Comedian Jay Leno, former host of “The Tonight Show” and an avid car collector, suffered burn injuries when one of his cars burst into flames last weekend. Leno, 72, is recovering at the Grossman Burn Center in Los Angeles, where he is in stable condition and being treated for “burns that he received to his face and hands from a gasoline accident in his garage over the weekend,” hospital spokeswoman Aimee Bennett said in a statement, CNN reported. “I got some serious burns from a gasoline fire. I am OK. Just need a week or two to get back on my feet,” Leno told Variety, according to CNN. Leno had been expected to perform at The Financial Brand Forum conference in Las Vegas on Sunday, an opening night event for attendees who purchased a gold pass. “His family was not able to provide us very many details, but there was a very serious medical emergency that is preventing Jay from traveling,” read an email sent to conference attendees. “All we know is that he is alive, so our prayers go out to him and his family tonight.” Leno had been working on one of his cars at the time of the accident, CNN reported. “He is in good humor and is touched by all the inquiries into his condition and well wishes,” Bennett said. “He…  read on >  read on >

Patients with advanced ankle osteoarthritis have two surgical options to restore their quality of life, and the good news is a new study shows both have good outcomes. Deciding which one is better depends on the patient. “Our aim in this trial was to provide the data that patients need to make informed decisions about these operations,” said study author Andrew Goldberg, a consultant orthopedic surgeon for University College London (UCL). “We’ve clearly shown that both joint replacement and fusion provide significant patient benefits. We also found that the type of joint replacement seems to have an effect, but this needs further research,” he added in a university news release. The study compared total ankle joint replacement with ankle fusion, a procedure where the ankle joint is pinned to prevent movement. The trial included 280 patients aged 50 to 85 who underwent procedures meant to relieve pain caused by advanced osteoarthritis. Half had total ankle replacement, while the other half had ankle fusion surgery. The researchers compared the two procedures, finding that both significantly improved patients’ quality of life. Patients were assessed before their operation and 12 months after surgery. The investigators then also looked at the type of total ankle replacement most used in the United Kingdom. Compared to ankle fusion, they found significant improvement in clinical scores and quality of life with this…  read on >  read on >

COVID-19 swept across the world far more effectively than previously thought, with a stunning number of cases left unreported as recently as the summer of 2021, a new World Health Organization (WHO) study says. About 3 out of every 5 human beings carried antibodies against COVID-19 in their bloodstream as of September 2021, according to a review of millions of virus blood tests. That translates to 10.5 actual COVID infections for each case reported between June and September of 2021, researchers estimate. In other words, public health officials found out about only 9.5% of all COVID cases during that period, the study says. “Particularly in the beginning as COVID struck, there was a great reluctance for people to attribute illnesses to COVID,” said Dr. William Schaffner, medical director of the Bethesda, Md.-based National Foundation for Infectious Diseases. “There was a great sense at the time that the reported cases were exaggerated. Actually, they were vastly underreported.” The global scale of COVID-19 infections has remained a mystery, researchers noted. More than 1 million are dead from COVID in the United States and more than 6.5 million worldwide, but no one can say exactly how many people have been infected by the novel coronavirus. “This virus can produce a lot of infections without symptoms or mild symptoms,” said Schaffner, who was not part of the study. “Indeed,…  read on >  read on >

FRIDAY, Nov. 11, 2022 (HealthDay News) – Too little of the “sunshine vitamin” — vitamin D — in Black Americans could raise their odds of developing diabetes, new research suggests. Two new studies found an association between levels of vitamin D in the blood and insulin resistance, a precursor to full-blown diabetes. It’s been long known that low blood levels of vitamin D “are associated with an increased risk of diabetes in white populations, but our research strongly suggests that this relationship also holds true for African Americans,” said Amaris Williams, a co-author on both studies and a postdoctoral scholar in the Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Metabolism at Ohio State University. In their new investigations, the researchers looked at data from two major heart-health studies, each of which tested patients’ blood for 25-hydroxyvitamin D, the biological “precursor” of active vitamin D. It’s a common clinical measure for assessing whether or not an individual has levels of vitamin D needed for good health. Researchers examined vitamin D levels in the blood collected from more than 3,300 Black participants in the Jackson Heart Study between 2000 and 2004. Over a median of 7.7 years, 584 developed diabetes. They also examined more than 5,600 participants in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) study, none of whom had diabetes at the study’s outset. This group included a range…  read on >  read on >

