Brianna Starr, 29, didn’t think twice about sunbathing without sunscreen, hoping to get a golden tan that to many connotes health and beauty. But when her sister was diagnosed with melanoma at the age of 19, she got serious about protecting her skin health, says Starr, a certified physician assistant at Orlando Health in Florida. “There is a history of melanoma in my family, and so I started seeing a dermatologist every six months and actually flagged two separate moles, one on my neck and one on my shoulder,” Starr said in an Orlando Health news release. The moles were abnormal and could have developed into melanoma. Unfortunately, there are far too many young adults with the same mindset Starr once had, a new survey finds. Nearly a third of Americans (32%) think that a tan makes people look better and healthier, a dangerous beauty standard that can increase a person’s risk of skin cancer, poll results show. “There is no such thing as a healthy tan, as it’s really just a visual manifestation of damage to the skin,” said Dr. Rajesh Nair, an oncology surgeon at the Orlando Health Cancer Institute. “But we’re fighting against a perceived positive image and health benefits of something that actually has a totally opposite reality, which is that suntanned skin represents an increased risk of a deadly disease.”…  read on >  read on >

Hormone replacement therapy can safely ease middle-aged women’s symptoms during early menopause, data from a major women’s health study show. Women younger than 60 can use hormone replacement to treat symptoms like hot flashes and night sweats without significantly increasing their risk of breast cancer or other health problems, according to long-term results from the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI). “The WHI findings should never be used as a reason to deny hormone therapy to women in early menopause with bothersome menopausal symptoms,” said lead researcher Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Many women are good candidates for treatment and, in shared decision-making with their clinicians, should be able to receive appropriate and personalized healthcare for their needs,” Manson added in a hospital news release. The WHI involved more than 160,000 postmenopausal women ages 50 to 79. The study tracked their rates of heart disease, cancer and hip fractures, and also included randomized clinical trials of more than 68,000 women to test potential aging treatments like hormone therapy or calcium and vitamin D supplementation. Prior to the WHI, studies had reported that older women who took hormone therapy had lower risks of heart disease, stroke, dementia, chronic disease and death, researchers said in background notes. A WHI clinical trial slammed the brakes on hormone replacement therapy in 2002,…  read on >  read on >

Teens who vape frequently are exposing themselves to harmful metals like lead and uranium, a new study finds. Lead levels in urine are 40% higher among intermittent vapers and 30% higher among frequent vapers, compared to occasional vapers, results show. And urinary levels of uranium were twice as high among frequent vapers as occasional vapers, researchers reported April 29 in the journal Tobacco Control. Exposure to these sort of heavy metals could harm the developing brains of teenagers, resulting in thinking problems and behavioral disorders, researchers said. These metals also increase the risk of breathing problems, cancer and heart disease. “E-cigarette use during adolescence may increase the likelihood of metal exposure, which could adversely affect brain and organ development,” concluded the research team led by Dr. Hongying Dai, associate dean of research with the University of Nebraska Medical Center, in Omaha. “These findings call for further research, vaping regulation and targeted public health interventions to mitigate the potential harms of e-cigarette use, particularly among adolescents,” the researchers added in a journal news release. An estimated 14% of high school students, more than 2 million, used an e-cigarette in 2022, along with more than 3% of middle school students, around 380,000, researchers said in background notes. Heavy metals like nickel, tin and lead have been found in e-cigarette vapor previously, along with many other potentially harmful…  read on >  read on >

A middle-aged Seattle man collapsed in his Portland, Ore.-area hotel room, where he was staying during a business trip. He’d just tried fentanyl for the first time, and it very nearly killed him by literally destroying his brain. Inhaling fentanyl caused terrible inflammation throughout large sections of white matter in the patient’s brain, his doctors at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) deduced. White matter serves as the network of neural highways that connect various parts of the brain to each other and to the spinal cord. As a result, he lost consciousness and came perilously close to irreversible loss of brain function — either killing him or leaving him a vegetable. The patient is the first documented case of this phenomenon involving fentanyl, although previous cases have been noted involving heroin, researchers noted. “This is a case of a middle-class man, in his late 40s, with kids, who used fentanyl for the first time,” said lead researcher Dr. Chris Eden, a second-year internal medicine resident at the OHSU School of Medicine. “It demonstrates that fentanyl can affect everyone in our society.” Fentanyl is cheap, readily available and 50 times more potent than heroin, Eden noted. Illicit drug manufacturers frequently cut fentanyl into other substances like heroin, often without the knowledge of the user. “We know very well the classic opiate side effects: respiratory depression,…  read on >  read on >

