Health/Fitness « Weekly Gravy

Living in a noisy neighborhood with less green space negatively affects teens’ sleep, which may lead to poorer memory and thinking skills, according to a pair of studies. In a study on residential environment, researchers found that as noise levels steadily increased, so too did the time needed for teens to fall asleep. They also didn’t sleep as long as kids in quieter, greener neighborhoods. But as the average number of trees rose, teens dozed off sooner and slept longer. “For adolescents, the harms of insufficient sleep are wide-ranging and include impaired cognition [thinking skills] and engagement in antisocial behavior,” said study author Stephanie Mayne. She’s assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. As such, it critical to identify ways to prevent and treat the problem, Mayne said in a news release from the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. “Our findings suggest that neighborhood noise and green space may be important targets for interventions,” Mayne said. In Mayne’s study, 110 teens wore watches that measured their rest and activity for 14 days each in both eighth and ninth grades. The researchers mapped their home addresses to determine sound levels, tree cover, housing and population density. The second study showed how sleep loss associated with reduced time in bed affected the brain waves of… read on > read on >

The great outdoors can soothe the soul, but new research suggests that working outside might also guard against breast cancer. The study wasn’t designed to say how working outside affects chances of developing breast cancer, but vitamin D exposure may be the driving force, the researchers suggested. “The main hypothesis is that sun exposure through vitamin D production may decrease the risk of breast cancer after age 50,” said study author Julie Elbaek Pedersen, of the Danish Cancer Society Research Center in Copenhagen. Vitamin D deficiency has been linked to a host of diseases and conditions including breast cancer. Vitamin D is often called the “sunshine vitamin” because your body produces it when exposed to the sun’s ultraviolet B rays. The body mainly makes vitamin D in the middle of the working day so outdoor workers are exposed to considerably higher levels than those who work indoors, Pedersen said. “Women who work outdoors may regularly be exposed to sunlight and thereby have more sufficient long-term levels of vitamin D compared with women working indoors,” she said. You don’t need much sun exposure to make adequate amounts of D. “Maximum daily vitamin D levels are secured after only minutes in the sun in the summertime, and more time will not increase the levels further,” Pedersen said. In recent years, the push to wear sunscreen and avoid… read on > read on >

College football players suffer more concussions and head hits in practice than they do actually playing the game, a new study suggests. Across five seasons of football, 72% of concussions and 67% of head impacts incurred by players on six National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I teams happened during practice rather than on game day, researchers found. The incidence of concussion and head impacts also were disproportionately higher in the preseason than the regular season, said lead researcher Michael McCrea, director of the Brain Injury Research Program at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. “Our data suggest modifying preseason training activities and football practice throughout the season could lead to a substantial reduction in overall concussion incidence and head impact exposure,” McCrea said. The findings were published Feb. 1 in the journal JAMA Neurology. While these specific findings are new, experts and coaches have known for years that practice is at least as dangerous as actual play when it comes to head trauma, said Dr. Robert Cantu, medical director and director of clinical research at the Cantu Concussion Center at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Mass. That’s why the National Football League agreed in 2015 to dramatically reduce full-contact practices in its collective bargaining agreement with the NFL Players Association, said Cantu, who wrote an editorial accompanying the new study. The NFL now has… read on > read on >

It only takes a second. Experts are warning that unsecured televisions, bedroom dressers and other heavy furniture can crush, maim and even kill curious children, and the issue may only worsen during stay-at-home lockdowns. According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), between 2000 and 2019, 451 kids aged 17 years and younger died in tip-over accidents, the CPSC said. And an average 11,100 per year were treated in hospital emergency rooms for tip-over-related injuries from 2017 through 2019. “Tip-over injuries and deaths are among the most tragic we see,” Robert Adler, the agency’s acting chairman, said in a CPSC news release. “Parents and caregivers don’t suspect that the bookcase or dresser in their child’s room can be hazardous — it’s a truly hidden hazard. And these tip-overs happen so fast; it’s literally in the blink of an eye, often with a parent close by.” About eight in 10 tip-over deaths involved kids under age 6, and 75% of fatalities for children involved a TV, according to the new report. With millions of Americans preparing to watch the Super Bowl on Feb. 7, now is the time to anchor all TVs in your home, the agency said. This short CPSC video shows how quickly these tragedies can occur: A CPSC survey last year found that many parents and caregivers considered anchoring furniture and TVs… read on > read on >

WEDNESDAY, Feb.3, 2021A majority of dermatology patients are happy with telehealth appointments in place of in-person office visits, a new study finds. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many medical specialties to move from in-person to online appointments, but dermatology had already seen increased use of telehealth visits over the last decade, according to the George Washington (GW) University researchers. “Teledermatology boasts a number of benefits, including increased access to care, cost savings for patients, convenience, and, with the current pandemic, avoids physical contact,” study co-author Samuel Yeroushalmi said in a university news release. He’s a third-year medical student at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences in Washington, D.C. However, virtual appointments do have potential issues, including privacy concerns, appropriate image acquisition and adequate health care provider training, the study authors noted. To assess patient satisfaction with teledermatology appointments, the researchers distributed an online survey to dermatology patients at the GW Medical Faculty Associates. Nearly half (47%) of the respondents said they’d had a previous appointment canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and almost 18% were new patients with no previous in-office appointment. Patients said they liked that telehealth visits were time-efficient, didn’t require transportation and maintained social distancing. Reasons they didn’t like virtual appointments included lack of physical touch and feeling they received an inadequate assessment. When asked if they would recommend telehealth… read on > read on >

