A U.S. Food and Drug Administration advisory panel on Tuesday voted against recommending the psychedelic MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a 10-1 vote, the panel determined the evidence amassed so far fails to show the controversial drug’s benefits outweigh its risks, the Associated Press reported. During the meeting, panel members pointed to flawed study data and significant drug risks, including the potential for heart problems, injury and abuse. “It seems like there are so many problems with the data — each one alone might be OK, but when you pile them on top of each other … there’s just a lot of questions I would have about how effective the treatment is,” Dr. Melissa Decker Barone, a psychologist with the Department of Veterans Affairs, said during the meeting, the AP reported. The FDA is expected to make a final decision by August, but the panel’s vote could bolster the agency’s reasoning for rejecting the treatment, the AP reported. MDMA is the first in a series of psychedelics — including LSD and psilocybin — that are expected to come before the FDA for review in the next few years, the AP reported. But on Tuesday, the FDA advisers pointed to flawed studies that could have skewed the results on MDMA, missing follow-up data on patient outcomes and a lack of diversity among participants.…  read on >  read on >

Maternal mortality rates in the United States continue to exceed those in other wealthy nations, with most women dying during pregnancy and childbirth in ways that were preventable, a new report shows. In 2022, U.S. women had a death rate from complications of pregnancy and childbirth of 22 deaths per 100,000 live births, researchers found. That’s a rate more than double and sometimes triple that of other high-income countries, researchers said. For example, there were zero recorded maternal deaths in Norway that year. Further, Black women have the highest maternal death rate in the United States, at nearly 50 deaths per 100,000 live births. “This study provides a bleak picture of how poorly the U.S. is performing when it comes to maternal mortality rates compared to other high-income countries,” said study author Munira Gunja, a senior researcher with the Commonwealth Fund. For the study, researchers assessed maternal health across 14 nations: the United States, Australia, Canada, Chile, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. About two-thirds (65%) of maternal deaths in the United States occur after birth, and more than 80% are preventable, the report found. Severe bleeding, high blood pressure and infection are the leading causes of maternal death within the first week following delivery, researchers report. In the subsequent weeks and months, weakening of the…  read on >  read on >

People who feel lonely and socially isolated might benefit from more sleep, especially if they’re a young adult, a new study suggests. Better sleep is associated with significantly less emotional and social loneliness, researchers report. Younger adults in particularbenefit from better sleep, but people of all ages report less loneliness after they’ve slept well, results show. “Loneliness is an urgent public health crisis, and there is a pressing need for providers to better understand and treat it,” said lead researcher Joseph Dzierzewski, vice president of research and scientific affairs at the National Sleep Foundation in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Surgeon General’s Office warned in 2023 about a public health crisis of loneliness and isolation, researchers noted. Even before the pandemic, about half of U.S. adults were experiencing loneliness, and the social isolation measures required to protect health likely made matters even worse, the warning said. “Our results highlight the important role that sleep plays in understanding loneliness across the adult lifespan,” Dzierzewksi said in a university news release. “Perhaps efforts to improve sleep health could have a beneficial effect on loneliness, especially for young people.” Adults should get about seven hours of sleep each night to promote optimal health and alertness, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine says. For this study, nearly 2,300 adults with an average age of 44 completed an online sleep health…  read on >  read on >

Strapping a mask to your face can make for a happier marriage, a new study suggests. Relationships with partners flourish if a person with sleep apnea starts using a continuous positive air pressure (CPAP) machine on a regular basis, researchers found. Snoring is one of the most recognizable symptoms of sleep apnea, and it can reach timber-rattling levels for some. This means both the person with sleep apnea and their partner often lose lots of sleep to the health problem. “No one is at their best when they aren’t sleeping,” said lead researcher Wendy Troxel, a senior behavioral scientist with RAND Corp. “In an age where we see couples going through ‘sleep divorces,’ and roughly 50% of marriages end in actual divorce, recognizing how healthy sleep can contribute to healthy relationships is imperative,” Troxel added. Nearly 30 million Americans have sleep apnea, a chronic disease in which the upper airway collapses repeatedly during sleep, disrupting normal breathing, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine. The new study involved 36 couples in which a person with sleep apnea started using a CPAP machine, which uses mild levels of air pressure delivered through a mask to keep the throat open. After three months, the couples reported higher levels of relationship satisfaction and lower levels of conflict if the CPAP machine was regularly used.  “Recognizing that sleep…  read on >  read on >

