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People who are hesitant about getting the COVID-19 vaccine don’t have to work hard to find internet rumors and theories that will fuel their fears regarding the vaccine’s safety. That’s because anti-vaccine groups and individuals are working overtime to promote frightening, false theories about the two COVID-19 vaccines that have now been administered to more than 24 million Americans, infectious disease experts say. “These kind of rumors have been around ever since Edward Jenner made his smallpox vaccine in the late 1700s,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “There was a belief if you got the vaccine, which was derived from cowpox, that you would take on bovine characteristics. You’d get a snout, you’d get a tail, you’d get floppy ears. That was the internet 1802, basically.” There are two major types of disinformation being promulgated about the coronavirus vaccines: Anecdotal “cause-and-effect” rumors that erroneously tie a person’s untimely demise to the fact they recently got a COVID-19 vaccine. “Big lie” conspiracy theories that allege the vaccine can cause all manner of major side effects, from infertility to permanently altering your genetics. Health care workers had braced for stories coming out that tie people’s personal health problems and untimely deaths to their recent vaccination, even though there’s no evidence linking the two. For example, vaccine… read on > read on >

Too much screen time can make your toddler more distractible, British researchers warn. The use of smartphones and tablets by babies and toddlers has soared in recent years. “The first few years of life are critical for children to learn how to control their attention and ignore distraction, early skills that are known to be important for later academic achievement,” said lead author Tim Smith, a professor at the Center for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London. “There has been growing concern that toddler touchscreen use may negatively impact their developing attention, but previously there was no empirical evidence to support this,” Smith added. To learn more, Smith’s team studied toddlers with different levels of touchscreen usage, assessing them at 12 months, 18 months and 3.5 years of age. At each visit, the toddlers did computer tasks while an eye-tracker measured their attention. Objects appeared in different locations of the computer screen, and researchers monitored how quickly the children looked at the objects and how well they ignored distracting objects. Toddlers with high daily touchscreen use were quicker to look when objects appeared and were less able to resist distraction than those with little or no daily screen time, the study found. Main researcher Ana Maria Portugal, an associate research fellow at Birkbeck University of London, said the team could not conclude,… read on > read on >

Could something as simple as taking a low-dose aspirin once a day guard against pregnancy loss among women who have already suffered miscarriages? New research suggests that’s the case, though exactly how low-dose aspirin helps stave off miscarriages is not fully understood yet. But “aspirin is anti-inflammatory and in a certain subset of women, miscarriage may be the result of an underlying inflammation,” noted study author Ashley Naimi, an associate professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta. In his study of more than 1,200 women aged 18 to 40 who had a history of one or two miscarriages, those women who took low-dose aspirin (81 milligrams) five to seven days a week were more likely to get pregnant, stay pregnant and deliver a live baby. The same was seen among women who took aspirin at least four days a week. The study was published Jan. 25 in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The new findings run counter to a previous analysis of the same data, which found no difference in pregnancy loss among women who took aspirin or dummy pill while trying to conceive. When the researchers went back to the data and looked at whether women stuck to the daily aspirin regimen or not, they found that consistency appeared to be linked to the findings. “Aspirin in this group of women could play… read on > read on >

Low-dose aspirin may help some people curb their risk of developing colon cancer — but not if they wait until age 70 to start, a large, new study suggests. Researchers found that when people began using aspirin in their 50s or 60s, their risk of developing colon cancer after age 70 was trimmed by 20%. There was no such benefit, however, among people who began using aspirin at age 70 or later. No one is saying all middle-aged people should rush to take low-dose aspirin, experts cautioned. In fact, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends low-dose aspirin (usually 81 mg a day) for only a select group: People in their 50s who have at least a 10% risk of suffering a heart attack or stroke in the next 10 years. The rationale is that long-term aspirin use carries a risk of bleeding in the gut or the brain. But for those middle-aged adults, the risk is outweighed by the benefits — namely, reduced odds of both cardiovascular disease and colon cancer. With older adults, the benefits of starting aspirin are less clear. So the task force — a government-funded panel of medical experts — suggests people in their 60s talk to their doctor about the pros and cons. For people in their 70s, the aspirin question gets murkier. And a 2018 clinical trial fueled… read on > read on >