Health/Fitness « Weekly Gravy

A high number of preteens and teens in the United States have viewed pornography and many have also sent or received nude or seminude photos — sexting — over their smartphones, a new study reveals. “The prevalence rates we found in this study suggest that school counselors must be prepared to talk about sexting and pornography use with students, and to change the narrative about these behaviors,” said Amanda Giordano, lead author of the study and an associate professor in the University of Georgia Early College of Education, in Athens. “It’s important that students know that sending a sext is not a new requirement for romantic relationships and that pornography does not reflect expectations for sexual activity,” Giordano added in a university news release. For the study, the researchers questioned 350 students, aged 12 to 17 years. The investigators found that 15% had sent a sext to someone. About 25% had ever received a sext. About 25% had ever been asked to send a sext. About 12% said they had felt pressure by someone to send a sext in the past year. This pressure was concerning because of the unintended consequences of sexting, such as having the picture forwarded to others, put online or used as a form of blackmail to get the person to meet other demands, the researchers said. “If your boyfriend, girlfriend… read on > read on >

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 7, 2022 (HealthDay News) – How singers use their voices, including the genre of music they perform, has an impact on vocal injury, new research finds. Dr. Lesley Childs, medical director of the Voice Center at University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, led a two-part study of more than 1,000 patient records. The study looked at phonotraumatic lesions in patients’ vocal folds, including benign nodules, pseudocysts and hemorrhagic polyps. All of these can lead to hoarseness and are typically caused by overuse or straining of the voice. Researchers found that nodules were almost equally found across all singing genres. Opera singers had a significantly higher proportion of pseudocysts. People who sang in the praise/worship genre had significantly more hemorrhagic polyps. “These findings, combined with clinical observations, suggest that nodules may be related more to the speaking voice than the singing voice since they were more or less equally distributed across genres,” Childs said in a news release. “At the same time, the style of singing, acoustic environment and vocal demands unique to each genre clearly impact both the frequency and type of injuries that develop, with opera singers presenting with more chronic injury patterns and praise/worship singers presenting with more acute injuries.” In the first part of the study, researchers looked at 712 singers who had voice disorders between June 2017 and December… read on > read on >

Researchers may have sniffed out why colds are more likely in wintertime: The answer may lie within the nose. A previously unidentified immune response inside the nose is responsible for fighting off the viruses that cause upper respiratory infections, according to researchers at Massachusetts Eye and Ear and Northeastern University in Boston. Unfortunately, cold weather inhibits this protective response, making it more likely that a person will come down with anything from a cold to COVID-19. The new study offers the first biological explanation why respiratory virus infections are more likely to spike in colder seasons, researchers said. “Conventionally, it was thought that cold and flu season occurred in cooler months because people are stuck indoors more where airborne viruses could spread more easily,” said senior researcher Dr. Benjamin Bleier, director of Otolaryngology Translational Research at Mass Eye and Ear. “Our study, however, points to a biological root cause for the seasonal variation in upper respiratory viral infections we see each year, most recently demonstrated throughout the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said in a hospital news release. The nose is a prime entry point for viruses or bacteria, which can either be inhaled or directly deposited if a person does something like rub their nose. Once inside the nose, germs work their way backward up the airway and into the body, infecting the cells along the… read on > read on >

Shehzin Tietjen was 27 years old when she felt a lump in one of her breasts while in the shower. That discovery led to a confirmation of breast cancer, an unexpected jolt at her age. “I was really shocked,” said Tietjen, who lives in Atlanta. Though breast cancer is more common in postmenopausal women, about 9% of new breast cancer cases occur in women under 45. Many breast cancer treatments, including chemotherapy, can affect fertility. While Tietjen soon began talking with doctors about preserving her fertility, that’s not a conversation all young women with a similar diagnosis have, according to a survey of more than 700 breast cancer patients by Living Beyond Breast Cancer (LBBC), a Pennsylvania-based nonprofit. Only 49% of survey respondents reported discussing fertility issues with their health care providers, just slightly higher than eight years earlier. Two-thirds of women whose breast cancer was diagnosed before age 45 said it had significant impacts on their sexual health. But 86% said their health care provider was unable to address these issues. Study leader Arin Ahlum Hanson, director of outreach for LBBC, said addressing these fertility and sexual health issues is a critical need. “What is really important is that those conversations are had early on at that point of diagnosis to help young women make those decisions to pursue fertility preservation or just be… read on > read on >

Money may not buy happiness, but it might give low-income obese people an extra incentive to lose weight, a new study suggests. The study, of people from urban neighborhoods, found that cash rewards encouraged participants to shed some extra pounds, versus a weight-loss program with no financial bonuses. And the effects were similar whether people were rewarded for reaching their weight-loss goals, or simply for making healthy lifestyle changes. Over six months, 39% to 49% of people given cash incentives lost at least 5% of their starting weight. That compared with 22% of study participants given no monetary motivation. The caveat, experts said, is that no one knows how financial rewards pan out in the long run. In this study, the weight-loss differences among the groups had begun to narrow by the one-year point. “This would only be impactful if people could keep losing weight at this rate over the longer term,” said Karen Glanz, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics in Philadelphia. Glanz, who was not involved in the study, said that researchers still have much to learn about the role for financial incentives in weight loss — including how and when it’s best to use them. The concept itself is not new. Studies have suggested that offering people money in exchange for lost pounds can bear fruit… read on > read on >

