College students who routinely cram at the last minute may not only see their grades suffer, but their health, too, a new study suggests. Researchers found that of more than 3,500 college students they followed, those who scored high on a procrastination scale were more likely to report certain health issues nine months later. The list included body aches, poor sleep, and depression and anxiety symptoms. Experts said the findings do not prove that procrastination, per se, directly caused those problems — by, for example, delaying a medical visit and allowing a niggling health issue to worsen. But they do reinforce the fact that procrastination, when chronic, is a red flag. “Everyone procrastinates, but not everyone is a procrastinator,” said Joseph Ferrari, a psychology professor at DePaul University in Chicago, who has been studying the subject since the 1980s. Dragging your feet on doing your taxes, or something equally unpleasant, is normal. Chronic procrastination is different, and it’s not just a benign personality quirk, said Ferrari, who was not involved in the new study. When procrastination is a way of life — rearing its head at work, home and in relationships — that’s a problem, Ferrari said. It’s also common: In his own research, Ferrari has found that about 20% of adults qualify as chronic procrastinators — making it more prevalent than mental health disorders…  read on >  read on >

If you’ve ever thought you must absorb more calories from food than other people do, you might be onto something: A new study hints that some people’s gut bacteria extract more energy, as in calories, from food — possibly contributing to weight gain. The study, of 85 overweight adults, found that those with a particular gut bacteria profile — dubbed the “B-type” — had less energy density in their stool samples, versus people with other bacterial profiles. “Energy” is what most of us know as calories, and the finding suggests that people with a B-type gut might pull more calories from their food before it’s eliminated as waste. And it’s possible, though not proven, that could influence body weight, the researchers added. On average, study participants with a B-type gut weighed about 20 pounds more than participants with another gut bacteria profile dubbed the R-type, according to senior researcher Henrik Roager. The big caveat is it’s not clear what caused that weight difference, said Roager, an associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, in Denmark. “Future studies should investigate whether individuals receiving the same amount of calories would differ in weight gain, depending on their gut microbes’ ability to extract energy,” he suggested. The study, published online recently in the journal Microbiome, is one of the latest looks at the gut microbiome — the vast…  read on >  read on >

Singing may help stroke patients regain communication skills, according to new research. About 40% of stroke survivors have aphasia, a difficulty to deliver or comprehend spoken or written language. That impairment is ongoing for about half of those patients a year after their stroke, potentially affecting quality of life or leading to social isolation. Researchers in Finland studied a singing-based group rehabilitation program. “Our study utilized a wide variety of singing elements, such as choral singing, melodic intonation therapy and tablet-assisted singing training,” said study co-author Anni Pitkäniemi, a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. She spoke in a university news release. Melodic intonation therapy involves using melody and rhythm to progress gradually from singing toward speech. It has been used to some extent in aphasia rehabilitation. Though previous research had determined that it was possible to retain singing ability even in severe aphasia, the use of singing — especially choral singing — had not been widely studied in aphasia rehabilitation. Rehab sessions were led by a trained music therapist and a trained choir conductor. While singing therapy has typically been done individually, these researchers suggested that singing-based group training should be used as part of aphasia rehabilitation. “In addition to training in speech production, group-based rehabilitation provides an excellent opportunity for peer support both for the patients and their families,” said co-author Sini-Tuuli…  read on >  read on >

FRIDAY, Dec. 30, 2022 (HealthDay News) – The United States could see a huge rise in diabetes among young people over the next several decades, a new modeling study finds. As many as 220,000 young people under the age of 20 could have type 2 diabetes in 2060, which would represent a nearly eight-fold increase, a research team that included scientists from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found. Type 1 diabetes cases could increase, too, by as much as 65% in the next 40 years. Even if the rate of new diabetes diagnoses among young people stayed unchanged, type 2 cases could increase nearly 70% and type 1 cases by 3% by 2060. “This new research should serve as a wake-up call for all of us. It’s vital that we focus our efforts to ensure all Americans, especially our young people, are the healthiest they can be,” CDC Acting Principal Deputy Director Dr. Debra Houry said in an agency news release. “The COVID-19 pandemic underscored how critically important it is to address chronic diseases, like diabetes. This study further highlights the importance of continuing efforts to prevent and manage chronic diseases, not only for our current population but also for generations to come.” The study authors used findings from the Search for Diabetes in Youth survey, which was funded by the CDC…  read on >  read on >

A new study confirms what many believe: Women tend to be better than men at imagining or understanding what another person is feeling or thinking. Using a test that measures empathy, researchers evaluated more than 300,000 people in 57 countries around the world to come to that conclusion. “Our results provide some of the first evidence that the well-known phenomenon — that females are, on average, more empathic than males — is present in a wide range of countries across the globe. It’s only by using very large data sets that we can say this with confidence,” said study author David Greenberg, from Bar-Ilan University in Israel. The study was led by Cambridge University in England and included collaborators from Bar-Ilan and Haifa universities in Israel, as well as Harvard and Washington universities in the United States, and IMT School for Advanced Studies in Lucca, Italy. The test used in the study is one of the most widely used for measuring empathy. It asks participants to choose a word best describing what a person in a photo is thinking or feeling just by viewing photos of the eye region of the face. This new study found that females scored significantly higher than males, on average, in 36 countries. Females scored similarly to males in 21 countries. In no country did males score significantly higher than…  read on >  read on >

Most working-age Americans get health insurance through their employer, but even they are finding it tougher to afford medical care these days, a new study shows. Researchers found that over the past 20 years, a growing number of Americans with job-based health insurance have been skipping medical care due to costs. Women have been particularly hard-hit. The study, published Dec. 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, could not get at the reasons. But experts said there are some likely explanations, including rising health care costs and moves by insurance plans to foist more payment responsibility onto consumers. “The U.S. health care system is unique in how privatized it is,” said lead researcher Avni Gupta, a PhD student at the NYU School of Global Public Health in New York City. About 61% of Americans younger than 65 get health insurance through their employer, and businesses use that benefit to help attract workers, Gupta pointed out. “It’s the most important fringe benefit of employment,” she said. But increasingly, the new findings show, that fringe benefit is falling short. By 2020, the study found, about 6% of U.S. women with employer-sponsored insurance said they’d been forced to skip needed medical care in the past year due to costs. That was double the percentage 20 years before, at 3%. The figures were lower among men, but…  read on >  read on >