Health/Fitness « Weekly Gravy

The first two years of a baby’s life are critical for brain development, and how the brain grows during that time may help predict future learning, behavior and health. That’s according to experts at Cedars-Sinai, who are working to better understand how brain connections and genetics influence a child’s development. “We want to use advanced imaging as a tool to detect deviations as early as possible so that we can hopefully bring them back to the normal trajectory,” said Wei Gao, director of Neuroimaging Research at Cedars-Sinai and a professor of biomedical sciences. Gao said a baby’s brain first develops areas that control movement and senses, followed closely by social and emotional skills. “The first year is where you need to pay very special attention to the social-emotional development of the baby,” Gao said in a news release. “You want to provide sensitive support to the baby so the baby can develop a secure attachment with you as a caregiver. That has long-term impacts to their later achievements and quality of life.” He and his team created one of the first detailed maps showing how parts of the brain connect during early childhood. In a new study, they are tracking more than 7,000 children from birth through age 10. By combining brain scans with information about each child’s environment and genetics, researchers hope to learn… read on > read on >

Throbbing, swollen knees hobble many seniors, but there are many solid means of treating knee arthritis that don’t involve meds, a new evidence review says. Knee braces, water therapy and exercise all effectively ease the ache of wear-and-tear knee arthritis, researchers reported today in the journal PLOS One. “They reduce pain and improve mobility without the gastrointestinal or cardiovascular risks linked to common pain medications,” wrote the research team led by senior researcher Yuan Luo of the First People’s Hospital of Neijiang in China. “Patients and clinicians should prioritize these evidence-based options,” researchers concluded. More than 10% of people older than 60 have knee arthritis, researchers said in background notes. That makes simple, cheap treatments a must, especially if they come without the side effects associated with many drugs. For the study, researchers pooled data from 139 clinical trials involving nearly 10,000 people to compare 12 knee arthritis treatments that don’t involve drugs. These studies focused on knee osteoarthritis, which occurs when cartilage breaks down over time and bones start rubbing together. Knee braces came out on top, with results showing that wearing the devices can reduce pain, improve function and relieve stiffness. Exercises or treatments performed in warm water, also known as hydrotherapy, were particularly effective at easing pain, researchers found. And general exercise also was consistently effective, improving both pain and physical function… read on > read on >

An experimental AI tool can help speed detection of melanoma and other skin diseases, a new study says. The tool, PanDerm, improved accuracy of skin cancer diagnoses by 11% when used by doctors, researchers reported recently in the journal Nature Medicine. It also helped doctors improve by nearly 17% accurate diagnosis of other skin conditions, researchers said. “PanDerm is a tool designed to work alongside clinicians, helping them interpret complex imaging data and make informed decisions with more confidence,” senior researcher Zongyuan Ge said in a news release. He’s an associate professor of data science and AI at Monash University in Australia. An estimated 70% of people have some sort of skin condition, researchers said in background notes. This makes early detection crucial, as it can lead to better treatment. PanDerm was developed by an international team of researchers and trained on more than 2 million skin images, across four types of medical imaging, researchers said. The AI was specifically designed to look for many different types of skin conditions, using images ranging from microscopic slides to wide-field images showing lesions and surrounding skin. “Previous AI models have struggled to integrate and process various data types and imaging methods, reducing their usefulness to doctors in different real-world settings,” Ge said. For this study, researchers tested the AI on a range of clinical tasks involving skin… read on > read on >

A new digital tool can flag kids who are at risk for developing childhood asthma, researchers report. The tool scans electronic health data records and calculates an asthma risk score for children, according to results published recently in eClinical Medicine. It relies on information that’s routinely collected as part of kids’ medical history, researchers said. “Our hope is that using the childhood asthma passive digital marker in clinical practice will improve the early detection of asthma risk in high-risk children, allowing for earlier interventions that could improve asthma control and lessen the future risk of hospitalization,” lead researcher Arthur Owora, an associate professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine, said in a news release. For the study, researchers used the tool to comb through records of more than 69,000 Indiana children born between 2010 and 2017, of whom just under 8% had been diagnosed with asthma after age four. The digital tool was better able to predict which kids at age 3 had a higher risk of developing childhood asthma, results show. The tool predicted asthma among 37% of those children, versus 26% using an earlier pediatric asthma risk score, researchers found. Results suggest pneumonia and bronchiolitis are two of the most powerful predictors for childhood asthma, the study says. The new tool could be an easily adopted means of helping doctors… read on > read on >

Struggling with low back pain? Slip on your walking shoes and start hoofing, a new study suggests. People who walked more than 78 minutes a day were less likely to suffer from low back pain, researchers reported. Power walking also protected against low back pain, but to a lesser degree than ambling for longer periods of time, according to findings published June 13 in JAMA Network Open. And there’s a dose-response relationship — the longer or harder you walk, the more you reduce your risk of low back pain, the study says. “These findings suggest that policies and public health strategies promoting walking could help to reduce the occurrence of chronic low back pain,” concluded the Norwegian research team led by Rayane Haddadj, a doctoral student with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Department of Public Health and Nursing. Back pain is the most common type of chronic pain in the United States, researchers said in background notes. For the study, researchers analyzed data from nearly 11,200 people recruited for an ongoing Norwegian health research project between 2017 and 2019. Those included in this study wore activity trackers for a week to gather data on walking and physical activity. Their average age was 55. At a follow-up an average four years later, about 15% of the participants said they had suffered from lower back… read on > read on >

People with ADHD might be prescribed their meds remotely without increasing their risk of addiction, a new study says. Experts have worried that prescribing stimulants like Adderall through telehealth visits might increase substance abuse among people with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). But this study found no increased risk among ADHD patients prescribed their meds via telehealth versus those who got their scrips at an in-person visit, according to results published June 11 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. “Our study suggests that, generally, telehealth-based relationships – which make health care more accessible – can be safe and don’t increase the risk of substance use disorder,” lead researcher Dr. Vinod Rao, medical director of adult ambulatory psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said in a news release. For the study, researchers tracked nearly 8,000 patients treated for ADHD at Massachusetts General Hospital between March 2020 and August 2023, a time during which many doctors pivoted to telehealth due to the COVID-19 pandemic. About 46% of the patients had an in-person appointment on the day their first stimulant was prescribed, results show. Overall, about 91% of patients had at least one in-person visit with their doctor prior to their first prescription, while 9% had a telehealth-only relationship with their doc. Patients who never met their doc in person were not more likely to develop a substance use… read on > read on >