For many, the holidays are a time when you connect with others and share time with loved ones. But for some, the holidays are a painful exercise in loneliness. While a Northwestern Medicine study published last spring found loneliness is more prevalent in both younger and older adults, those feelings intensify around the holidays, said Eileen Graham, who co-authored that study. And those feelings are most pronounced for the oldest. “What was striking was how consistent the uptick in loneliness is in older adulthood,” Graham noted when the study was published. “There’s a wealth of evidence that loneliness is related to poorer health, so we wanted to better understand who is lonely and why people are becoming lonelier as they age out of midlife so we can hopefully start finding ways to mitigate it.”   One way to ease loneliness for these folks is to invite them into your home. “Young adults who are living in unfamiliar cities and setting up new social networks will often find ways to celebrate with Friendsgivings because they might not be coming home for the holidays,” said Graham, an associate professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Others include older adults who have lost friends or spouses and, finally, people who have fewer resources.” How else can folks deal with those heightened feelings of isolation during the…  read on >  read on >

How long Americans can expect to live varies dramatically — and the gap continues to widen. A new report says health inequalities have, in essence, created 10 Americas. These mutually exclusive populations are divided along familiar fault lines, including race, ethnicity, income and address.  While life expectancy rose in nine of 10 Americas between 2000 and 2010, only six saw gains between 2010 and 2019, according to the report.  And it plummeted in all 10 in 2021, the first year of the pandemic. In 2021, Asian Americans had the longest life expectancy at birth — 84 years.  That’s two decades more than the group with the lowest life expectancy: American Indians and Alaska Natives living in the West, who were expected to live 63.6 years.  “The extent and magnitude of health disparities in American society are truly alarming in a country with the wealth and resources of the USA,” said Christopher Murray, director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. “These disparities reflect the unequal and unjust distribution of resources and opportunities that have profound consequences on well-being and longevity, especially in marginalized populations.” Murray is senior author of the report, which was published Nov. 21 in The Lancet, a British health journal. It builds on an earlier study that identified “Eight Americas” based on race, geography, ethnicity, per capital income…  read on >  read on >

Three out of four times, your Facebook friends don’t read past the headline when they share a link to political content.  Experts say that’s somewhat surprising — and downright scary.  People who share without clicking may be unwittingly aiding hostile adversaries aiming to sow seeds of division and distrust, warned S. Shyam Sundar, a professor of media effects at Penn State University. “Superficial processing of headlines and blurbs can be dangerous if false data are being shared and not investigated,” said Sundar, corresponding author of the new study published Nov. 19 in the journal Nature Human Behavior.  “Disinformation or misinformation campaigns aim to sow the seeds of doubt or dissent in a democracy — the scope of these efforts came to light in the 2016 and 2020 elections,” he added in a Penn State news release. To learn more about content shared on social media, his team analyzed more than 35 million public posts containing links shared on Facebook between 2017 and 2020. The links included political content from both ends of the spectrum — and it was shared without clicking more often than politically neutral content. While the study was limited to Facebook, researchers said their findings likely apply to other social media platforms as well.  Data for the analysis were provided in collaboration with Facebook’s parent company, Meta.  It included user demographics and…  read on >  read on >

Think of it as collateral damage: Millions of Americans say they have been harmed by a loved one’s drug or alcohol use. One in 3 adults who responded to a new nationwide survey said they had suffered “secondhand harm” from another person’s drinking. And more than 1 in 10 said they had been harmed by a loved one’s drug use.  That’s close to 160 million victims — 113 million hurt by loved one’s drinking and 46 million by their drug use, according to the survey published recently in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.  “There are more harms than people think,” said study co-author William Kerr, of the Alcohol Research Group at the Emeryville, Calif.-based Public Health Institute. “They affect families, relationships and communities.” He said it makes sense that risky drinking and drug use have far-reaching consequences, but researchers only began looking at the secondhand harms of alcohol in recent years. Less has been known about the damage done by a loved one’s drug use. The new study is based on a survey of 7,800 U.S. adults. They were questioned between September 2019 and April 2020, before the pandemic became a factor in Americans’ substance use. People were asked if they had been harmed in any of several ways due to someone else’s substance use.  In all, 34% of respondents said they…  read on >  read on >