Stroke survivor Ken Allsford focused intensely on how he wanted to bend his elbow. And then the robot exoskeleton attached to his left arm obeyed his unspoken command, moving his crippled limb. “It was a combination of exciting and trepidation, because sometimes nothing would happen,” Allsford, 61, of Katy, Texas, recalled. “But when you actually see it move without actually making the moves yourself, that’s very exciting.” The experiment with Allsford was part of an ongoing project to see if such a brain-machine interface can help improve the rehabilitation of stroke patients. Ten stroke patients had clinically significant improvements in their arm movement after more than a dozen therapy sessions with a robot exoskeleton powered by their own brains, researchers reported recently in the journal NeuroImage: Clinical. “We found that there was an improvement in 80% of the participants,” said senior researcher Jose Contreras-Vidal, director of the Non-Invasive Brain Machine Interface Systems Laboratory at the University of Houston. Most patients retained their improved function for at least two months after therapy ended, suggesting the potential for long-lasting gains, he added. Physical therapists often help stroke patients overcome paralysis by manually moving the person’s limbs again and again, with the hope that the brain will rewire itself to restore control over the arm or leg, Contreras-Vidal said. This type of therapy has started to rely on… read on > read on >

Like influenza, could COVID-19 evolve to wax and wane with the seasons? New research suggests it might. Early in the pandemic, some experts suggested that SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes COVID-19 — may behave like many other coronaviruses that circulate more widely in fall and winter. To find out if that could be true, researchers analyzed COVID-19 data — including cases, death rates, recoveries, testing rates and hospitalizations — from 221 countries. The investigators found a strong association with temperature and latitude. “One conclusion is that the disease may be seasonal, like the flu. This is very relevant to what we should expect from now on after the vaccine controls these first waves of COVID-19,” said senior study author Gustavo Caetano-Anollés. He is a professor at the C.R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The same research team previously identified areas in the SARS-CoV-2 virus genome undergoing rapid mutation. Similar viruses have seasonal increases in mutation rates, so the researchers looked for connections between mutations in SARS-CoV-2 and temperature, latitude and longitude. “Our results suggest the virus is changing at its own pace, and mutations are affected by factors other than temperature or latitude. We don’t know exactly what those factors are, but we can now say seasonal effects are independent of the genetic makeup of the virus,”… read on > read on >

MONDAY, Feb. 1, 2021 (American Heart Association News) — Medical science has come a long way since the days of “bikini medicine,” when the only time doctors managed a woman’s health differently than a man’s was when treating the parts of her body found under a bikini. Over the past few decades, researchers have uncovered countless ways in which women’s and men’s bodies react differently to the same diseases. And just as it’s now widely recognized women experience heart disease differently than men, scientists are beginning to understand why the sexes experience illness differently in another vital organ – the brain. It’s not that male and female brains are built differently, said Lisa Mosconi, director of the Women’s Brain Initiative at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York. It’s that they age differently. Women bear the brunt of Alzheimer’s disease, the most common form of dementia, accounting for 2 of every 3 people diagnosed. Women are twice as likely as men to experience major depression. They are three times more likely to be diagnosed with autoimmune disorders that attack the brain, such as multiple sclerosis. They are four times more likely to have migraines and also are more likely to die from strokes. What’s driving these disparities? While multiple factors are at play, Mosconi said, it’s hormones – testosterone in men and estrogen in women –… read on > read on >

For some patients suffering from knee arthritis, a special procedure may reduce the need for a total knee replacement, Canadian researchers say. By getting what is known as a ‘high tibial osteotomy,’ younger patients with less severe joint damage who are physically active might be able to delay the need for a knee replacement by 10 years or more, though they may have to search for a doctor who performs the surgery. “High tibial osteotomy is a knee surgery aimed at treating patients in earlier stages of osteoarthritis by correcting the alignment of bowed legs and shifting load to less diseased parts of the knee,” explained lead researcher Trevor Birmingham, the Canada research chair of musculoskeletal rehabilitation at the University of Western Ontario. During the procedure, the tibia (shinbone) is cut and then reshaped to relieve pressure on the knee joint. Beyond improving pain and function, a goal of the procedure is to prevent or delay the need for total knee replacement, Birmingham said. Although high tibial osteotomy can improve pain and function and is cost-effective, the procedure is underused in North America, Birmingham said. “Rates of high tibial osteotomy continue to decline, while rates of other knee surgeries continue to rise,” he added. “The low rates of high tibial osteotomy are partially due to the perception that the procedure is only suitable for a… read on > read on >