Health/Fitness « Weekly Gravy

SATURDAY, Dec. 16It’s that time of year when your kids come home with sniffles and sore throats, but when should you worry if they have a fever? To a certain extent, fevers are the body’s natural way of fighting infection, one expert says. “Fever helps the immune system,” explained Dr. Christopher Tolcher, a pediatrician with Agoura-West Valley Pediatrics, part of the Chidlren’s Hospital of Los Angeles network. “It slows down the spread of viruses and bacteria. It helps the body make more antibodies and chemicals that fight the infection, and it helps the immune system’s cells move around better in the body.” “Fevers are almost never dangerous…,” he said in a hospital news release. “A fever has to reach 107 to cause damage to tissues. That’s extremely rare.” That said, if your child’s fever reaches 105 degrees, call your doctor. “It doesn’t mean the child is in danger, but the child should be checked by the doctor that day to see what’s going on,” Tolcher said. A normal body temperature for a child ranges from 97 to 100 degrees, with an average of around 98.6. When a person’s temperature reaches 100.4 or above, it’s considered a fever. But when is a fever considered a medical emergency? Call your child’s doctor right away for: A fever that lasts more than four to five days A fever… read on > read on >

Smoking shrinks the human brain, and once that brain mass is lost then it’s gone for good, a new study warns. Brain scans from more than 32,000 people strongly link a history of smoking with a gradual loss of brain volume. In fact, the more packs a person smoked per day, the smaller their brain volume, researchers found. The study also establishes the potential series of events that leads to smoking-related brain loss, with a genetic predisposition to smoking eventually causing decreased brain volume. “It sounds bad, and it is bad,” said senior study author Laura Bierut, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “A reduction in brain volume is consistent with increased aging,” Bierut added in a university news release. “This is important as our population gets older, because aging and smoking are both risk factors for dementia.” The study, published recently in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science, helps explain previous studies that have found smokers at higher risk for age-related brain decline and Alzheimer’s disease. “Up until recently, scientists have overlooked the effects of smoking on the brain, in part because we were focused on all the terrible effects of smoking on the lungs and the heart,” Bierut said. “But as we’ve started looking at the brain more closely, it’s become apparent that smoking is… read on > read on >

Regular exercise appears to enhance and even grow crucial areas of the human brain, new research using MRI scans shows. It’s long been known that physical activity is a brain-booster, but this international study illustrates ways this could be happening. “With comprehensive imaging scans, our study underscores the interconnected synergy between the body and the brain,” said study senior author Dr. Rajpul Attariwala, a radiologist at Prenuvo, a medical imaging center in Vancouver, Canada. Reporting recently in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Attariwala and colleagues analyzed more than 10,000 brain scans conducted at various Prenuvo centers. A pattern emerged: People who regularly engaged in running, walking or sports tended to have larger volumes of gray matter in their brains. Gray matter helps with the processing of incoming information, the researchers noted. These avid exercisers also tended to have larger volumes of white matter. White matter helps connect different brain regions and is crucial to memory. You didn’t have to run marathons to get a brain benefit, the team found. “We found that even moderate levels of physical activity, such as taking fewer than 4,000 steps a day, can have a positive effect on brain health,” study co-author Dr. David Merill said in a journal news release. He directs the Pacific Brain Health Center at Pacific Neuroscience Institute in Santa Monica, Calif. “This is much less… read on > read on >

Media mogul Oprah Winfrey confirmed Wednesday that she has used a weight-loss medication to help her shed pounds and get healthy. Winfrey has added the drug to a regimen that includes regular exercise and other lifestyle tweaks, People magazine reported. Weight fluctuations “occupied five decades of space in my brain, yo-yoing and feeling like why can’t I just conquer this thing, believing willpower was my failing,” Winfrey told the magazine. Her most recent weight-loss journey began after she had knee surgery in 2021. “I started hiking and setting new distance goals each week. I could eventually hike three to five miles every day and a 10-mile straight-up hike on weekends,” she said. “I felt stronger, more fit and more alive than I’d felt in years.” But that wasn’t the only change she made to her life, said Winfrey, who turns 70 in January. “I eat my last meal at 4 o’clock, drink a gallon of water a day, and use the Weight Watchers principles of counting points. I had an awareness of [weight-loss] medications, but felt I had to prove I had the willpower to do it. I now no longer feel that way.” “I was actually recommending it to people long before I was on it myself,” she noted. After an epiphany in July during a panel conversation with weight-loss experts, she changed her… read on > read on >

Being in a marriage or long-term relationship typically includes promises of monogamy, but new research shows a surprising number of folks, mostly men, are open to the idea of having another person in the mix. Fully one-third of men in the United Kingdom are open to the idea of having more than one wife or long-term girlfriend, while only 11% of women would want someone else in their relationship, results show. Those trends hold when considering both types of polygamy, researchers said. Those are polygyny, a man marrying more than one woman, or polyandry, where a woman marries more than one man, researchers found. About 9% of men said they would share their partner, versus 5% of women interested in such a relationship, according to the report in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. “This study shows that a sizable minority of people are open to such relationships, even in the U.K, where such marriages are prohibited,” said lead researcher Andrew Thomas, a senior lecturer in psychology at Swansea University in Wales. “Interestingly, many more men are open to the idea than women — though there is still interest on both sides,” Thomas added. For this study, researchers asked 393 heterosexual men and women in the U.K. how they felt about a committed partnership in which they shared their other half with someone else. “Comparing polygyny… read on > read on >

