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Your cellphone might be harming your heart, a new study warns. People who regularly use a cellphone have a higher risk of heart disease, researchers found in a large-scale study. And the more time someone spends on their phone, the greater their risk for heart problems, researchers report. Risk of heart disease was about 21% higher in people who use their phone six hours or more a week, compared with 15% higher for those on the phone four to six hours and 13% for one to three hours, results show. “We found that compared with non-regular mobile phone users, regular mobile phone users had a significantly higher risk of incident cardiovascular diseases,” said researcher Dr. Ziliang Ye, with Southern Medical University in China. For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 444,000 participants in the long-term UK Biobank research project. The participants all reported the frequency of their cellphone use. Researchers defined regular mobile phone use as at least one call per week. The research team tracked the participants for about 12 years, looking to see if they’d been diagnosed with stroke, heart disease, heart rhythm problems or heart failure. It turned out that regular phone users did have a higher risk of heart problems, compared to non-users, and that more cellphone use increased that risk. Cellphone use can impact a person’s sleep patterns… read on > read on >

Jillian Davis was pleased to be gifted a car seat during her pregnancy, from a family member who bought it online from a major retailer. But following the delivery of her daughter in late June, a car seat tech at her Salt Lake City hospital informed her that the seat was an unsafe counterfeit. “It’s completely shocking because this is my fourth child and I’ve never heard of this being an issue,” Davis said in a hospital news release. “It’s scary to think I could have been driving around with my child in a car seat that’s dangerous.” Online retailers are selling fake kid’s car seats that are very likely to fail in a crash, child health experts warn. These seats are enticing because they cost much less than major brands, and are sold on prominent national retail websites through third-party sellers, experts said. “It’s hard to tell a car seat is counterfeit from a small picture online, and many parents think they found a great deal from a major retailer,” said Michelle Jamison, community health program manager at Intermountain Primary Children’s Hospital in Salt Lake City. “Once they realize there’s a problem and try to return it, the site they got it from has already been taken down,” Jamison added in a hospital news release. Intermountain Children’s offers car seat checks to help parents… read on > read on >

“Rolling stop” laws that let bicyclists treat stop signs as yield signs are not dangerous, a new study demonstrates. Both bike riders and drivers perform safely in intersections once they’ve been informed about how the law works, results from lab experiments involving bicycle and motor vehicle simulators show. “The focus of previous research has been crash-data analysis and why riders are motivated to do a rolling stop even when it’s illegal in their state,” said lead researcher David Hurwitz, a transportation engineering professor with Oregon State University. “No one has looked at how well bicycle rolling-stop laws work, or what happens when you educate people about them.” Also known at the “Idaho stop,” rolling stop laws for bicyclists have been approved by eight states, researchers said. Idaho led the way back in 1982, followed by Oregon in 2019 and Washington in 2020. The other states are Arkansas, Delaware, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Utah. The laws allow riders to keep their momentum, theoretically reducing congestion at intersections and crash risk because cyclists move through the stop more efficiently, researchers said. Nearly half of all bicycle-car crashes happen at intersections, Hurwitz noted. In 2022, 1,105 U.S. bicyclists were killed in collisions with motor vehicles, a 13% increase from the previous year. For this study, researchers observed 60 people in pairs as they operated separate bicycle and motor… read on > read on >

People with HIV can no longer be turned away if they try to enlist in the U.S. military, a federal judge has ruled. The decision, issued this week by U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkma, said the Pentagon’s ban on HIV-positive people seeking to join the armed forces contributes “to the ongoing stigma surrounding HIV-positive individuals while actively hampering the military’s own recruitment goals.” “Modern science has transformed the treatment of HIV,” Brinkema wrote in her ruling. “Asymptomatic HIV-positive service members with undetectable viral loads who maintain treatment are capable of performing all of their military duties, including worldwide deployment.” Importantly, HIV can’t be spread through saliva, sweat, tears, group exercise or sharing a bathroom. Instead, most people get HIV through anal or vaginal sex or when sharing needles, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Antiretroviral therapy can also keep HIV viral loads to low or undetectable levels, and patients who are virally suppressed won’t transmit the virus through sex or syringe-sharing, according to the CDC. In recent years, the Pentagon’s policies toward HIV-positive Americans have come under legal fire. In 2022, Brinkema struck down the military’s ban on people who are HIV-positive from joining the armed forces as officers or deploying abroad, CNN reported. Following that ruling, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a memo that said people who are HIV-positive will no longer be automatically barred from… read on > read on >

It’s long been known that a daily dose of low-dose aspirin helps keep colon cancer at bay. But new research suggests that those who benefit most are folks whose lifestyles up their odds for the disease in the first place. “Our results show that aspirin can proportionally lower the markedly elevated risk in those with multiple risk factors for colorectal cancer,” said study lead author Dr. Daniel Sikavi. He’s a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) in Boston. Aspirin is thought to prevent colon cancer by lowering the production of pro-inflammatory proteins, known as prostaglandins, that can spur tumor development. But there may be other factors at play, and “aspirin likely prevents colorectal cancer through multiple mechanisms,” according to study co-senior author Dr. Andrew Chan, director of epidemiology for the Mass General Cancer Center. However, the story of daily aspirin’s role in colon cancer prevention has been a rocky one. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an influential and independent panel of experts, at first recommended low-dose (81 milligrams) aspirin on a daily basis as a means of preventing both heart disease and colon cancer, based on a wide array of data. However, the task force rescinded that guidance in 2016, saying that the risk of bleeding from long-term aspirin use negated any other health benefit. But might daily aspirin benefit some users more than… read on > read on >

