A cancer diagnosis can be devastating. Now, new research shows that patients diagnosed with cancer have a risk of suicide 26% higher than the general population. A variety of factors contribute to the elevated risk, including geography, race and ethnicity, economic status and clinical characteristics, American Cancer Society (ACS) researchers found. The study also showed a decline in elevated risk for cancer patients compared with the general population from 67% in 2000 to 16% in 2016. “Our findings highlight the importance of timely symptom management and targeted interventions for suicide prevention in individuals with cancer,” said senior author Xuesong Han, scientific director of health services research at ACS. “These require joint efforts by federal and state governments, as well as health care providers, to ensure comprehensive health insurance coverage for psycho-oncological, psychosocial and palliative care, development of appropriate clinical guidelines for suicide risk screening, and inclusion of suicide prevention in survivorship care plans,” Han said in a society news release. Her team analyzed data from 16.8 million individuals diagnosed with cancer in 43 states between 2000 and 2016. During that time, nearly 20,800 people with cancer died by suicide. This elevated suicide risk was seen across all demographic groups, with particularly higher risks among folks who were Hispanic, uninsured, covered by Medicaid, or under 64 years of age and on Medicare. The suicide risk was…  read on >  read on >

Doctors are seeing an alarming increase in cases of a specific genital malformation in male babies, and new research suggests environmental factors might be at play. The malformation is known as hypospadias, where the opening of the urethra is not at the tip of the penis, but on the underside of the organ. In the study, scientists identified a direct link between hypospadias tissue samples and the presence of epigenetic alterations — changes to the molecular factors and processes around DNA that determine how genes behave. “Previous researchers have done extensive analyses and not found any kind of genetic DNA sequence mutations that correlate with the presence of the disease, so there has always been a big question mark regarding where it comes from,” explained senior study author Michael Skinner, a professor of biology at Washington State University. “Our study shows the etiology of the disease is environmentally driven through epigenetics, rather than a result of changes to the DNA sequence,” he said in a university news release. “It gives us a clearer picture of what is going on.” Incidents of this malformation have increased by 11.5% in recent decades. This research could ultimately lead to earlier detection and better clinical management this genital defect, the study authors said. What happens next is uncertain, but researchers pointed to one potential path. It could be identifying…  read on >  read on >

As numerous U.S. states move to restrict transgender health care, a new study shows that such care can substantially improve teenagers’ mental health. The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, followed transgender and nonbinary teenagers who received “gender-affirming” hormones — either estrogen or testosterone — for two years. During that time, researchers found, two-thirds of teens who’d had moderate to severe depression showed a marked improvement. Many also saw their anxiety symptoms wane and reported gains in their satisfaction with life. Experts who were not involved in the study said it bolsters evidence of the benefits of gender-affirming care — health care services for transgender and nonbinary people. That care can include “puberty blockers” — medications that put a pause on pubertal development — and gender-affirming hormones, which alter patients’ physical traits to better align with their gender identity. In the study, there was a direct correlation between teenagers’ mental health gains and the degree to which hormone therapy had given them their desired physical appearance. It’s known that compared with their peers, transgender and nonbinary teenagers are at higher risk of mental health issues, substance use and suicide. A survey last year by the nonprofit Trevor Project found that between 12% and 22% of transgender and nonbinary young people had attempted suicide in the past year. And few — one-third —…  read on >  read on >

In today’s highly polarized political environment, is it possible to stay up-to-date with the news of the day without getting totally stressed out? If not, is there a way to limit the emotional and physical fallout? Or is all that individual stress in service of a greater societal good? New research paints a complex picture with no easy answers. On the one hand, paying close attention to the daily doings of politicians does appear to have a way of making people feel consistently bad, investigators found. And those negative emotions appear to take a toll, they warn, in the form of poorer mental and physical health. On the upside, the study also found that staying politically informed appears to serve a larger good, motivating people to get more involved in important causes, through volunteer work or financial donations. “We expected people would have negative reactions to politics each day, but we were somewhat surprised by how consistent the effects were,” noted study author Matthew Feinberg, an associate professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. What’s clear, however, is that all that negativity seems to source back to a fundamental fact, Feinberg said: People take politics very, very personally. “They internalize what happens in the political arena,” he said. And the result is that all “the scandals, the incivility and the animosity so…  read on >  read on >

When birth rates fall in the United States, experts try to figure out what’s happening. The fertility rate is at its lowest since the 1970s — 1.71 per woman, according to a new study. But it’s not that young people today don’t want children, new research suggests. In fact, they want about as many as their parents had. Instead, young Americans may simply be having more difficulty achieving life goals in order to have kids, said study co-author Sarah Hayford, director of the Ohio State University Institute for Population Research. “You see a lot of things of like, ‘Oh, young people just aren’t interested in having children’ or ‘young people have better things to do.’ And we don’t find that,” Hayford said. “We find that young people are interested in having children and people want children. They’re planning to have children. It’s just other things that are making it hard to carry out those plans.” The U.S. fertility rate peaked during the post-World War II baby boom, at 3.58 in 1958 and reached a low of 1.77 in 1972. After a rebound, birth rates plummeted during the Great Recession starting in 2008 and continued to drop even after, Hayford said. For the study, Hayford and co-author Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, used…  read on >  read on >

Hundreds of rural hospitals across the United States are teetering on the edge of closure, with their financial status increasingly in peril, a new report reveals. More than 200 rural hospitals are at immediate risk of closure because they aren’t making enough money to cover the rising cost of providing care, and their low financial reserves leave them little margin for error, the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform report states. Overall, more than 600 rural hospitals — nearly 30% of rural hospitals nationwide — are at risk of closing in the near future, according to the report. “Costs have been increasing significantly and payments, particularly from commercial insurance plans, have not increased correspondingly with that,” said Harold Miller, president and CEO of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR). “And the small hospitals don’t have the kinds of financial reserves to be able to cover the losses.” The COVID-19 pandemic actually provided temporary relief to cash-strapped hospitals, thanks to federal grants that helped keep them open and serving patients. More than 150 rural hospitals nationwide closed between 2005 and 2019, the CHQPR report noted. Another 19 shut down in 2020, more than any year in the previous decade. But only six more closed in 2021 and 2022, because of the financial assistance hospitals received while the pandemic raged. Now that federal…  read on >  read on >