THURSDAY, Nov. 10, 2022 (HealthDay News) – Getting vaccinated for COVID-19 while pregnant provides higher levels of antibodies for both mom and baby than catching the virus does, a new study finds. When pregnant women received one of the two available mRNA vaccines, researchers found that the women had 10-fold higher antibody concentrations than those who were infected naturally. The research team from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) and the University of Pennsylvania detected antibodies as early as 15 days after the women’s first dose of the vaccine. “These findings suggest that COVID-19 vaccination not only provides robust protection for mothers during pregnancy — it also provides higher concentrations of antibodies to babies than COVID-19 infection,” said first study author Dr. Dustin Flannery, an attending neonatologist at CHOP. “Given that pregnancy is a risk factor for severe COVID-19, this study suggests pregnant people should prioritize getting vaccinated to protect themselves and their babies,” he said in a hospital news release. The researchers studied these questions by analyzing data from patients who gave birth between Aug. 9, 2020, and April 25, 2021, at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. The team members chose these dates because they found it easier to determine the origin of a patient’s antibodies. Vaccines were not widely available during part of this time frame, becoming available in December 2020. Boosters were not widely…  read on >  read on >

In an advance in treating spinal cord injuries, researchers have pinpointed nerve cells that are key to allowing people with paralysis to walk again. The findings come, in part, from nine patients involved in an ongoing Swiss study that is seeking to restore movement to people with paralysis. All nine rapidly regained the ability to stand and walk with the help of implants that electrically stimulate spinal nerves that control lower-body movement. Now the researchers are reporting that they’ve identified a specific group of cells in the lower spine that appear necessary for that movement recovery to happen. The hope, experts said, is that the discovery will help in refining the electrical stimulation therapy — and, eventually, aid in developing even more sophisticated ways to restore complex movement to people with paralysis. In the United States alone, as many as 450,000 people are living with a spinal cord injury, according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Just over half of those injuries are in people younger than 30, most of whom are male — with traffic accidents or violence often to blame. Spinal cord injuries essentially cut off communication between the brain and the spinal nerves located below the level of the injury. But those nerve cells are not useless — just offline. And for years, researchers have been studying epidural electrical stimulation (EES)…  read on >  read on >

Women tend to be better able than men to recover from kidney injury, but why? Apparently women have an advantage at the molecular level that protects them from a form of cell death that occurs in injured kidneys, a new study in mice has discovered. “Kidney disease afflicts more than 850 million people worldwide every year, so it’s important to understand why female kidneys are more protected from these acute and chronic injuries,” said study author Dr. Tomokazu Souma. He is an assistant professor in the department of medicine at Duke University School of Medicine, in Durham, N.C. “Our study is a step toward identifying the causes, and suggests that this female resilience could be therapeutically harnessed to improve kidney repair in both sexes,” Souma said in a Duke Health news release. In the study, researchers looked at a form of cell death called ferroptosis, which is dependent on iron and oxidative stress, and has been identified as a key player in kidney diseases. The researchers used a special type of RNA analysis on mice. They found that being female conferred striking protection against ferroptosis through a particular pathway called nuclear factor erythroid 2–related factor 2 (NRF2). This NRF2 is highly active in females. In males, the sex hormone testosterone reduces NRF2 activity and that promotes ferroptosis and undermines cell resiliency in kidney injury. The…  read on >  read on >