Lifestyle « Weekly Gravy

Many young Americans are prescribed psychiatric drugs to treat medical conditions, but nearly one-third of them wind up misusing the medications, a new study finds. “Misuse of prescription substances is alarmingly high among U.S. youth and young adults,” said lead researcher Israel Agaku, a part-time lecturer in oral health policy and epidemiology at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, in Boston. The study found that, overall, 35% of young people (aged 12 to 25) said they had taken a prescribed psychoactive drug in the past year, and 31% of those said they had misused that drug. While opioids were the most commonly prescribed drug, misuse of stimulants and tranquilizers was higher. Psychotropic drugs change a person’s mental state and can have intoxicating effects. “This study draws attention to the silent epidemic of prescription stimulant use among youth,” Agaku said. “With increasing popularity of performance-enhancing stimulants in schools, it is imperative for policymakers, school administrators, health care professionals and parents to become more aware of this emerging danger and take appropriate steps, similar to what has been done for the opioid epidemic.” Dr. Scott Krakower, an attending psychiatrist in child and adolescent psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y., said, “It is very alarming to see so many young people having access to controlled substances.” It is important for doctors to screen for illicit… read on > read on >

Combining drugs with driving is a potentially deadly but all too common combination in the United States, according to a new report. University of Cincinnati (UC) researchers found that almost 9% of adults reported driving under the influence of alcohol. Marijuana use among drivers was more than 4%, while many adults also use both pot and other drugs in combination with alcohol. The most commonly reported drugs used while driving were marijuana and opioids, the study found. “We need to focus our efforts on drugged driving, in addition to drunk driving, because drugged driving causes such a high level of fatalities,” said study lead author Andrew Yockey. He’s a doctoral student in UC’s College of Education, Criminal Justice and Human Services. With lawful marijuana use rising in the United States, there are concerns about road safety, the researchers said in a university news release. Keith King, director of the UC Center for Prevention Science, said, “There is serious concern as to how legalization will affect driving behaviors among adults.” King called for more research to evaluate the impact of legalization. The team also emphasized education at an early age and identifying culturally relevant prevention strategies. For the study, the researchers used sample data from the 2016 to 2018 National Survey on Drug Use and Health. The investigators found that men were significantly more likely than… read on > read on >

Being rushed into hospital care can be an emotional experience. So, what a surgeon says to trauma or emergency surgery patients plays a role in how satisfied they are after their operations, a new study finds. Researchers analyzed data from nearly 187,000 patients discharged from 168 HCA Healthcare hospitals in the United States in 2018 and 2019. HCA Healthcare is a publicly traded company based in Nashville, Tenn. The goal was to determine how several factors — including interactions with nurses and doctors — contributed to satisfaction ratings in five patient categories: trauma; elective surgery; emergency surgery; emergency medical; and elective medical. “Nurses uniformly come out as the most highly ranked, and that’s because they provide wonderful bedside care and have so much contact with the patients,” said study author Dr. Samir Fakhry, vice president of HCA Healthcare’s Center for Trauma and Acute Care Surgery Research. “But in the case of the trauma patients, and to a lesser degree the emergency surgical patients, physician communication ranked as the number two factor,” Fakhry added. Among trauma and emergency surgery patients, physician communication had a significant impact on overall satisfaction after nursing factors were accounted for, representing a 12% increase in the former and an 8.6% increase in the latter group, the researchers found. Among elective surgery and medical admission patients, physician communication didn’t even rank as… read on > read on >