More and more Americans who use “micromobility” transport, such as electric bikes and e-scooters, are motoring their way straight into the ER, new data shows. In fact, the rate of e-bike injuries among Americans doubled each year between 2017 and 2022, reportED a team led by Dr. Adrian Fernandez, of the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). There was a concurrent 45% rise in injuries linked to e-scooters. This steep rise in accidents “underscores an urgent need for added safety measures,” Fernandez said in a UCSF news release. His team published its findings July 23 in the journal JAMA Network Open. As the researchers noted, the use of tiny motorized means of getting around has surged 50-fold over the past decade in the United States. E-bikes and e-scooters are not only much easier on the environment than cars, but they are relatively cheap, convenient and can reach speeds of up to 28 miles per hour. But there’s a downside: Accidents. Fernandez and colleagues used data from U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s National Electronic Injury Surveillance System for 2017 through 2022. While 751 injuries on e-bicycles were reported in 2017, that number had spiked to 23,493 just five years later, the team found. At the same time, e-scooter injuries rose from 8,566 to 56,847. Compared to folks riding conventional, pedal-powered bikes, those who opted for electric… read on > read on >

Wartime appears to increase the risk of chronic pain for military women, a new study suggests. Active-duty servicewomen who served between 2006 and 2013 – a period of heightened combat deployments – had a significantly increased risk of chronic pain compared to women serving at other times, according to results published July 5 in the journal JAMA Network Open. Likewise, female family members of military personnel serving in 2006-2013 also were more likely to experience chronic pain, researchers found. “I was surprised by the magnitude of the effect we observed here, particularly among female civilian spouses,” lead researcher Dr. Andrew Schoenfeld, an orthopedic surgeon with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, said in a news release. “This underscores an overlooked aspect of deployment schedules that the Military Health System must recognize.” About 21% of U.S. adults experience chronic pain, which can persist for months to years, researchers said in background notes. For the new study, researchers analyzed Military Health System medical records for nearly 3.5 million women 18 to 64 from 2006 to 2020. Nearly 325,000 women (9%) had a diagnosis of chronic pain. Researchers divided the women into two groups — those treated from 2006 to 2013, a period of more intense combat exposure, and those treated from 2014 to 2020, when there was significantly less combat exposure. Women in active service from 2006… read on > read on >

For decades, millions of Americans popped a low-dose aspirin each day to lower their heart risks. Then, accumulated data prompted the nation’s two leading cardiology groups — the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association — to overturn advisories in 2019 and recommend against daily aspirin, citing a risk for bleeding that exceeded any benefit for most people. Trouble is, many Americans aren’t heeding that message and continue to take the daily pill, a new survey finds. The survey, from a sample representing over 150 million U.S. adults, found that almost a third of heart-healthy people age 60 or older said they took a daily low-dose (81milligrams) aspirin each day in 2021. That’s about 18.5 million older Americans, said a team led by Dr. Mohak Gupta. He’s a physician in internal medicine who conducted the study while at the Cleveland Clinic. He’s now practicing at Houston Methodist. Add in folks under 60 and the number rises to more than 25.6 million Americans taking daily aspirin, the researchers estimated. Given aspirin’s now dubious risk-benefit ratio for folks at average heart risk, “our findings highlight the urgent need for physicians to inquire about aspirin use, including self-use, and engage in risk–benefit discussions to reduce inappropriate use for primary prevention in older adults,” the researchers said. They published their findings June 24 in the Annals of… read on > read on >

For the first time since the pandemic, it got a little safer to cross America’s streets in 2023, new statistics show. According to data released Monday from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA), 7,318 American pedestrians were killed by motor vehicles last year — a dip of 5.4% from 2022 and the first such decline seen since the pandemic ended. But it’s no time for celebration: The 2023 number for pedestrian deaths is still 14.1% above pre-pandemic levels. Still, the news is somewhat heartening, said GHSA Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Adkins. “A decline in pedestrian deaths offers hope that, after years of rising fatalities, a new trend is starting,” he said in a GHSA news release. “Each death is tragic and preventable. We know how to improve safety for people walking — more infrastructure, vehicles designed to protect people walking, lower speeds and equitable traffic enforcement. It will take all this, and more, to keep the numbers going in the right direction.” The new data comes from the State Highway Safety Offices (SHSOs) in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, the GHSA said. The report also gave insights into how and where pedestrians are most often killed: There’s been no big change in the kinds of vehicles driven when a pedestrian dies, only that the percentage of deaths involving light trucks ( SUVs, pickups… read on > read on >

Cyberbullying and sexual harassment are rampant in the world of professional video gaming and online gaming, a new study reports. Nearly 96% of 145 video game players from 14 countries said they had been targeted online in the previous year. “It’s not just an isolated incident,” said lead researcher Louise Trudgett-Klose, a doctoral student in psychology with the University of South Austrialia. “The fact that 96% of players – professional or otherwise – experienced cyberbullying in the previous 12 months suggests that toxic behaviors are prevalent in the gaming community,” Trudgett-Klose noted in a university news release. Women and professional e-sports players are the most common targets of abuse, results show. Women are targeted most often for sexual harassment in the world of gaming, particularly as they rise through the elite ranks, researchers found. Women make up 46% of the world’s 3 billion video game players, and represent 16% of e-sports competitors and content creators, researchers said in background notes. “There was a definite link between the level of professional gaming and the incidence of cyberbullying, and sexual harassment for women players,” Trudgett Klose said. “The more professional a player becomes, the more they are exposed to hostile behavior.” Gaming professionals who attracted the most fame, with a large fan base and heavy presence on social media platforms, were exposed to the worst levels of… read on > read on >