Rates of postpartum depression have more than doubled in little over a decade among American women, a new analysis shows. While about 1 in every 10 new moms (9.4%) suffered postpartum depression in 2010, that number rose to almost 1 in every 5 (19%) by 2021, report a team from Kaiser Permanente Southern California. Why the steep rise? Better detection and reporting could be playing a big role, the researchers said. However, rising rates of obesity during pregnancy could also be a factor, since obesity has long known to be a risk factor for postpartum depression. Whatever the reasons, “the prevalence of postpartum depression is high and rising,” said a team led by Dr. Darios Getahun, a Kaiser researcher based in Pasadena, Calif. His team published its findings Nov. 20 in the journal JAMA Network Open. As defined by the researchers, postpartum depression is “a depressive disorder that occurs within 12 months following childbirth.” Like other forms of depression, symptoms include sadness, anxiety and lack of interest in activities that were once pleasurable. Mothers with postpartum depression may fail to bond with their infant, neglect breastfeeding and develop other illnesses. “In severe cases, postpartum depression can lead to suicide or infanticide,” Getahun’s team wrote in the report. In their new analysis, the researchers tracked rates of postpartum depression for more than 442,000 California pregnancies between…  read on >  read on >

Parents can’t monitor everything their kids watch online, but a set of new guidelines may help young people manage their own viewing habits. “Research consistently shows that video content, and the platforms that host it, have the potential to help or harm teens,” said Arthur Evans Jr., CEO of the American Psychological Association (APA).  “It is the shared responsibility of video platforms, content creators, parents, caregivers, educators, policymakers and the technology industry to create an environment where youth can learn and express themselves safely online,” he added in an APA news release. The association announced new recommendations to help parents, policymakers and tech companies give teens the power to manage their own viewing habits. They include steps that can be taken right away, as well as longer-range recommendations for Big Tech and policymakers. For educators: Teach teens to be choosy. Videos can help with homework, teach new skills or hobbies or provide insights into different experiences and cultures, APA points out, calling on schools to teach video literacy. The aim: “To expand [teens’] knowledge and abilities while resisting manipulative platform features designed to prolong their engagement and profit from their attention.” For creators: Modify features that can affect teens’ well-being. Platforms that recommend content to young people, switch between short videos and autoplay content to extend viewing time may lead to abnormal viewing habits and…  read on >  read on >

Drugs already taken by millions of diabetes patients appear to also help slash asthma attacks by up to 70%, new British research shows. The two drugs are metformin, one of the most widely used diabetes medications, and the GLP-1 class of medications that include Ozempic, Mounjaro and Saxenda. A study of nearly 13,000 people with diabetes and asthma found that metformin cut a patient’s odds for asthma attacks by 30%, while adding in a GLP-1 med reduced it by another 40%. The effects appeared to rely on more than just improved in blood sugar control or weight reduction, the authors said, and suggest that metformin and GLP-1s might work directly on airway function to ease asthma. All in all, the findings “suggest potential for repurposing anti-diabetic. drugs to much needed alternative treatments for asthma,” said a team led by Chloe Bloom. She’s a senior lecturer in respiratory epidemiology at Imperial College London. Her team published its findings Nov. 18 in JAMA Internal Medicine. As the researchers explained, there’s long been good reason to suspect that metformin might improve asthmatics’ respiratory health. The drug has anti-inflammatory effects, they said, and it also appears to reverse some of the changes in airways and the “hyper-responsiveness” of airways that asthma brings. The data on GLP-1s shows similar effects: The same cellular receptors that the drugs work on in…  read on >  read on >

Folks who stress-eat fatty foods like cookies, chips and ice cream might be able to protect their health with a nice cup of cocoa or green tea, a new study says. Drinking cocoa that’s high in healthy flavanols along with a fatty meal can counteract some of the impact of fats on the body, particularly the blood vessels, researchers found. “Flavanols are a type of compound that occur in different fruits, vegetables, tea and nuts including berries and unprocessed cocoa,” said lead investigator Rosalind Baynham, a research fellow with the University of Birmingham in the U.K. “Flavanols are known to have health benefits, particularly for regulating blood pressure and protecting cardiovascular health.” For the study, researchers asked young and healthy adults to eat two butter croissants, a slice and a half of cheddar cheese, and half a pint of whole milk for breakfast. The participants also were randomly assigned to drink cocoa either high or low in flavanols. The research team then subjected the participants to a stressful math test, and monitored their blood vessel function and heart activity. “This stress task induced significant increases in heart rate and blood pressure, similar to the stress you may encounter in daily life,” Baynham said in a news releaase. People who ate fatty foods with a low-flavanol drink had reduced blood vessel function when they were placed…  read on >  read on >