Financial stress and work lost to cancer treatment affects patients and their partners alike. Partners also experienced pain, fatigue and sleep issues owing to these fiscal worries, a new study found. “We know that financial toxicity or hardship is a significant effect of cancer and its treatment and is associated with poor health issues for patients and survivors,” said lead author Lauren Ghazal. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Rogel Cancer Center and the University of Michigan School of Nursing. “Financial toxicity extends to caregivers or partners, too,” she said in a university news release. Her team wanted to understand how that toxicity affects the caregiver’s health, including anxiety, depression, fatigue and overall quality of life. “It is important to examine the full effect of financial toxicity on a household in order to develop multilevel interventions that center the patient,” she explained. For the study, the researchers surveyed patients who had been treated for stage 3 colon cancer one to five years earlier, as well as their spouses, domestic partners or significant others from the same household. In all, 307 patient-partner pairs responded. The survey asked about potential stressors including cutting spending, missing bill payments and debt from unpaid bills, bank loans or money borrowed. Patients and partners were also asked about physical function, anxiety, depression, fatigue, sleep disturbance, social roles, social activities and…  read on >  read on >

The “baby bust” that hit the United States during the first year of the COVID pandemic did not affect all states equally — with states that were more racially diverse or more “blue” seeing bigger drops in their birth rates. That’s among the findings of a new study that probed a now well-documented phenomenon: The pandemic triggered a drop-off in the U.S. birth rate, as it did in many other countries. That was the national picture at least. But the United States is geographically huge and diverse in many ways, said Linda Kahn, the senior researcher on the study and an assistant professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, in New York City. And as the new study demonstrates, the pandemic’s effects on birth rates differed from state to state. On the national level, Kahn’s team found what others have: Nine months into the pandemic, the U.S. birth rate was down compared to the year before — with 18 fewer births per month for every 100,000 women of childbearing age. But by the pandemic’s “second wave,” in 2021, the national birth rate had gotten back on track: That is, it returned to the declining trajectory it had been on in 2019. A deeper look, though, showed that states varied widely in how the early pandemic affected births. New York state, for example, saw a huge…  read on >  read on >

Over the past few years the escalating opioid crisis has touched off a complex debate about how best to reign in suicide risk among patients who are prescribed the addictive painkillers. The question: Could rapidly cutting back on legal opioid prescriptions help, or might patients’ desperation over lack of access inadvertently drive up suicide risk? Now new research suggests that opioid prescription rates and suicide risk appear to go hand-in-hand. As prescription rates fall, so does suicide risk. “People who are prescribed opioids, especially at higher doses, are at increased suicide risk,” said lead author Dr. Mark Olfson, a professor of psychiatry, medicine and law at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City. Roughly 4 in 10 overdose suicide deaths across the U.S. involve opioids, Olfson pointed out. And suicide risk is twice as high among patients prescribed high-dose opioids as among those who receive low-dose options. But the role of legal prescribing patterns has been a matter of controversy and competing considerations, he said. “On one hand, increasing opioid prescriptions might increase suicide risks by expanding access to medications that are potentially fatal when mixed with other drugs — such as benzodiazepines — or when taken in excess.” Olfson said, adding that opioids also increase depression risk in some people. “On the other hand, lowering the dose of opioids too quickly or…  read on >  read on >

Adding menthol flavoring to electronic cigarettes may damage your lungs more than regular e-cigarettes do, a new study reveals. The common mint flavoring helps deliver lots more toxic microparticles, compared with e-cigarette pods that don’t contain menthol. It’s those microparticles that damage lung function, researchers say. “Beware of additives in the e-cigarettes,” said senior researcher Kambez Benam, an associate professor in the division of pulmonary, allergy and critical care medicine at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine. “If you vape, they can make you inhale more particles into your lungs. Don‘t assume that since menthol is a substance naturally found in mint plants and added to some food and beverages, it would be fine to inhale,” he said. “Menthol flavoring leads to a significantly higher number of particle counts that one would take into their lungs by vaping them,” he said. “E-cigarette aerosols are known to contain many harmful substances, such as nicotine and formaldehyde.” A number of studies have suggested that e-cigarette vapor can cause lung inflammation, oxidative stress, DNA damage and airway hyper-responsiveness that can trigger asthma, Benam said. Vaping these substances can cause lung damage that impairs lung function. Menthol, he added, is such a toxic substance. To look at the potential danger of menthol, Benam’s team developed a “vaping robot” that mimics the temperature, humidity, puff volume and duration of…  read on >  read on >

