Wildfires raging in several states and Canada are triggering air quality alerts and evacuation orders across the western parts of the United States. Smoke and haze have filled the skies in California, Oregon, Arizona, Washington and several other western states: As of Wednesday, there were 79 large, active wildfires that have burned over 1.4 million acres across the country, according to the National Interagency Fire Center. Evacuation orders are in effect for 15 fires in the Northwest, the Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, Canada is battling about 430 active wildfires in British Columbia and 177 in neighboring Alberta, including two that led to the evacuation of up to 25,000 visitors and residents of the Canadian Rockies’ largest national park, the AP reported. To deal with the pollution spewing from these wildfires, air quality alerts and advisories have been issued in many parts of the western United States: The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality issued air quality alerts for the eastern counties of Harney, Malheur, Grant, Baker and Morrow until further notice. In Idaho, air quality advisories were sent out to the central counties of Ada, Canyon, Gem, Owyhee, Payette and Washington. In north central Washington, the Colville Reservation, all of Chelan County, plus the Methow Valley down to Brewster in Okanogan County were under air quality alerts until further notice. Last but not least, Canadian authorities issued an air quality advisory for…  read on >  read on >

Obese kids infected with dengue are significantly more likely to suffer severe illness requiring hospitalization, a new study warns. A new analysis of nearly 5,000 dengue-infected Sri Lankan children found that weight plays a powerful role in how sick the mosquito-borne virus can make a kid. Kids with higher BMIs had higher hospitalization rates than those children who weighed less, researchers reported recently in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The heaviest children — those who are clinically obese — were twice as likely to be hospitalized as the rest, results show. “With the increase in obesity in many countries, it would be important to create awareness and educate the public of the potential risks regarding obesity and risk of severe disease and hospitalization from dengue,” said senior researcher Dr. Neelika Malavige, a professor of immunology and molecular medicine at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura in Sri Lanka. The study comes weeks after health officials in the Florida Keys issued a dengue alert following two confirmed cases of the infectious disease there, and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a nationwide advisory about an increased risk of dengue infections in the U.S. Dengue reached a historic high of more than 6.5 million cases and more than 7,300 deaths worldwide in 2023, researchers said in background notes. And the world is about…  read on >  read on >

Youngsters so sick they’ve needed treatment in an ICU appear to bear the scars of that experience years later, a new study finds. Children and teenagers treated in an intensive care unit have a significantly higher risk of developing a mental illness as they grow up, researchers reported July 20 in the Journal of Affective Disorders. “Given our study results, the development of appropriate major psychiatric disorder prevention strategies should be emphasized for child and adolescent ICU survivors,” concluded the research team led by Dr. Ping-Chung Wu, of the Taipei Veterans General Hospital in Taiwan. For the study, researchers analyzed data on more than 8,700 children admitted to an ICU between 1996 and 2013. Those who survived their illness were followed an average of nearly 10 years. Data showed the survivors had: 4.7 times the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 3.2 times the risk of schizophrenia A doubled risk of bipolar disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder 1.7 times the risk of major depression Kids who stayed in the ICU three days or more in particular had a higher risk of these disorders, researchers said. Risk of specific mental illnesses also varied depending on the condition that landed the child in the ICU, researchers found. For example, schizophrenia risk was highest among patients admitted for blood diseases, nervous system disorders and digestive illnesses, while PTSD was…  read on >  read on >

Folks with depression who got therapy via text or voice messages fared just as well as those who got weekly video-based telemedicine sessions with a therapist, a new trial has found. The findings “suggest that psychotherapy delivered via text messages may be a viable alternative to face-to-face or videoconferencing delivery and may allow for more immediate on-demand care,” in a time when it’s often tough for people to access mental health care, the study authors wrote. The trial was funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health and published July 19 in the journal Psychiatric Services. The shutdown of traditional in-office services during the pandemic threw the spotlight on telemedicine as a means of delivering psychiatric care. But are face-to-face video sessions the only effective way to deliver telemedicine? In the new study, 215 adults with depression received 12 weeks of telemedicine care from a digital mental health care company called Talkspace (the company played no role in funding the study). Half of the patients received weekly standard videoconference sessions with a therapist for 30 to 45 minutes. The other half received psychotherapy delivered via voice or text messages, where patients could interact with the therapist whenever and how often they wanted.  At the halfway point (six weeks), roughly the same amount of patients —  28 patients receiving message-based therapy and 27 receiving videoconferencing…  read on >  read on >

