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 >

Teens on the verge of falling asleep behind the wheel is a common threat to public safety on U.S. roadways, a new study reports. About 1 in 6 teenage drivers say they’ve driven while drowsy, according to a National Sleep Foundation study presented Wednesday at the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies in Houston. The research was also published in a special supplement of the May issue of the journal Sleep. That finding means that about 1.7 million teenage drivers have driven while sleepy, and more than 400,000 teens drive drowsy at least once a week, researchers estimated. “This is a troubling rate, especially given that teens are new drivers with relatively low opportunity to have engaged in drowsy driving when compared to the lifetime of driving opportunities in adults,” said principal investigator Joseph Dzierzewski, vice president of research and scientific affairs at the National Sleep Foundation. Teens know it’s not safe — about 95% said drowsy driving is extremely or very risky, poll results show. However, they listed drowsy driving as having the lowest risk of death or serious harm when compared to drunk, drugged or distracted driving, researchers found. Most teens said work or school schedules keep them from getting the sleep they need to drive alert. Teen drivers with jobs were more than twice as likely to have driven drowsy…  read on >  read on >