While people’s immune system T-cells can still target the spike proteins of the COVID coronavirus, their power to do so is waning over time, researchers report. As the virus continues to mutate, T-cell recognition of newer variants may be lost, the researchers cautioned. That could lead to decreasing overall protection by the immune system. Despite the fact that T-cells were still able to recognize parts of the spike protein, called epitopes, including those in the omicron variant, recognition was worse in seven of 10 epitopes that were mutated in different variants, the study found. “Our paper shows that although most people have a diverse T-cell response against the virus, some responses are less effective against omicron. As further variants of concern are identified we will need to consider carefully how new viral mutations affect T-cell recognition,” said lead study author Heather Long, an associate professor in the Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy at the University of Birmingham in England. “The vaccines currently in use are still vital to protect us from COVID-19,” Graham Taylor, an associate professor in the institute, added in a university news release. “Should SARS-CoV-2 continue to mutate to evade the immune system, our findings will help researchers to develop new vaccines better suited to those variants.” As part of the study, researchers tested CD4+ T-cells collected early in the pandemic from… read on > read on >

Getting toys for some of the tots in your life this holiday season? Experts at Penn State Health offer tips on making safe choices. Each year, about 200,000 U.S. children end up in the emergency room with a toy-related injury, ranging from poisoning to choking hazards, according to Jen Lau, program manager of Pediatric Trauma and Injury Prevention at Penn State Health Children’s Hospital in Hershey, Pa. “Not all toys are safe,” said Dr. Mary Catherine Santos, a pediatric surgeon at the hospital. “We see problems with children requiring surgery or having traumatic injuries from toys where the child isn’t supervised or the toy is given to a child of the wrong age.” Among the biggest concerns are button batteries or magnets. If ingested, magnets may be attracted to each other internally, causing perforation, twisting or blocking of the intestines and infection. Surgery may be required. “Toddlers instinctively explore by putting things in their mouth,” Lau said. “It’s developmentally what they do. And button batteries are literally life-threatening.” Danger also lurks in holiday cards that play music and have moving parts. They can be easily taken apart, exposing dangerous batteries. “We’ve seen death because of it,” Lau said in a Penn State news release. Here are more ways to keep your child safe: Inspect all new toys. Pay attention to labels ― including age guidelines,… read on > read on >

A simulator may make driving safer for teens with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder by training them to take shorter glances away from the roadway. Focused Concentration and Attention Learning (FOCAL) is a computer-based program that teaches teens to keep their eyes on the road. For this study, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, a driving simulator was added to give students immediate feedback. The researchers, led by Jeffery Epstein of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, called the combined training FOCAL+. The 76 teens who participated in FOCAL+ had a nearly 40% lower risk for a crash or near crash compared to those in a control group who did not do the training, the study found. For the training, those in the FOCAL+ group were shown a split screen. The top half of the screen displayed a driver’s perspective of a roadway. The bottom half displayed a map. Participants were shown a street name and told to touch the space bar to identify the street on the map, causing the roadway to disappear. Pressing the key a second time restored the map. Toggling between the two represented multitasking while driving. When the map-only screen was displayed for more than three seconds, an alarm sounded. In a subsequent trial, the alarm sounded after two seconds. In the simulator training that followed, participants sat at a… read on > read on >

Corticosteroid injections to relieve pain in patients with knee osteoarthritis could actually be setting them back. Two new studies have discovered that, despite the temporary relief of symptoms, the injections were associated with continued progression of the disease. On the other hand, patients injected with another symptom reliever, hyaluronic acid, saw decreased progression of their knee osteoarthritis. The findings were presented Tuesday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), in Chicago. Research presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal. “While both corticosteroid and hyaluronic acid injections are reported to help with symptomatic pain relief for knee osteoarthritis, our results conclusively show that corticosteroids are associated with significant progression of knee osteoarthritis up to two years post-injection and must be administered with caution,” said Dr. Upasana Upadhyay Bharadwaj, a research fellow in the department of radiology at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). “Hyaluronic acid, on the other hand, may slow down progression of knee osteoarthritis and alleviate long-term effects while offering symptomatic relief,” she added in an RSNA news release. The UCSF study included 210 people enrolled in the Osteoarthritis Initiative, a study that has been observing 5,000 participants with knee osteoarthritis for 14 years. Among those included in the UCSF study, 140 received no injections, 44 were injected with corticosteroids and 26… read on > read on >

People with long COVID deal with months or years of punishing fatigue, mind-numbing brain fog or a frightening fight to take each and every breath. But they can also face the skepticism of others, a new study finds — employers and doctors questioning whether they’re really sick, friends avoiding them, family losing patience. About 95% of people living with long COVID say they’ve experienced at least one type of stigma, and three out of four say they are stigmatized “often” or “always” by their condition, researchers report. “Our findings suggest that long COVD is currently more stigmatized than many other long-term conditions, such as HIV and depression,” said lead researcher Marija Pantelic, a lecturer in public health at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the United Kingdom. “Nearly all of the people living with long COVID who took part in this study experienced some form of stigma related to this illness.” Long COVID affects more than 30% of patients who are hospitalized with COVID, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The symptoms of long COVID can be demoralizing but also confoundingly vague, which can promote some skepticism, said Dr. Aaron Glatt, chair of medicine and chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai South Nassau. “People might say, ‘Well, I had COVID and I’m not sick. So how come you had COVID… read on > read on >