The wee hours of the morning could be the most dangerous for someone on the brink of suicide or homicide, a new study shows. There’s a five-fold greater risk for suicide and an eight-fold greater risk for homicide between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. for those awake in the still of the night, researchers report. “Disrupted sleep may acutely impair rational thought, which can drive impulsive behaviors in vulnerable individuals,” said lead study author Andrew Tubbs, a researcher in the University of Arizona’s Sleep and Health Research Program. Statistics show that nearly 19% of suicides and 36% of homicides take place at night, researchers said in background notes. For the new study, they analyzed 15 years of U.S. data involving more than 78,000 suicides and 50,000 homicides. Teens and young adults were three times more likely to commit suicide in the still of the night, researchers reported May 29 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. Nighttime risk of suicide is also higher for people who’ve been drinking and those who’ve been fighting with their partner. However, being awake late did not seem to increase suicide risk among people with a history of suicidal thoughts or prior attempts, results show. The risk for homicide did not vary by age, but young adults accounted for more than half of all homicide victims at night. Waking in the…  read on >  read on >

People who regularly stay up until the wee hours of the morning could be harming their mental health, a new study finds. Regardless of whether people were morning larks or a night owls, they tended to have higher rates of mental and behavioral disorders if they stayed up late, researchers found. The mental health risk associated with staying up late cropped up regardless of a person’s preferred sleep timing, also known as their chronotype. “We found that alignment with your chronotype is not crucial here, and that really it’s being up late that is not good for your mental health,” said senior researcher Jamie Zeitzer, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford Medicine, in California. “The big unknown is why.” These findings run counter to previous studies which found that people who stick to their chronotype tend to be healthier, Zeitzer added. For the study, researchers tracked nearly 74,000 middle-aged and older people in the United Kingdom. More than 19,000 said they were morning types, while about 6,800 identified as evening types. The rest fell somewhere in the middle. The participants were asked to wear an activity monitor to track their sleep over seven days. Their preferred sleep timing was then compared to both their actual sleep and their mental health, which was determined through their health records. Analysis showed that night owls…  read on >  read on >

Ambulances meant for people having a mental health crisis could help folks get the care they need with less confrontation and friction, a new study says. People transported to the hospital by a “psychiatric ambulance” required fewer restraints or coercive measures than those transported by the police, according to results from an Amsterdam program. In 2014, Amsterdam introduced a psychiatric ambulance service operated by a trained driver and a psychiatric nurse. It looks just the same as a typical ambulance, but inside it’s stripped of visible medical equipment to create a more tranquil environment. Patients can sit upright or lay on a stretcher, with a soft Velcro restraint or sedative medication available as needed. Researchers compared nearly 500 police transports in the four months prior to introduction of the psychiatric ambulance, and more than 650 ambulance transports that occurred within six months after the service started. They found stark differences when it came to the use of restraints: 86% of people transported by ambulance were not restrained, compared with 57% of those transported by police. 42% of people transported by police were handcuffed, compared to less than 1% who went by ambulance. However, the occurrence of aggressive events was similarly low in both the ambulance and police groups, around 2%. The rates of hospital admission were similar between the two groups, 36% for ambulance versus…  read on >  read on >

America’s college students seem to be more stressed than ever, with a new report finding a sharp rise in cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and acute stress disorder (ASD) on campuses across the country. In a “national sample of U.S. college students, we found a notable increase in the prevalence of PTSD and ASD,” concluded a team led by Yusan Zhai, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Rates of PTSD rose by 4.1 percentage points between 2017 and 2022, and stress disorder diagnoses rose by 0.5 percentage points, the data showed. Their findings were published May 30 in the journal JAMA Network Open. As Zhai’s group explained, any number of events — campus shootings, sexual assault, physical violence and natural disasters, for example — can trigger either PTSD or ASD. PTSD can lead to more persistent symptoms, while ASD’s impact may be more transient — anywhere from a few days to a month. In their study, the Birmingham researchers focused on 2017 through 2022, “a period marked by escalated societal stressors and global health crises,” including, of course, the pandemic. They looked at data from the ongoing Healthy Minds study, which tracks the mental health of over 392,000 people attending 332 different colleges and universities across the United States. About 58% of the students were female. The data showed that during the study…  read on >  read on >