(HealthDay News) — If you aren’t getting enough sleep, you’ll probably feel very tired during the day. And you may not feel alert and refreshed when you wake up. While everyone has a sleepless night now and then, chronic lack of sleep can lead to a host of medical problems and should be discussed with your doctor, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute says. Here is the agency’s list of issues you should mention to your physician: How long you’ve had trouble sleeping and how often it occurs. How long it typically takes you to fall asleep, how often you wake up at night, and how long it takes you to fall back asleep. Do you snore loudly or wake up gasping or feeling out of breath? Do you feel refreshed when you wake up, or are you tired? How often you doze off or have trouble staying awake during everyday tasks, especially driving.

Hay fever sufferers often choose the wrong medication for their seasonal sniffles, new research suggests. With flowers, trees and grasses springing back to life, folks with allergies will start to complain of sneezing, runny noses, and watery, itchy eyes. More often than not, though, they’ll head to the allergy aisle of their nearest drug store without advice from a doctor or pharmacist, the new study found. Only 63 percent of people who visit their community pharmacy to purchase treatment for their hay fever have a doctor diagnosis, said study senior author Sinthia Bosnic-Anticevich. “This is despite the fact that a vast majority of them are experiencing moderate to severe hay fever symptoms, which impact on their day-to-day living,” she added. Moreover, 70 percent select their own hay fever medication without consulting the pharmacist. And of those who reported wheezing, only 6 percent chose the correct medication, the study found. “Only 17 percent [choose allergy drugs] appropriately,” added Bosnic-Anticevich, a professor at the University of Sydney in Australia, who specializes in the use of respiratory medicines. It’s estimated that hay fever affects 30 percent of the world’s population, the researchers pointed out. Although this study was done in Australia, Bosnic-Anticevich said she has heard anecdotally from U.S. colleagues that the results would likely be similar if it had been done with American allergy sufferers. So what…  read on >

Medical care costs in the United States can be so overwhelming that Americans fear the cost of treatment more than the illness itself, a new poll shows. “It’s shocking and unacceptable that medical bills strike more fear in the hearts of Americans than serious illness,” said Shelley Lyford. She is president and CEO of West Health Institute, a San Diego-based research group that teamed up with NORC at the University of Chicago to conduct the nationwide poll. More respondents (40 percent) feared the cost of treating a serious illness than feared becoming ill (33 percent). The poll, of more than 1,300 adults, also found that 44 percent had not gone to the doctor when they were sick or injured within the past year, and 40 percent had skipped a suggested medical test or treatment because of the expense. Nearly half of the respondents said they also went without a dental checkup or cleaning in the past year, and 4 out of 10 said they didn’t see a dentist when they needed care. Thirty percent said they had been forced to choose between paying for medical bills or necessities such as food, heating or housing in the past year. About one-third said they had not filled a prescription or took less than the prescribed dose to save money. And respondents who said they didn’t get a…  read on >

Tree care workers have one of the nation’s most perilous jobs, and the danger could grow as climate change increases the risk to trees from major storms, diseases, insects, drought and fire, experts warn. Better training and safety in tree care operations are essential, according to researchers from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. Every year, about 80 tree care workers die and at least 23,000 chainsaw-related injuries are treated in U.S. emergency rooms. Many of those injuries stem from poor training and equipment, according to Rutgers experts who have studied risks to tree care workers since Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In the last month, the northeast and mid-Atlantic states have gone through four nor’easters resulting in further widespread tree damage from heavy snow. “There is a popular misconception that tree removal is low-skill work, but nothing could be further from the truth,” researcher Michele Ochsner said in a university news release. “Handling storm-downed trees without injury to people or property involves an array of technical skills and knowledge of how different species of trees respond in different seasons and weather conditions,” she explained. Ochsner formerly worked in Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations. She and her colleagues found that workers employed by tree care experts and licensed arborists were more likely to receive health and safety training and to use protective gear than…  read on >

People’s chances of living longer have been increasing dramatically for decades. But, that seems to have slowed recently, a new worldwide study has found. The sharpest decline has come in countries that already had the shortest life expectancy, according to researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore. They said the slowdown in life expectancy gains does not mean that humans have simply reached their maximum biological life span. Rather, the researchers argue that their findings could mean that recent medical advances have not sustained historic increases in average life expectancy. “This is not about us hitting the ceiling,” researcher David Bishai said in a Hopkins news release. “The slowdown has been sharpest in countries that have the most life expectancy to gain.” Bishai is a professor in the school’s Department of Population, Family and Reproductive Health. “It’s a rebuke to the idea that you can fix global health just by inventing more stuff,” he said. “New health technology has been essential to making strides in life expectancy, of course, but our predecessors in the 1950s were making faster progress with the basics of soap, sanitation and public health.” In the 1950s, the study found, life expectancy worldwide increased, on average, by 9.7 years in a decade. Since 2000, however, the increase in a decade has been just 1.9 years. The…  read on >

Single dads have been played for laughs in countless TV sitcoms, from “The Andy Griffith Show” and “My Three Sons” up to modern takes such as “Arrested Development” and “Louie.” But in real life, being a single dad is tough — so much so that it can lead to an early grave, Canadian researchers report. “We found that single fathers had a threefold higher mortality compared to single moms and partnered dads, and a fivefold higher mortality compared to partnered moms,” said lead researcher Maria Chiu. She is a scientist with the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Services at the University of Toronto. Over the course of a decade, you can expect six single dads to die versus two single moms, two partnered fathers and one partnered mother out of every 100 parents from each group, Chiu said. Single-parent families headed by fathers are becoming more commonplace around the world, largely due to increasing rates of divorce, separation and children born out of wedlock, the researchers said. More than 2.6 million households in the United States are headed by single dads, a ninefold increase since the 1960s, the study authors noted. Despite this, most research on single parents has focused on single mothers, Chiu said. No study to date has compared the life expectancy of single dads, single moms and partnered couples. To investigate, Chiu and…  read on >