When COVID-19 restrictions lifted in the United Kingdom, the risk for severe asthma attacks doubled. While having COVID isn’t more likely to cause asthma attacks than other respiratory infections, it may have been that safety measures, such as wearing masks and reduced socializing, kept these attacks at bay, the authors of a new study suggested. “Our study was observational, so it can’t prove cause-and-effect. But our findings do raise the possibility that certain elements of the public health measures introduced during the pandemic — such as wearing face masks — could help in reducing respiratory illnesses moving forward,” study lead author Adrian Martineau said in a news release from Queen Mary University of London. He is a clinical professor of respiratory infection and immunity at the university. The researchers studied the data from more than 2,300 adults with asthma who participated in the university’s COVIDENCE UK study between November 2020 and April 2022. The participants answered a monthly online questionnaire that asked about face covering use, social mixing and asthma symptoms. COVID restrictions were imposed in the spring of 2020. In April 2021, social mixing restrictions and the need for face coverings started relaxing in the U.K. When restrictions were lifted, fewer people wore face coverings. They were more likely to mix socially. The study found that people subsequently had a higher risk of COVID…  read on >  read on >

Transgender youth are more likely than others to experience sleep disorders such as insomnia and sleep apnea, and researchers now recommend these young people be screened for sleep problems. “Transgender and gender-nonconforming identity may precede mental health disorders, and both influence insomnia diagnosis,” said study co-author Galit Levi Dunietz, an epidemiologist in the University of Michigan neurology department’s division of sleep medicine. For the study, the researchers analyzed claims data from more than 1.2 million people aged 12 to 25. Among them were just over 2,600 young people who identified as transgender or gender-nonconforming. The investigators found that transgender youth were 5.4 times more likely than cisgender youth to have insomnia. They were also three times more likely to have sleep apnea or other sleep disorders. (Cisgender means they identify with the gender assigned at birth). The results show a concerning number of individuals with disorders that harm sleep quality, said co-author Dr. Ronald Gavidia, a sleep medicine physician at the university. Other research has suggested that transgender youth and adults also have a high prevalence of depression and anxiety symptoms. These are known to affect sleep quality and health, and they may be contributing to insomnia in this group, the study authors noted. “Given this higher prevalence of sleep disorders in relation to cisgender youth, clinicians should consider screening and testing this population for…  read on >  read on >

The kids aren’t alright. Up to 1 in 5 children in the United States has a mental health condition, but only about half of those who need mental health care are now receiving it. What’s more, suicide is the second leading cause of death among U.S. kids and teens, and youth suicide rates have been rising over the last decade. Now, about one year after the U.S. Surgeon General cited an urgent need to address the crisis, new research shows that the young people who are most likely to die by suicide live in areas with pronounced shortages of mental health professionals. These professionals are also feeling the strain as their workloads and waitlists grow exponentially, according to the American Psychological Association’s 2022 COVID-19 Practitioner Impact Survey. “This is a national emergency, and swift action is needed to improve youth mental health,” said study author Dr. Jennifer Hoffmann, an attending physician in the Division of Emergency Medicine at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. For the study, she and her colleagues analyzed more than 5,000 suicides by 5- to 19-year-olds that occurred from 2015 to 2016. The rate of suicide increased as the availability of mental health professionals decreased, and this also held for youth suicide by firearms. The greater the professional shortage, the higher the risk for suicide in that area,…  read on >  read on >

Research in wild bats is reinforcing a notion crucial to stopping future pandemics: When wildlife populations stay healthy, the odds of “crossover” viruses infecting humans subsides. In Australia, deforestation has caused a deadly respiratory virus to pass from fruit bats to humans, by forcing the two species into closer contact, a new study reports. Robbed of their winter habitats, large “flying fox” bat populations started breaking up over the past quarter-century and roosting in smaller groups closer to human agricultural and urban areas in subtropical Australia, the study authors explained. These bats are the natural reservoir of Hendra virus, which jumped from the bats into horses and then from horses to humans, according to the report published Nov. 16 in the journal Nature. Hendra virus causes a severe respiratory infection that has proven to be 75% fatal in horses and 57% fatal in humans. The case study offers a glimpse into the process that causes infectious diseases like Ebola to jump from animals into humans, a process called “pathogen spillover,” the researchers noted. “We collected and collated 25 years of data and saw this amazing pattern. We captured this rapid transition from bats feeding in big populations as nomadic animals to bats eking out a living in small populations, in areas where there are people,” said senior researcher Raina Plowright, a professor of public and…  read on >  read on >

With U.S. health officials calling childhood obesity a public health crisis, conversations about weight are important. But what you say to your kids can be challenging, and even counterproductive, a new study found. “Body weight is a sensitive issue and the way we talk about it matters,” said lead author Rebecca Puhl, deputy director of the University of Connecticut Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health. “We really want to identify language that adolescents feel more comfortable using in these conversations, that they don’t feel stigmatized, that they don’t feel blamed or shamed,” Puhl noted. To do that, researchers reviewed 2021survey data from more than 2,000 kids ages 10 to 17, along with more than 1,900 parents. Participants were asked about 27 terms and phrases that can be used to describe body weight. The teens felt the most negative emotions about terms like “overweight,” “fat” and “extremely obese,” the study found. More than one-third of youths reported feeling embarrassment, shame and sadness when their parents used these words. Have a daughter? Tread lightly, the researchers recommended. Girls reported feeling more negative emotions in response to words used about weight than boys did. Whether the young person had obesity or not did not impact how they felt about the words. “I think a lot of parents have positive intentions when it comes to talking about their…  read on >  read on >

Fungi found in the soil are causing lung infections nationwide, even in places that doctors aren’t aware are at risk. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not revised maps for environmental fungi since 1969, according to a new study that found one disease-causing fungus — histoplasma, or histo — to be more widespread than the old maps show. This can lead to delayed or missed diagnoses in people with lung infections, according to researchers from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The infections can be confused with COVID-19, bacterial pneumonia or tuberculosis. Fungi become a problem for people when they breathe in spores that are in the soil as the ground is disturbed by farming, landscaping or construction. People can become infected just by walking in areas that have a lot of spores — caves, for example. Infants, older adults and people with compromised immune systems may develop fever, cough, fatigue and other symptoms. “Every few weeks I get a call from a doctor in the Boston area — a different doctor every time — about a case they can’t solve,” said senior author Dr. Andrej Spec, an associate professor of medicine and a specialist in fungal infections at WUSTL. “They always start by saying, ‘We don’t have histo here, but it really kind of looks like histo.’ I say,…  read on >  read on >

It’s sort of like the Goldilocks principle — a room that’s either too dry or too humid can influence transmission of COVID-19 and cause more illness or death, Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers say. Maintaining an indoor relative humidity between 40% and 60% is associated with lower rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths, they reported Nov. 16 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Indoor conditions outside that range are associated with worse COVID outcomes, according to the report. “There’s potentially a protective effect of this intermediate indoor relative humidity,” said lead author Connor Verheyen, a doctoral student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, in Cambridge, Mass. The research team noted that most people are comfortable between 30% and 50% relative humidity. An airplane cabin is kept around 20%. Until now, researchers have considered that COVID-19 could be influenced by the seasons, but they tended to examine the virus’ patterns in the context of outdoor weather conditions. The MIT team decided that other researchers might be looking in the wrong direction, given that people in most places spend more than 90% of their time indoors. Indoor conditions also are where most viral transmission occurs. For the study, the investigators combined COVID data with meteorological measurements taken from 121 countries. They gathered COVID case counts and deaths from between January and August…  read on >  read on >