Consistently bad sleep is linked to a person’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes, a new study shows. Both too little and too much sleep is tied to diabetes risk, and swinging wildly between the two patterns of poor sleep reflects the most risk, researchers reported recently in the journal Diabetologia. The findings support “the importance of sleep health in midlife, particularly maintaining regular sleep schedules over time, to reduce the risk of adverse cardiometabolic conditions,” said researcher Kelsie Full, a behavioral epidemiologist and assistant professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. For the study, researchers analyzed the long-term sleep patterns of more than 36,000 adults participating in a health study of residents in 12 southeastern states in the United States. About 62% of the participants were Black people. The team examined the participants’ sleep patterns based on what they reported at the start of the study, as well as during a follow-up that took place an average of five years later. Poor sleep was defined as either fewer than seven hours or more than nine hours a night. “One of the main strengths of our study was that we focused on long-term sleep pattern rather than one-time measurement,” said lead researcher Qian Xiao, an associate professor of epidemiology, human genetics, and environmental sciences at the UT Health Science Center at…  read on >  read on >

City dwellers are less likely to be healthy, happy and well-off than people living outside urban areas, a new study reports. Instead, there’s a suburban “Goldilocks zone” between cities and rural areas where people are happiest, researchers report. “Areas near cities but beyond their boundaries… show the highest and most equal levels of psychological satisfaction,” said lead researcher Adam Finnemann, a psychologist and doctoral student with the University of Amsterdam’s Center for Urban Mental Health. For the study, researchers analyzed data on 156,000 people aged 40 and older drawn from the UK Biobank, a major health research database. The researchers used a new method of assessing whether someone lived in a city, suburb or rural area, based on both their distance from the nearest city center as well as the population density of that urban area. Thus, the team accounted “for the fact that living 15 kilometers from London differs from living 15 kilometers from Leeds—one is still urbanized while the other is countryside,” Finnemann said in a university news release. Results showed that while urban residents had the highest incomes, this didn’t make them happier. Instead, people in highly urban areas scored worse on a series of eight measures covering well-being, social satisfaction and economic contentment. Despite these scores, people are flocking to cities. The percentage of people living in cities has surged from…  read on >  read on >

Medical debt is significantly more common among people with a mood disorder, and these money woes can keep them from getting the help they need, a new study says. Among people with depression or anxiety, those with medical debt were twice as likely to delay or forego mental health care as those who were debt-free, results show. “The prevalence of medical debt in the U.S. is already quite high, and the prevalence was significantly higher among adults with depression and anxiety,” said lead researcher Kyle Moon, a doctoral student in the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School’s Department of Mental Health in Baltimore. “On the flip side, a relatively high number of adults with no medical debt also report delaying or forgoing mental health care, and medical debt appears to compound the problem,” Moon added in a Hopkins news release. For the study, researchers analyzed data from more than 27,600 participants in an annual federal survey on health. About 27% of adults with depression and 26% with anxiety have medical debt going back 12 months, compared with about 9% of those who don’t have either mood disorder, results show. Consumer credit report data shows that medical debt is the biggest contributor to personal debt, researchers said in background notes. These sort of money troubles impact access to health care, by causing people to delay or forego treatment.…  read on >  read on >

Dogs can sniff out whether a human is stressed or relaxed, new research suggests, and that sensory feedback appears to influence canine emotions and choices. The dog doesn’t even have to know the human well to interpret odor in this way, the British researchers noted. “Dog owners know how attuned their pets are to their emotions, but here we show that even the odor of a stressed, unfamiliar human affects a dog’s emotional state, perception of rewards and ability to learn,” said study author Dr. Nicola Rooney. She’s a senior lecturer in wildlife and conservation at Bristol Veterinary School in Bristol, England. “Working dog handlers often describe stress traveling down the lead, but we’ve also shown it can also travel through the air,” she said in a university news release. Her team published its findings July 22 in the journal Scientific Reports. As the Bristol team noted, research has long pointed to scent as an important but perhaps under-appreciated form of emotional communication between people. Rooney’s group wondered if dogs, with olfactory senses that are so much more sophisticated than humans, might catch human emotions through smell, as well, and act accordingly. They constructed an elaborate experiment to find out. First, they trained dogs in a simple task: If a bowl was placed in one location, it invariably contained food. But if it was placed…  read on >  read on >

Spending time in nature can provide a boost for people with mental illness, a new review finds. Even as little as 10 minutes spent in a city park can improve a person’s symptoms, researchers found. The positive effects of nature approved particularly helpful for people with mood disorders like depression or bipolar disorder, results show. “We know nature plays an important role in human health, but behavioral health and health care providers often neglect to think about it as an intervention,” said lead researcher Joanna Bettmann, a professor at the University of Utah College of Social Work. For the review, researchers analyzed results from 45 studies involving nearly 1,500 people diagnosed with mental illnesses. The studies varied in structure, with some participants spending short amounts of time in a city park and others having multiple-day wilderness adventures. No matter how long people spent around nature, they always experienced positive results, results show. Results showed that water-based outdoor spaces — rivers, lakes and oceans — had the greatest positive effect. Camping, farming and gardening activities were the most beneficial. The new review was published recently in the journal Ecopsychology. “All of these different types of outdoor spaces delivered positive results, which underscores the importance of preserving green spaces in our natural and built environments,” Bettmann said in a university news release. However, the researchers warned that…  read on >  read on >