All women 65 and older should continue to be screened for osteoporosis, the nation’s leading preventive health panel says in an updated recommendation. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force also recommends screening women younger than 65 who’ve gone through menopause and are at increased risk of a fracture from bone loss, according to the updated guidelines published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “Too often, the first sign of osteoporosis is a broken bone, which can lead to serious health issues,” USPSTF member Dr. Esa Davis said in a statement from the group. “The good news is that for women 65 years or older, as well as younger women at increased risk, screening can detect osteoporosis early—before fractures happen—helping women maintain their health, independence, and quality of life,” added Davis, senior associate dean of population and community medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. Osteoporosis happens as people grow older and their bones lose the ability to regrow and replenish themselves. As bones become thinner and less dense, the risk of a bone fracture grows worse. Bones most commonly broken due to osteoporosis include the hips, wrists and spine, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The updated guideline for women is consistent with earlier versions issued in 2018 and 2011. The USPSTF regularly reviews each of its screening guidelines, to make sure…  read on >  read on >

It takes a village to help a smoker quit. And a new study published recently in JAMA Internal Medicine shows that smokers had a nearly doubled success rate quitting when supported by an integrated approach that included medication and personal counseling. “Our study demonstrates that providing access to effective medications and trained tobacco cessation specialists offers the greatest chance at successfully quitting and, hopefully, avoiding the potential of lung cancer,” principal investigator Paul Cinciripini, executive director of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center’s Tobacco Research and Treatment Program, said in a news release from the college. Lung cancer is the top cancer killer in the U.S., accounting for one in five cancer-related deaths, researchers said in background notes. Tobacco use is responsible for 85% of lung cancer cases and contributes to nearly 30% of all cancer-related deaths, researchers added. The average smoker requires several attempts before they’re able to break their nicotine addiction and quit, researchers said. For this study, researchers recruited a group of 630 smokers between 2017 and 2021. The smokers were at least 50, and smoked an average 20 cigarettes a day. The smokers were randomly assigned to one of three groups, each containing 210 people. One group was provided nicotine replacement therapy or medication and access to phone-based support. The second received the same, only prescribed by a lung…  read on >  read on >

Text-based support programs are one of the best ways to help young people quit vaping, a new evidence review says. These texts offer motivational messages and tips for quitting vaping. “I think it’s clear that this approach helps young people,” senior researcher Jamie Hartmann-Boyce, an assistant professor of health policy and management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said in a news release from the college. “The question is, is it going to help other populations?” The review also found evidence that the quit-smoking drug varenicline might also help folks quit vaping. However, there still aren’t enough studies available to point to any concrete, tried-and-true methods for quitting vaping, researchers said in a study published Jan. 8 in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews.. “This is an area of research that is in its infancy, but is growing rapidly and organically from people who vape asking about help to quit vaping,” Hartmann-Boyce said. Previous reviews have found that e-cigarettes can help people quit smoking more effectively than other nicotine replacements like patches, gums or lozenges, researchers said. But what to do when one wants to quit vaping, which also involves nicotine addiction? “We also know that people who use vaping as a way to transition away from smoking are often keen to know how they can safely transition away from vaping without relapsing to smoking,…  read on >  read on >

The clock is running for people who’ve been diagnosed with dementia, but the time they have left depends on their age. Average life expectancy for people with dementia is largely based on their age at diagnosis, researchers found in a new evidence review. Dementia reduces life expectancy by about 2 years for those diagnosed at age 85, 3 to 4 years for those diagnosed at 80, and up to 13 years with a diagnosis at 65, researchers reported in a study published Jan. 8 in The BMJ. “About one third of remaining life expectancy was lived in nursing homes, with more than half of people moving to a nursing home within five years after a dementia diagnosis,” concluded the team led by senior researcher Dr. Frank Wolters, a senior scientist in epidemiology with the Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. One of the challenges of dementia involves planning for a person’s care following diagnosis, and these plans can hinge on how long a person will live with the degenerative brain condition, researchers said in background notes. Nearly 10 million people worldwide are diagnosed with dementia every year, researchers said. However, current life expectancy estimates vary widely, and haven’t been updated for more than a decade. For this evidence review, researchers analyzed data from 261 prior studies involving more than 5.5 million people with…  read on >  read on >