Mpox is making headlines again, as an outbreak of severe disease in the Democratic Republic of Congo in Africa has infected thousands of people and killed hundreds. Amid this worrying scenario, researchers at New York University (NYU) offer a glimmer of good news: Smaller doses of the mpox vaccine Jynneos, given in a different way, still offer good protection against the infection. “Our study shows that smaller vaccine doses of mpox vaccine administered in two doses, spread out over weeks to months, were similar to the full [subcutaneous] FDA-approved dose,” said study co-lead investigator and NYU infectious disease specialist Dr. Angelica Cifuentes Kottkamp. That could be welcome news in a crisis. “Implementing the smaller dose was a good emergency measure in the face of immediate shortages of the vaccine,” Kottkamp said in an NYU news release. Her team published its findings in the Dec. 14 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. After an outbreak of mpox last year stretched vaccine supplies, researchers tried the new formulation to help meet demand. Instead of injecting a large dose of vaccine below the skin, the new formulation uses two much smaller doses, given between the skin’s layers, and spaced out by as much as three months. In August 2022, the United States approved this new delivery method in the face of mpox vaccine shortages. According to the… read on > read on >

An overwhelming majority of older Americans think health insurers and Medicare should cover the cost of weight-loss medications like Ozempic, Wegovy or Zepbound, a new survey has found. More than four out of five older adults (83%) think insurance companies should pay for drugs that help obese people manage their weight, according to poll results from over 2,600 people ages 50 to 80. And about three in four (76%) believe Medicare should cover weight-loss drugs, researchers at the University of Michigan National Poll and Healthy Aging found. “Our data show the strong awareness and interest in these medications, and in access to them through insurance, alongside coverage for other weight-focused care including nutrition counseling, exercise programs and bariatric surgery,” said researcher Dr. Lauren Oshman, an obesity medicine specialist and associate professor in the University of Michigan Department of Family Medicine. Weight-loss drugs have been in the spotlight since the approval of Wegovy, an injectable drug initially approved for treating type 2 diabetes under the name Ozempic. The FDA has since approved Zepbound for weight loss, a diabetes drug previously approved under the name Mounjaro. These new medications are pricey, costing more than $12,000 a year for people who pay out of their own pockets. But the drugs are nearly as effective as bariatric surgery in helping people with obesity lose 10% or more of their… read on > read on >

A study involving twins suggests that if you have a sibling who develops dementia, that might not bode well for your life span. That’s true even if you don’t go on to develop dementia yourself, according to a study from U.S. and Swedish researchers. One investigator was surprised by the finding. “We expected a different result. We expected that, in twins where one developed dementia and the other did not, the difference in life span would be just like we see in unrelated people,” said lead study author Jung Yun Jang. She led the trial as part of her doctoral studies in the department of psychology at the University of Southern California (USC), in Los Angeles. The object of the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, was to assess typical life span after a dementia diagnosis. “One of the most frequently asked questions when a family member receives a diagnosis of dementia is: How much time do we have?” Jang noted in a USC news release. The study involved 90 pairs of identical twins (who share all their genes) and 288 pairs of fraternal twins, all from a 40-year database out of Sweden known as the Swedish Twin Registry. In all sets of twins used in in the new study, one twin had developed dementia while the other had not. As has been… read on > read on >

The diabetes and weight-loss drug Ozempic does not appear to harm a developing fetus when taken by pregnant women, a new study reports. Researchers found no elevated risk of birth defects among newborns of women who took medications to control their type 2 diabetes, compared with those who took insulin. During the decade-long study, researchers saw an increase in people trying to control their diabetes using drugs rather than relying on insulin injections. In particular, medications within the same class as Ozempic (semaglutide) – GLP-1 receptor agonists – became more popular as time went on. “As type 2 diabetes becomes a more common condition among women of reproductive age, and with the recent approval of GLP-1 receptor agonists such as semaglutide to treat obesity, the number of exposed pregnancies is likely to increase. Our findings provide initial reassurance of safety for infants prenatally exposed to these medications,” said lead researcher Carolyn Cesta, an assistant professor at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. GLP-1 receptor agonists work by mimicking the function of GLP-1, a naturally occurring hormone produced by the small intestine. Both the hormone and the drug slow stomach emptying, increase the feeling of fullness after eating, and control hormones related to blood sugar levels like insulin and glucagon. For the study, Cesta and her colleagues examined the outcomes of more than 3.5 million pregnancies in… read on > read on >

Folks who take the blockbuster weight-loss med tirzepatide (Zepbound) may regain much of the weight they lost soon after discontinuing it, new research shows. A trial funded by Eli Lilly, the injected drug’s maker, found that “in patients with obesity or overweight, withdrawing tirzepatide led to substantial regain of weight.” On the other hand, continuing on with tirzepatide kept the weight off, over the full two years of the trial. Of course, sticking with drug could mean big bills for users. Medicare and Medicaid do not cover the drug, and if your private insurance doesn’t cover Zepbound, it can cost over $1,000 per month. Lilly says certain commercial card savings programs it offers can reduce the monthly cost to about $550, or even lower, however. Zepbound was approved for weight loss by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Nov. 8, and Lilly announced its availability to consumers on Dec. 6. To trigger weight loss, tirzepatide mimics two hormones, GLP-1 and GIP, which stimulate the release of insulin in the body. It quells appetite and slows the rate at which food moves through the stomach, helping patients feel full. It’s the first drug in its class to compete with another weight-loss blockbuster, Wegovy. Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk, uses a similar active ingredient, semaglutide, which only focuses on GLP-1. That difference appears to translate to… read on > read on >