A blood test could help doctors spot the signs of knee osteoarthritis at least eight years before it shows up on X-rays, a new study claims. After analyzing the blood of 200 white British women, half diagnosed with knee osteoarthritis and half without, researchers discovered a small number of biomarkers distinguished the women with osteoarthritis from those without it. “We found we were able to identify people who are at risk for knee osteoarthritis, but what was exciting was that we were able to identify it eight years before they had any X-ray changes,” said senior study author Dr. Virginia Byers Kraus, a professor in the departments of Medicine, Pathology and Orthopedic Surgery at Duke University School of Medicine, in Durham, N.C. The study, published April 26 in the journal Science Advances, builds on previous research where the blood test demonstrated 74% accuracy in predicting knee arthritis progression and 85% accuracy in diagnosing knee arthritis. Knee arthritis strikes approximately 35 million adults in the United States. While there are no cures, the success of new therapies could hinge on identifying the disease early and slowing its progression. The researchers emphasized that just like heart disease, osteoporosis or Alzheimer’s disease, knee osteoarthritis is a chronic disorder that is typically diagnosed late in the game. By identifying it earlier, doctors could potentially stop the disease before it…  read on >  read on >

Researchers have conclusively identified the genetic cause of a rare, progressive movement disorder. A rare extra-long version of a gene appears to cause nerve cells to become poisoned by toxic proteins in people with spinocerebellar ataxia 4 (SCA4), researchers report. SCA4 causes muscle weakness and difficulty coordinating body movement, most notably resulting in a jerky and unsteady walking style and difficulty speaking, according to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The disease also causes a progressive loss of feeling in the hands and feet and a loss of reflexes, the NIH says. There’s no known cure for SCA4, and up to now there was no known cause, researchers said. SCA4’s pattern of inheritance had long made it clear the disease was genetic, but researchers have struggled for 25 years to figure out the exact genetics behind the disorder. Now, using a recently developed advanced sequencing technology to analyze the genetics of several Utah families, researchers found a section in a gene called ZFHX3 that’s much longer than it should be, containing an extra-long string of repetitive DNA. Human cells that have the extra-long version of ZFHX3 appear to be sick. They aren’t able to recycle proteins as well as they should, and some contain clumps of stuck-together protein. “This mutation is a toxic expanded repeat and we think that it actually jams up how a…  read on >  read on >

Advanced scanning techniques can find hidden inflammation in the brains of multiple sclerosis (MS) patients, a new study shows. This “smoldering” inflammation detected by positron emission tomography (PET) brain scans could help explain why patients continue to decline even though imaging shows no brain changes, researchers reported recently in the journal Clinical Nuclear Medicine. “One of the perplexing challenges for clinicians treating patients with MS is after a certain amount of time, patients continue to get worse while their MRIs don’t change,” explained lead researcher Dr. Tarun Singhal, an associate professor of neurology and director of the PET Imaging Program at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.  Singhal and colleagues started the study after noticing patients being treated with the most effective MS therapies available had symptoms that continued to worsen. The team has been working for eight years on newfangled brain scans involving microglia, immune cells in the brain that are thought to have a role in MS but cannot be seen by routine MRIs. The new technique involves a tracer dye that binds to the microglia cells. PET scans track the movement of such tracers, allowing doctors to observe the way tissues and organs in the body interact. A similar PET tracer scan has been FDA-approved to track amyloid beta protein in the brains of Alzheimer’s disease patients, the researchers noted. “This is…  read on >  read on >