Health/Fitness « Weekly Gravy

Vitamin D is an essential nutrient, and recent research has suggested it may also help guard against severe COVID-19. But how much is enough, and how hard is it to get the right amount of vitamin D? “We know that a large percentage of the population has suboptimal levels of vitamin D. In fact, as many as half of the U.S. population may be deficient in vitamin D,” said Kristin Gustashaw, clinical dietitian at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. “This can possibly lead to symptoms including fatigue, tiredness, hair loss, delayed wound healing, decreased immune health, muscle pain and more, with no other known causes. “Part of the difficulty of maintaining vitamin D levels is because there are not a large variety of foods that contain much vitamin D,” Gustashaw added in a medical center news release. The vitamin is accessible to people through some foods, supplements and even sunshine. Food sources include egg yolks, milk, cheese, beef or calf liver and certain fish, such as salmon, mackerel, tuna and sardines. Other foods are fortified with vitamin D, including certain cereals, breads, soy milk and orange juice. Gustashaw also recommends that people should get out in the sun for at least 15 to 30 minutes a day, but says they should be sure to get a constant source of the nutrient from their diet… read on > read on >

Too much screen time can make your toddler more distractible, British researchers warn. The use of smartphones and tablets by babies and toddlers has soared in recent years. “The first few years of life are critical for children to learn how to control their attention and ignore distraction, early skills that are known to be important for later academic achievement,” said lead author Tim Smith, a professor at the Center for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London. “There has been growing concern that toddler touchscreen use may negatively impact their developing attention, but previously there was no empirical evidence to support this,” Smith added. To learn more, Smith’s team studied toddlers with different levels of touchscreen usage, assessing them at 12 months, 18 months and 3.5 years of age. At each visit, the toddlers did computer tasks while an eye-tracker measured their attention. Objects appeared in different locations of the computer screen, and researchers monitored how quickly the children looked at the objects and how well they ignored distracting objects. Toddlers with high daily touchscreen use were quicker to look when objects appeared and were less able to resist distraction than those with little or no daily screen time, the study found. Main researcher Ana Maria Portugal, an associate research fellow at Birkbeck University of London, said the team could not conclude,… read on > read on >

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 27, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Retired doctors and nurses are being called to the front lines of the U.S. coronavirus vaccination effort, the White House COVID-19 Response team announced Wednesday. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is amending its rules to allow retired health professionals to administer COVID-19 vaccine shots, said Jeff Zients, the White House COVID-19 Response coordinator. The rules, drafted under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act, will also be adapted to allow licensed doctors, nurses and health practitioners to administer shots across state lines, Zients said. “We need to increase the number of places where people can get vaccinated, and also at the same time increase the number of vaccinators,” Zients said. “This action by HHS today will help get more vaccinators in the field.” The team also went over other strategies being implemented to increase vaccination rates across the United States, including: Planning the launch of 100 community vaccination centers across the country during February. Arranging to supply vaccines directly to pharmacies. Standing up mobile vaccination clinics to reach under-served communities. Speeding up the production of low-dead-space syringes that can squeeze an extra sixth dose out of Pfizer vaccine vials. “I want to level with the public. We are facing two constraining factors,” said Andrew Slavitt, senior advisor to the White House COVID-19 Response team.… read on > read on >

People who’ve recovered from severe COVID-19 may have stronger long-term immune protection from reinfection than those with milder illness, researchers report. They examined blood samples from 39 COVID-19 patients and 10 people who hadn’t been exposed to the virus (their blood samples were given pre-pandemic). In all, they analyzed the expression of individual genes of more than 80,000 CD8+ T-cells. CD8+ T-cells are immune cells that destroy virus-infected host cells, and “memory” CD8+ T-cells protect the body from reinfection by many types of viruses. Of the COVID-19 patients, 17 had milder illness and weren’t hospitalized, 13 had been hospitalized, and nine ended up in intensive care. The researchers were surprised to find that patients with milder COVID-19 had weaker CD8+ T-cell responses. The strongest CD8+ T-cell responses were in severely ill patients who required hospitalization or intensive care. “There is an inverse link between how poorly T-cells work and how bad the infection is,” study co-author Dr. Christian Ottensmeier said in a news release from the La Jolla Institute for Immunology in California. He’s a professor at the University of Liverpool in the U.K. and an adjunct professor at the La Jolla institute. The researchers found that CD8+ T-cells in people with mild COVID-19 had signs of T-cell “exhaustion,” in which cells receive so much immune system stimulation to combat viruses that they become less… read on > read on >