In a move guaranteed to alarm many, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vocal opponent of vaccines and other tenets of mainstream health care, to head the massive U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The department encompasses numerous key agencies, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, Medicaid and Medicare. Trump’s nomination, which came Thursday, shifts the 70-year-old Kennedy from a fringe character railing against many long-accepted medical practices to one of the most powerful people in the federal government, charged with overseeing Americans’ health care and safety. In a statement, Trump, who has already said he’d let Kennedy “go wild on health,” reinforced his would-be appointee’s image as a maverick. “For too long, Americans have been crushed by the industrial food complex and drug companies who have engaged in deception, misinformation and disinformation when it comes to Public Health,” Trump said in a post on his Truth Social site announcing the nomination. Kennedy, he said, would “Make America Great and Healthy Again!” It’s been a dramatic arc for Kennedy, whose namesake father was assassinated in 1968 in the midst of a campaign to become the Democratic Presidential nominee that year. Kennedy Jr. was himself a Democrat until he campaigned in this year’s presidential campaign as…  read on >  read on >

High blood pressure is a rare health issue among teens, but U.S. case numbers are creeping upwards. Now, research published recently in the Journal of the American Heart Association, shows that healthy sleep can help keep hypertension at bay in the young. That’s probably because “disrupted sleep can lead to changes in the body’s stress response, including elevated levels of stress hormones like cortisol, which in turn can increase blood pressure,” explained study first author Augusto César Ferreira De Moraes. He’s an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas Health Science Center, in Houston.  As the researchers noted, high blood pressure can affect a teenager: Data shows that about 1.7% of U.S. adolescents (averaging about 14 years of age) were diagnosed with hypertension in 2018-2020, and that number rose to 2.9% by 2020-2022. The new study looked at the same dataset, which included more than 3,300 kids who wore Fitbits that tracked their daytime activity and nighttime total sleep time, as well as their REM (deep) sleep. The study found that adolescents who got the age-recommended 9 to 11 hours of sleep nightly had a 37% lowered odds for high blood pressure “incidents,” compared to those who didn’t. Certain factors, such as the noise level of the neighborhood the teen lived in, didn’t impact the results, De Moraes and colleagues noted. There are…  read on >  read on >

Vitamin D supplements might lower blood pressure in seniors who are obese, reducing their heart health risk, a new study says. But taking more than the recommended daily dose will not provide additional health benefits, researchers report in the Journal of the Endocrine Society. “Our study found vitamin D supplementation may decrease blood pressure in specific subgroups such older people, people with obesity and possibly those with low vitamin D levels,” said researcher Dr. Ghada El-Hajj Fuleihan of the American University of Beirut Medical Center in Beirut, Lebanon. Studies have linked vitamin D deficiency to an increased risk of high blood pressure, researchers said in background notes. However, there’s not solid evidence whether taking vitamin D supplements can help lower blood pressure. The recommended daily dose of vitamin D is 600 IU, or about 15 micrograms, researchers said. For the study, researchers tracked the health of 221 seniors with obesity who took either 600 IU or 3,750 IU of daily vitamin D supplements for a year. The supplements did lower their blood pressure, results show, but higher doses did not provide additional benefits. “High vitamin D doses compared to the Institutes of Medicine’s recommended daily dose did not provide additional health benefits,” El-Hajj Fuleihan said in a news release. More information The Endocrine Society has more on vitamin D for preventing disease. SOURCE: The Endocrine…  read on >  read on >

People with both type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease face a heart health double-whammy, a new study says. Men with both diabetes and kidney disease will develop heart health problems 28 years earlier than those without either condition, researchers reported today at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago. Women with diabetes and kidney disease will develop heart problems 26 years earlier, results show. “Our findings help to interpret the combination of risk factors that will lead to a high predicted cardiovascular disease risk and at what age they have an impact on risk,” lead study author Vaishnavi Krishnan, a researcher at Northwestern University in Chicago and a medical student at Boston University School of Medicine, said in a news release. “For example, if someone has borderline-elevated levels of blood pressure, glucose and/or impaired kidney function, but they don’t yet have hypertension or diabetes or chronic kidney disease, their risk may not be recognized,” Krishan said. For the study, researchers used federal health survey data from 2011 to 2020 to create heart risk profiles for people who have type 2 diabetes, kidney disease, or both. Kidney disease and type 2 diabetes are two of the four components of cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome (CKM), which the heart association defines as the overall health risk that arises from the interplay of heart disease, kidney problems, diabetes and obesity.…  read on >  read on >

More than a year after its advisory panel unanimously declared the drug phenylephrine to be useless against nasal congestion, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is proposing that it be removed from common over-the-counter decongestants. Products that include phenylephrine as an active ingredient include Sudafed PE, Vicks Sinex and Benadryl Allergy Plus Congestion. In fact, “it is important to note that some products only contain oral phenylephrine as a single, active ingredient,” the FDA said in a statement released Thursday. However, based on the available science, it’s time for consumers to stop throwing their money away on such products, the FDA said. “It is the FDA’s role to ensure that drugs are safe and effective,” Dr. Patrizia Cavazzoni, who directs the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), said in the statement. “Based on our review of available data, and consistent with the advice of the advisory committee, we are taking this next step in the process to propose removing oral phenylephrine because it is not effective as a nasal decongestant.” The agency said its experts poured over decades of data on whether or not phenylephrine could ease nasal congestion. They found no evidence to support the claim, nor any evidence to support the notion that phenylephrine might boost the effects of other medicines included in a decongestant, such as acetaminophen or dextromethorphan. At…  read on >  read on >