likely consuming cannabinoids via the milk they produce, and we do not know whether this has any effect on the developing infant,” lead researcher Courtney Meehan, a biological anthropologist at Washington State University, said in a news release. Worse, there’s no consistent time when a weed user can expect the THC concentrations in their breast milk to peak and then decline. Guidelines for new mothers say to wait at least two hours after drinking alcohol before breastfeeding. There are no similar guidelines for cannabis. For participants who used cannabis just once during the study, THC in… read on > read on >

An experimental procedure could reduce levels of a hunger-triggering hormone by burning part of a person’s stomach lining, a new study reports. In the procedure, doctors snake a tube down the patient’s throat with a tiny device that singes the lining of the upper portion of the stomach, also called the gastric fundus. That’s the part of the stomach that produces ghrelin, the primary hormone that controls appetite, researchers said. A six-month clinical trial in which 10 obese women received the procedure resulted in a nearly 8% loss of body weight and a more than 40% reduction in fasting ghrelin levels, according to researchers. They’re slated to report the findings later this month at the Digestive Disease Week medical meeting in Washington, D.C. “This relatively brief, outpatient, non-surgical procedure can facilitate weight loss and significantly curb hunger, and it could be an additional option for patients who don’t want or aren’t eligible for anti-obesity medications, such as Wegovy and Ozempic, or bariatric surgery,” lead researcher Dr. Christopher McGowan, a gastroenterologist and medical director of the True You Weight Loss clinic in Cary, N.C., said in a news release. After snaking the tube into the stomach, doctors insert fluid to protect underlying stomach tissues and then burn (ablate) the mucosal lining of the gastric fundus. This reduces the number of ghrelin-producing cells in that part of… read on > read on >

Nine of 10 American adults are in the early, middle or late stages of a syndrome that leads to heart disease, a new report finds, and almost 10% have the disease already. “Poor cardiovascular, kidney, and metabolic health is widespread among the U.S. population,” concludes a team led by Dr. Muthiah Vaduganathan of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston. Researchers looked specifically at rates of what the American Heart Association has dubbed cardiovascular, kidney and metabolic (CKM) syndrome — interrelated factors that progress with time and, if left unchecked, lead to heart disease. CKM syndrome is divided into four stages: Stage 1: Excess fat buildup in the body (a risk factor for poor health) Stage 2: Emergence of other metabolic risk factors (for example, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes) Stage 3: Emergence of high-risk kidney disease and/or a high predicted risk of heart disease being diagnosed within the next 10 years Stage 4: A diagnosis of full-blown heart disease, with or without kidney disease To find out how many Americans might fall into one of these four categories, the Boston team tracked U.S. federal health survey data for 2011 through 2020. Among adults age 20 or older, only 10.6% did not have some level of CKM syndrome, the researchers reported May 8 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. … read on > read on >

More than 320,000 U.S. children lost a parent to drug overdose during the past decade, according to a new study reported May 8 in JAMA Psychiatry. What’s more, the death rate accelerated during the period, more than doubling between 2011 and 2021, researchers found. About 27 children per 100,000 had a parent die from an overdose in 2011. Ten years later, 63 children per 100,000 lost a parent to lethal drug use, results show. “This first-of-its-kind study allows us to better understand the tragic magnitude of the overdose crisis and the reverberations it has among children and families,” Miriam Delphin-Rittmon, administrator of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, said in a news release. Nationwide death records show that nearly 650,000 people 18 to 64 died of a drug overdose between 2011 and 2021. Of those, an estimated 321,566 left behind a child, based on data from drug use surveys. “It is devastating to see that almost half of the people who died of a drug overdose had a child,” Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said in a news release. “No family should lose their loved one to an overdose, and each of these deaths represents a tragic loss that could have been prevented.” These findings come on the heels of another study reporting a three-fold rise… read on > read on >

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All Sauce from Weekly Gravy:

The Pros & Cons of Robotic Knee Replacement Surgery

Americans Got Drug-Resistant Infections After Stem Cell Treatments in Mexico

More Data Suggests ‘Ultraprocessed’ Foods Can Shorten Your Life

Colon Cancer Cases Rising Sharply Among Children, Teens

Can Zinc Really Shorten a Cold?

Tobacco Plus Weed in Pregnancy Could Be Lethal Combo for Baby

How Long Does Marijuana THC Linger in Breast Milk?

Stomach-Zapping Procedure Lowers Appetite to Help With Weight Loss

About 90% of U.S. Adults Are On the Way to Heart Disease

More Than 321,000 U.S. Kids Lost a Parent to Drug ODs in a Decade