Jouncing along to school in a fume-spewing, rattletrap yellow bus is practically a rite of passage for most American students. But outdated buses actually wind up costing kids many days of education, thanks to the clouds of diesel exhaust left in their wake, a new study argues. School districts that upgrade to a “greener” bus fleet have higher attendance rates than those with older, dirtier-running buses, researchers report. Replacing all school buses built prior to 2000 could add more than 1.3 million additional student days of attendance each year in the United States, the study estimated. About 25 million children ride the bus to school every day, the researchers said. Older buses cough out higher levels of diesel exhaust, which can trigger asthma attacks in kids, said lead researcher Meredith Pedde, a research fellow in epidemiology with the University of Michigan. “Air pollution can even affect those without asthma,” Pedde added. “It has been linked to upper respiratory infections, pneumonia and other types of respiratory illness, so it might be impacting a larger student body than just asthmatic students.” To see whether cleaner buses cut down on student absences, Pedde and her colleagues examined data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s School Bus Rebate Program. The EPA program doled out more than $7 million annually to replace or retrofit old polluting buses between 2012 and…  read on >  read on >

You may be struggling with stomach pain and digestive distress without understanding why, thinking it might be something you ate. Can stress cause stomach pain? Stress, especially chronic stress, can indeed increase your risk for gastrointestinal (GI) problems. “Stress and anxiety are common causes of stomach pain and other GI symptoms,” Dr. Nina Gupta, a gastroenterologist at University of Chicago Medicine, said recently in an article. Stress impacts the digestive system through the nervous system, and can affect food movement and the gut’s bacterial balance. Stress can also cause people to eat poorly, smoke and/or drink too much alcohol or caffeine — all habits that can trigger stomach pain. Outside the brain, the gut has the greatest area of nerves. This component of the autonomic nervous system — known as the enteric nervous system — is sometimes referred to as the “second brain.” According to Harvard Health, “neurons lining the digestive tract signal muscle cells to initiate a series of contractions that propel food farther along, breaking it down into nutrients and waste.” The enteric nervous system communicates with the central nervous system and is known as the “brain-gut axis.” This connection explains why stress may cause digestive problems. According to the American Psychological Association, stress may increase the risk for or exacerbate symptoms of the following gut diseases or dysfunction: Bloating, burping, gas Heartburn,…  read on >  read on >

For what they say is the first time, British researchers report that they have found the spread of COVID-19 in households is linked to the presence of the virus on hands and surfaces, not just in the air. The investigators collected data from households at the height of the pandemic, finding that people were much more likely to get COVID-19 from someone in their house if virus was present on hands or frequently touched places, like refrigerator door handles or sink faucets. “There’s no doubt that if you have COVID-19, you’re emitting the virus into the air as micro-aerosols as well as large droplets that land on your hands and the surfaces around you. What hasn’t been shown, until now, is that the presence of the virus on people’s hands or household surfaces predicts transmission to contacts,” said study author Ajit Lalvani. He is director of the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health Protection Research Unit (HPRU) in Respiratory Infections. The NIHR HPRU is a research partnership between Imperial College London and the UK Health Security Agency. Researchers from University of Oxford also worked on the study. “Our real-life study in London households provides the first empirical evidence to show that the presence of SARS-CoV-2 on people’s hands and surfaces contributes significantly to spread of COVID-19. Since we didn’t systematically sample household…  read on >  read on >

It’s well known that being overweight or obese can increase health risks. But a new study finds that the reasons why a person is obese may have some impact on heart disease risk. Specifically, being obese because of lifestyle carried higher risks than it did if the extra weight was due to genetic predisposition, researchers found. “The link between obesity and cardiovascular disease was twice as strong in those with a genetic predisposition to a low BMI as it was in those with obesity driven by genetic factors,” said study author Ida Karlsson, an assistant professor at the Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden. To study this, her team used data from more than 15,000 twins from the Swedish Twin Registry. Information included their BMI and their genetic predisposition for high BMI. The researchers also used data from medical registries to establish the incidence of heart disease in this group. Karlsson stressed that a healthy lifestyle is always important for everyone. The risk of heart disease was still higher in all people who were overweight or obese compared to people with a healthy weight. “Obesity is a complex common disease that can have many different causes,” Karlsson said in an institute news release. “Since it’s so stigmatized, the results can help us understand that its effects on health…  read on >  read on >