The number of American teens who smoke or have even tried smoking has dropped dramatically compared to a generation ago, with less than 1% now saying they light up cigarettes daily. Researchers tracked data on students in grades 9 through 12 from 1991 through to 2021. They report a 16-fold decline in daily cigarette use — from 9.8% of teens saying they smoked daily in 1991 to just 0.6% by 2021. Even trying smoking is clearly unpopular now: Whereas about 70% of teens surveyed in 1991 said they had “ever” smoked, that number fell to less than 18% by 2021, a fourfold decline. “The substantial decrease in cigarette use among U.S. adolescents spanning three decades is an encouraging public health achievement,” said senior study author Panagiota Kitsantas, of Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. “This decrease underscores the importance of continued vigilance, research and intervention to further reduce tobacco use and its associated harms,” Kitsantas said in a university news release. She’s chair of population health and social medicine at the university’s Schmidt College of Medicine. The findings are based on federal government surveys comprising more than 226,000 teens. The study is published online in the winter 2023 issue of the Ochsner Journal. Other findings from the study: “Frequent” smoking (on at least 20 days of the prior month) fell from 12.7% of teens in…  read on >  read on >

U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin remains hospitalized while recovering from complications related to a December surgery to treat prostate cancer, the Pentagon announced Tuesday. His doctors at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Dr. John Maddox, director of trauma medical, and Dr. Gregory Chesnut, director of the Center for Prostate Disease Research, said the 70-year-old is expected to make a full recovery once his complications have cleared. “His prostate cancer was detected early, and his prognosis is excellent,” the doctors said in a hospital statement.  Austin first underwent minimally invasive prostate cancer surgery on Dec. 22 following routine screening in November, his doctors said. He went home the next day to recover. But on New Year’s Day, “Austin was admitted to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center with complications from the December 22 procedure, including nausea with severe abdominal, hip, and leg pain,” his doctors said. “Initial evaluation revealed a urinary tract infection. On January 2, the decision was made to transfer him to the ICU for close monitoring and a higher level of care.” “Further evaluation revealed abdominal fluid collections impairing the function of his small intestines. This resulted in the backup of his intestinal contents, which was treated by placing a tube through his nose to drain his stomach,” the doctors said. “He has progressed steadily throughout his stay,” Maddox and Chesnut added.…  read on >  read on >

Could the immune system play a role in why some women become depressed during and after a pregnancy?   Swedish researchers have uncovered a “bidirectional relationship” between pregnancy-linked depression and autoimmune diseases such as psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, ulcerative colitis and celiac disease. In other words, women who experienced depression specific to a pregnancy were more prone to developing these illnesses, and women who already had an autoimmune disease were more likely to develop pregnancy-linked depression, the study found. “Our study suggests that there’s an immunological mechanism behind perinatal depression and that autoimmune diseases should be seen as a risk factor for this kind of depression,” concluded study lead author Emma Bränn. She’s a researcher at the Institute of Environmental Medicine at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. Autoimmune diseases occur when the immune system goes awry and begins attacking healthy tissue. In their research, Bränn’s group analyzed data on 1.3 million pregnancies in Sweden between 2001 and 2013.  A little more than 55,000 women in the database had developed depression during their pregnancy or within a year of delivery. Looking at the women’s health histories, the researchers found that those who’d been diagnosed with an autoimmune disease were 30% more likely to develop pregnancy-linked depression, compared to women without such diagnoses. The reverse was also true: Women with pregnancy-linked depression were 30% more likely to develop…  read on >  read on >

Depression that emerges around the time of pregnancy raises a woman’s risk for suicide sharply and for many years, new Swedish research shows. The study found that a new mom’s odds for suicide soars seven-fold in the year after a diagnosis of perinatal depression — depression that arises just before, during or after a pregnancy. The increase in risk isn’t limited to the short-term, however. Between five to 18 years after delivery, the risk of suicide in women with perinatal depression was still more than double that of women unaffected by the illness, noted a team led by Dr. Songhao Lu of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.  They published their findings Jan. 9 in JAMA Network Open. According to background information supplied by Lu’s team, the period just after delivery of a new baby is a particularly dangerous time for suicide.  “In fact, 13% to 36% of maternal deaths are attributable to suicide,” the study authors noted. “The consequences are devastating to the newborn and the family.” Many studies have already shown that suicide risks rise in the weeks and months after a woman suffers perinatal depression. But what about the much longer term? In their study, Lu’s team analyzed Swedish national health data for 2001-2017. They compared the suicide rate of a group of almost 87,000 women diagnosed with perinatal depression to that of…  read on >  read on >

“School spirit” appears to provide long-lasting mental health benefits for Black teens, new research finds. School connectedness – the degree to which students feel like part of to their school community – is a protective factor against depression and aggressive behavior later in life among Black students, researchers report in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence. “Our data provide fairly strong evidence for the idea that the experiences Black adolescents have in their school impacts their long-term mental health,” lead researcher Adrian Gale, an assistant professor in the Rutgers University School of Social Work, said in a news release. Lots of research has been conducted on the benefits of school connectedness for well-being and physical health, but most studies have focused on white teenagers, researchers said. To take a closer look at Black students, researchers analyzed data from an ongoing study following nearly 5,000 children born in large U.S. cities between 1998 and 2000. Of those kids, nearly 1,700 were Black children interviewed at ages 9 and 15, researchers said. The kids’ caregivers also were interviewed at the 15-year follow-up. The children were asked at age 9 to rate how often they felt “part of your school, close to people at your school, happy to be at your school, and safe at school.” Six years later, the kids’ caregivers were asked whether their children often…  read on >  read on >

People often sit on secrets that gnaw away at them because they’re worried others will judge them harshly. But those fears are overblown, a series of psychological experiments demonstrates. Folks tended to be much more charitable than expected when told a secret considered shameful by the person who held it, researchers found. Secret holders consistently overestimate the reactions others will have if dirty laundry is aired, said co-researcher Amit Kumar, an assistant professor of marketing with the University of Texas at Austin. “When we’re thinking about conveying negative information about ourselves, we’re focused on the content of the message,” Kumar said in a university news release. “But the recipients are thinking about the positive traits required to reveal this secret, such as trust, honesty and vulnerability.” Kumar and his colleagues conducted a series of 12 experiments designed to accurately assess the fallout from revealing secrets. For example, they asked several groups to imagine revealing a negative secret, and then predict how their confidante would judge them. Each participant then revealed their secret to that person, and the confidante was asked how they responded to learning the secret. The expected judgment was consistently worse than how the confidante actually responded, Kumar said. This overestimation held for secrets divulged to a wide range of people – strangers, acquaintances, friends, family members and romantic partners. “Their expectations were…  read on >  read on >