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For years, older adults took a baby aspirin a day to help ward off a first-time heart attack or stroke. Now yet another study is showing the risks are not worth it for most. Specifically, researchers found the risk of brain bleeding while using low-dose aspirin outweighed any potential benefit against stroke for relatively healthy older adults — that is, those with no history of heart disease or stroke. In fact, among more than 19,000 older adults in the study, those who took daily low-dose aspirin for several years showed no reduction in their risk of an ischemic stroke (the kind caused by a blood clot). They did, however, have a 38% higher risk of bleeding in the brain, compared to study patients given placebo pills for comparison. Experts said the findings align with the latest recommendations on low-dose aspirin: Most people with no history of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack or stroke, should skip it. “What’s becoming clearer and clearer is that aspirin, for primary prevention, is not indicated for most people,” said Dr. Anum Saeed, a cardiologist who was not involved in the study. “Primary prevention” refers to prevention of first-time strokes or heart attacks. The new findings do not apply to people who have been prescribed aspirin because they already have a history of those conditions, said Saeed, an assistant professor at… read on > read on >

Many parents in the United States aren’t installing child car seats correctly, a new study finds. Errors in car seat installation are common, even for seats that have a 5-star rating for features like ease of use, researchers found. The study found that fewer errors were detected when parents installed seats that had higher ratings, but researchers recommend that parents seek out safety technicians to learn the proper techniques for seat installation. Child restraint systems cut the risk of crash injuries by 50% to 85%, but only if properly used, the researchers noted. “New parents often receive training on car seat installation before the baby is born,” said researcher Dr. Michelle Macy, an emergency medicine physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “However, it would be beneficial for them to take advantage of the available resources after the child’s birth as well, especially during the transition from infant carrier to a rear-facing car seat, and then again when switching the seat to face forward,” she said in a hospital news release. For the study, Macy and her colleagues analyzed data from Safe Kids Illinois seat check records from 2015 through 2019. The most common errors were for seats installed with seat belts (70%) and the least common for recline angle (37%). One of the more common errors that were found around… read on > read on >

Getting older adults who are failing mentally to relinquish their car keys can be challenging. But those conversations are necessary, said researchers who found a majority of adults with cognitive impairment still get behind the wheel. Michigan Medicine researchers studied this issue in a South Texas community. They found that more than 600 adults over age 65 in Nueces County had cognitive assessment scores — scores of thinking and memory — that indicated a likelihood of impairment. Among them, more than 61% were current drivers. About one-third of their caregivers had concerns about the drivers’ abilities to safely navigate the roads. “It is likely appropriate that some with mild cognitive impairment are still driving, but for some it may not be,” said senior author Dr. Lewis Morgenstern, professor of neurology, neurosurgery and emergency medicine at University of Michigan Medical School. “Patients and caregivers should discuss these issues with their health care providers and consider on-the-road driving evaluations to ensure safety,” Morgenstern said in a school news release. About 1 in 9 Americans ages 65 and up lives with Alzheimer’s disease. That’s 6.7 million people. Millions more have related dementias. These conditions can affect neuropsychological and visual skills that reduce the ability to drive safely, the researchers pointed out. Dementia had medium to large effects on driving impairment, according to a 2017 review of motor vehicle… read on > read on >

ChatGPT may have some of the reasoning skills doctors need to diagnose and treat health problems, a pair of studies suggests — though no one is predicting that chatbots will replace humans in lab coats. In one study, researchers found that — with the right prompting — ChatGPT was on par with medical residents in writing up a patient history. That’s a summary of the course of a patient’s current health issue, from the initial symptoms or injury to the ongoing problems. Doctors use it in making diagnoses and coming up with a treatment plan. Recording a good history is more complicated than simply transcribing an interview with a patient. It requires an ability to synthesize information, extract the pertinent points and put it all together into a narrative, explained Dr. Ashwin Nayak, the lead researcher on the study. “It takes medical students and residents years to learn,” said Nayak, a clinical assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University, in California. Yet, his team found that ChatGPT was able to do it about as well as a group of medical residents (doctors in training). The catch was, the prompt had to be good enough: The chatbot’s performance was decidedly subpar when the prompt was short on detail. ChatGPT is driven by artificial intelligence (AI) technology that allows it to have human-like conversations — instantly generating… read on > read on >

Low doses of the eyedrops ophthalmologists use to dilate your pupils during an eye exam are not able to slow the progression of nearsightedness (myopia) in children, a new clinical trial has found. Atropine eyedrops at a concentration of 0.01% did not outperform placebo drops in slowing either myopia progression or elongation of the eye among children after two years of treatment, the study results show. The results contradict findings from other recent trials that showed a benefit from using low-dose atropine drops to arrest myopia, the researchers said. Stronger concentrations of atropine — 0.5% to 1% — have long been used by pediatric eye doctors to slow the progression of nearsightedness, the study authors said in background notes. However, such doses cause light sensitivity and blurry near vision when kids receive the drops nightly, the researchers said. Lower concentrations have fewer side effects, and so it was hoped that low-dose atropine would be effective. By 2030, it’s predicted that 39 million people in the United States will have myopia. By 2050, that number is expected to grow to 44 million in the United States and to 50% of the global population. The study enrolled 187 U.S. children between 5 to 12 years of age with low or moderate myopia. Low-dose atropine was randomly prescribed to 125 of the children, while 62 received placebo drops.… read on > read on >

