For people with the mysterious chronic pain condition fibromyalgia, researchers say nerve stimulation may offer some relief. In a recent study, use of TENS — transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation — during movement or activity was shown to significantly reduce pain associated with fibromyalgia after just four weeks. Dr. Lesley Arnold, who was not involved with the new study, lauded its outcomes. “The improvements in pain and fatigue were remarkable,” she said. Arnold, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, suggested that the study may help guide physicians in use of TENS for symptom management. TENS uses a battery-operated machine to deliver electrical currents via electrodes attached to the skin. This is believed to activate nerve pathways that inhibit pain. People with fibromyalgia are encouraged to engage in physical activity as a way to manage their symptoms. But, paradoxically, movement can be painful for them. In the study, researchers randomly divided more than 300 women with fibromyalgia into three groups: active TENS; placebo (sham) TENS; or no TENS. Those in the TENS groups were instructed to use the device over four weeks, at home, for two hours daily during activity. The patients were told to apply the device’s electrodes to two specific areas along the back — one upper and one lower — and to activate the machine…  read on >

As much as people often love to talk about their feelings, it might be more productive to skip the conversations and write about your worries instead, according to research done at Michigan State University (MSU). The research, published in the journal Psychophysiology, provides the first neural evidence of the benefits of expressive writing, according to lead author Hans Schroder. He’s a former MSU doctoral student who is now doing research at the Laboratory for Translational and Affective Neuroscience at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Mass. It turns out that writing about your stresses, anxiety and worries can free up your brain to accomplish other tasks more effectively. Researchers have long known that constant worry uses up mental resources. It’s as though anxiety is always running in the background. So when you add on, say, a stressful work project, you automatically force your brain to multitask, which is never a good thing. In the MSU study, Schroder’s team found that the participants who wrote expressively about their feelings were able to offload their worries and allow their brains to run efficiently, like a new hybrid car. On the other hand, study participants who didn’t write about their feelings — and stayed stressed — ended up guzzling more brain gas to accomplish the same tasks, like your parents’ old, inefficient clunker. The key takeaway is that offloading worry…  read on >

High levels of ozone and wood smoke each increase the risk for lung diseases like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) among smokers and nonsmokers alike, two new studies find. People with COPD gradually lose their ability to draw a decent breath. Cigarette smoking is the leading cause, but COPD also can be caused by regular exposure to lung irritants. In one study of nearly 1,900 participants, researchers found that exposure to high levels of ozone over a decade increased the likelihood of COPD. For every 5-parts-per-billion increase in 10-year ozone exposure, the risk for COPD increased 16%, the findings showed. The same increase in ozone was also linked with greater odds of emphysema and a worse quality of life, the study authors said. “What really stood out was that the effect was apparent even among current heavy smokers,” said researcher Dr. Nadia Hansel, director of the pulmonary and critical care division at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, in Baltimore. “This means that active smoking doesn’t outweigh this effect of ozone.” Even those already at risk for COPD had an additional increased risk with ozone exposure, she added in a university news release. “I think this adds to increasing evidence that there is probably no healthy level of ozone,” Hansel said. Her team’s findings were published online recently in JAMA Internal Medicine. In the second…  read on >

Testosterone therapy is no fountain of youth for older men, though it might help some who are impotent. That’s according to new guidelines from the American College of Physicians — the first from the group to address the issue of treating age-related “low T.” It’s known that men’s testosterone levels decline with age. And for years industry has promoted the idea that men suffer a range of symptoms caused by what’s sometimes described as “male menopause.” The list includes fatigue, weakness, muscle loss, dulled memory and thinking, depression, and dampened libido and erectile dysfunction. Yet for nearly all of those problems, there is no good evidence testosterone therapy helps, the college found in a research review. The only area where there is some benefit, the group says, is in treating sexual dysfunction. On average, studies have found “small improvements” in sexual and erectile function. The lackluster performance in clinical trials is “a bit surprising,” said ACP president Dr. Robert McLean. But, he pointed out, the fact that testosterone wanes with age does not automatically mean that’s behind men’s health issues. And that means replacing testosterone will not necessarily help. That never stopped manufacturers of supplemental testosterone, however. For years, they launched aggressive marketing campaigns warning men of the health effects of age-related declines of the male hormone. Between 2009 and 2013, the number of U.S.…  read on >

Minimum wage laws can be a literal lifesaver for people who are struggling to get by, a new study suggests. The suicide rate declines among less-educated folks when the minimum wage is increased, researchers discovered. States experience as much as a 6% decrease in their suicide rates for every $1 increase in the minimum wage, said lead researcher John Kaufman, a doctoral student of epidemiology at Emory University, in Atlanta. A $1 increase in the federal minimum wage could have prevented 13,800 suicides among less-educated adults aged 18 to 64 during the peak in unemployment following the 2009 financial crash, researchers estimated. A $2 increase would have prevented 25,900 suicides between 2009 and 2015. This effect is solely among people with a high school education or less, Kaufman said, and it grows stronger when the unemployment rate is higher. “During periods of high unemployment, people are more willing to work at lower-wage jobs, and those lower-wage jobs are going to be the ones that have increased pay if there’s an increase in minimum wage,” Kaufman said. “Those jobs become more valuable both to the people working and to their dependents and their families, compared to times when the economy is doing well.” There’s broad support among Democratic presidential candidates for doubling the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15, including former Vice President Joe Biden…  read on >