If pandemic-related stress has you grinding your teeth, you’re not alone. Dentists say tooth-grinding and jaw-clenching are on the rise due to the many challenges stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve been seeing an increase in the number of patients looking for appointments to replace broken mouth guards” that have been cracked or chewed through, said Dr. Leopoldo Correa, director of the Craniofacial Pain Center at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, in Boston. Grinding and clenching (“bruxism”) can cause cracked teeth, fillings and crowns; migraines and other headaches; face, neck and jaw pain. “You may resolve a stressful situation in the short term, or it may continue and develop into chronic stress,” which can result in symptoms such as fatigue, increased muscle tension, depression, an inability to fall or stay asleep, and bruxism, Correa said. “According to some data, the amount of force we create when clenching the jaw is around 300 pounds,” he said in a school news release. Five to 10 minutes of jaw and face exercise each day can help you cope, Correa suggested. Here’s what to do: Keep your teeth apart, bend your fingers and place your knuckles on each side of your face. Give yourself a self-massage, pushing down. If possible, briefly apply heat or an ice pack to the side of the face before doing the stretching exercise.… read on > read on >

Living in a noisy neighborhood with less green space negatively affects teens’ sleep, which may lead to poorer memory and thinking skills, according to a pair of studies. In a study on residential environment, researchers found that as noise levels steadily increased, so too did the time needed for teens to fall asleep. They also didn’t sleep as long as kids in quieter, greener neighborhoods. But as the average number of trees rose, teens dozed off sooner and slept longer. “For adolescents, the harms of insufficient sleep are wide-ranging and include impaired cognition [thinking skills] and engagement in antisocial behavior,” said study author Stephanie Mayne. She’s assistant professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. As such, it critical to identify ways to prevent and treat the problem, Mayne said in a news release from the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute. “Our findings suggest that neighborhood noise and green space may be important targets for interventions,” Mayne said. In Mayne’s study, 110 teens wore watches that measured their rest and activity for 14 days each in both eighth and ninth grades. The researchers mapped their home addresses to determine sound levels, tree cover, housing and population density. The second study showed how sleep loss associated with reduced time in bed affected the brain waves of… read on > read on >

Dr. Lisa Iezzoni is all too familiar with the discrimination that patients who have a disability can face: Having lived with multiple sclerosis for more than four decades and now in a wheelchair, she has also studied health care experiences and outcomes for people with disabilities for more than 20 years. But her new survey on doctors’ attitudes towards disabled patients still surprised her — not for the attitudes the survey uncovered, but how widespread those attitudes were. “I did expect that there would be a lot of physicians who viewed quality of life of people with disabilities worse than that of other people,” said Iezzoni, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston. “I just didn’t expect it to be over 80%. That’s most physicians. That was a bit surprising.” In her study, she surveyed 714 doctors with practices in many different specialties across the United States. A majority of physicians surveyed (82.4%) believed that people with significant disabilities had worse quality of life than people without disabilities. Just under 41% of physicians felt very confident in their ability to provide the same quality of care to patients with disabilities as they did for other patients. “You would think that if they’re caring for these patients, that they would feel confident in their ability to care for them equitably,” Iezzoni said. About… read on > read on >

Stress levels are on the rise as Americans grapple with the COVID-19 pandemic and bitter political divisions, a new American Psychological Association (APA) survey shows. On a 10-point scale where 1 means little to no stress and 10 means a great amount, adults’ average stress level clocked in at 5.6, according to the Stress in America: January 2021 Stress Snapshot. That’s higher than levels reported in APA surveys since April. Eighty-four percent of respondents in the latest survey reported feeling at least one emotion associated with prolonged stress in the prior two weeks. The most common were anxiety (47%), sadness (44%) and anger (39%). And two-thirds said they feel overwhelmed by the number of issues facing the nation. Significant sources of reported stress included the future of the United States (81%); the coronavirus pandemic (80%); and political unrest (74%). Two-thirds said the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol was a significant source of stress. Among other key findings: 84% of respondents say the nation has serious societal issues that need to be addressed and 9 in 10 hope that there will be a move toward unity. “Nearly a year into the pandemic, prolonged stress persists at elevated levels for many Americans. As we work to address stressors as a nation, from unemployment to education, we can’t ignore the mental health consequences of this global… read on > read on >