Scientists have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) tool capable of deciphering a brain tumor’s genetic code in real time, during surgery — an advance they say could speed diagnosis and personalize patients’ treatment. The researchers trained the AI tool to recognize the different genetic features of gliomas, a group of tumors that constitute the most common form of brain cancer among adults. Not all gliomas are the same, however. Most people are diagnosed with one of three subtypes that each have different genetic features — and, critically, different degrees of aggressiveness and treatment options. Right now, doctors called pathologists can analyze gliomas for those genetic markers, in what’s known as molecular diagnosis. But the process takes days to weeks, said Dr. Kun-Hsing Yu, the senior researcher on the new study. In contrast, the AI tool his team is developing can enable molecular diagnosis in 10 to 15 minutes. That means it could be done during surgery, according to Yu, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School, in Boston. The technology, called CHARM, also appears high on the accuracy scale. When Yu’s team put it to the test with glioma samples it had never “seen” before, the AI tool was 93% accurate in distinguishing the three different molecular subtypes. Being able to make such distinctions in the operating room is critical, Yu and… read on > read on >

Taking daily low-dose aspirin increases the risk of anemia in the elderly, a new clinical trial suggests. Not only does it raise anemia risk by more than 20% in people 70 or older, it is also associated with a decline in blood iron levels, researchers report. “This finding about anemia and aspirin is noteworthy because, in many older people, anemia has other consequences such as fatigue and general decline in function,” said lead researcher Dr. Zoe McQuilten, an associate professor of hematology with Monash University in Australia. About half of seniors in the United States take aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes, the researchers noted. However, major groups that once strongly recommended low-dose aspirin — such as the American Heart Association and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force — have tightened their guidelines after newer studies found the therapy increases the risk of dangerous bleeding. “We knew from large clinical trials that daily low-dose aspirin increased the risk of clinically significant bleeding [bleeding that requires a blood transfusion or other treatment for the bleeding],” McQuilten said. But it wasn’t clear whether aspirin also contributed to full-fledged anemia, or a lack of healthy red blood cells to carry oxygen to the body’s organs, the researchers added. Symptoms of anemia include fatigue, shortness of breath, dizziness, irregular heartbeat, headache, chest pain and pale or yellow skin,… read on > read on >

Cutting back social media to a spare 30 minutes per day could be the key to reducing anxiety, depression, loneliness and feelings of fear of missing out, researchers say. That was true for college students in a new study who self-limited social media — often successfully and sometimes squeezing in just a bit more time — for two weeks. “I think on the one hand, the results are kind of counterintuitive, right? If you talk to many people, they would tell you that social media is how they manage their stress, how they keep themselves entertained, how they stay connected with other people. So, I think the typical perception is that people use social media to cope,” said lead author Ella Faulhaber, a doctoral student in human-computer interaction at Iowa State University. Faulhaber said researchers gained interesting insights when they asked participants about their experience. “Lots of them said, ‘I had trouble at first but then I realized how much I better slept, how I actually connected more with people in real life, how I found myself keeping busy with other things,’” Faulhaber said. The study dovetailed with recent health advisories from the U.S. Surgeon General and the American Psychological Association, which warned that young people’s mental health has suffered as their use of social media has surged. Faulhaber’s team worked with 230 college students,… read on > read on >

Physicians and scientists are experiencing alarming levels of harassment on social media, according to a new survey. About two-thirds of respondents said they had been harassed on social media since the COVID-19 pandemic began — up from 23.3% of physicians surveyed in 2020. About 64% reported harassment related to comments made about the pandemic, while 64% of those harassed said the pandemic had affected their use of social media platforms. “This study highlights that physicians and scientists changed the way they used social media during the pandemic,” said first author Dr. Regina Royan, a research fellow at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and an emergency medicine physician. “Sadly, those that use social media to share public health messages are more likely to face harassment,” she said in a university news release. “These are the people that we can’t afford to lose in this conversation, especially at a time when trusted messengers for public health information are essential.” For the study, researchers surveyed 359 U.S. physicians, scientists and trainees. Their comments revealed that advocacy around topics such as vaccination, masks, firearms, reproductive rights and gender-affirming care appeared to fuel the harassment. Respondents also shared personal experiences of online attacks. “When I posted a picture of myself with my badge in my white coat after my COVID-19 vaccination, I received hundreds of harassing anti-vax messages, including… read on > read on >

A new study finds that people working with artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be lonely, suffer from insomnia and drink more heavily after work. In the study, published online June 12 in the Journal of Applied Psychology, the researchers noted these findings don’t prove that working with AI systems causes loneliness or other responses, just that they are associated. The research involved four experiments in the United States, Taiwan, Indonesia and Malaysia. “The rapid advancement in AI systems is sparking a new industrial revolution that is reshaping the workplace with many benefits but also some uncharted dangers, including potentially damaging mental and physical impacts for employees,” said lead researcher Pok Man Tang, an assistant professor of management at the University of Georgia. “Humans are social animals, and isolating work with AI systems may have damaging spillover effects into employees’ personal lives,” he said in a journal news release. Working with AI systems can have some benefits, the researchers found. For example, employees who use AI systems are more likely to be helpful to fellow workers, but that may be triggered by loneliness and the need for social contact, Tang’s team said. The researchers also found that those with high levels of attachment anxiety, which is feeling insecure and worried about social connections, reported working with AI systems made them more likely to help others. They… read on > read on >