Have a hard time looking others in the eye? You aren’t alone, Canadian researchers report. Eye-to-eye contact rarely occurs when two people are talking, they found. “We discovered that participants spent only about 12% of conversation time in interactive looking, meaning that they gazed at each other’s faces simultaneously for just 12% of the interaction duration,” said lead researcher Florence Mayrand, a doctoral student with the McGill University department of psychology in Montreal. “Even more surprisingly, within those interactions, participants engaged in mutual eye-to-eye contact only 3.5% of the time,” Mayrand added in a university news release. But when someone does look you in the eye, take note — the gesture communicates nonverbal information that’s vital for future interaction, the researchers noted. For the study, the research team paired up participants and presented them with an imaginary survival scenario. In this scenario, they had to rank a list of items in order of their usefulness for survival, all while wearing mobile eye-tracking glasses. Researchers analyzed how often participants looked at each others’ eyes and mouths, as well as whether they followed the other person’s gaze. During the interactions, participants spent more time looking away than looking at their partner’s faces, researchers found. When they did look at each others’ faces, they looked equally often at the mouth and the eyes, and spent little time in…  read on >  read on >

A pregnant woman’s mental health might have profound effects on the mind of her unborn child, a new evidence review warns. Children appear to be at higher risk for mental health and behavior issues if their moms were highly stressed, anxious or depressed during pregnancy, researchers report. In particular, children were more likely to have ADHD symptoms or exhibit aggressive or hostile behavior if their moms reported more anxiety, depression or stress while pregnant. “Our research suggests that psychological distress during the pregnancy period has a small but persistent effect on children’s risk for aggressive, disinhibited and impulsive behaviors,” said researcher Irene Tung, an assistant professor of psychology at California State University, Dominguez Hills. For the review, Tung and her colleagues pooled and analyzed data from 55 studies involving more than 45,000 participants. All the studies measured women’s psychological distress during pregnancy, and then later measured their children’s “externalizing behaviors” — mental health symptoms directed toward others. The researchers also included only research where the mothers’ distress was measured both during and after pregnancy, to control for the potential effects of postpartum mental health problems on developing newborns. They found that even after controlling for mom’s postnatal distress, psychological symptoms during pregnancy independently raise children’s risk of mental health problems. The effect held true for both boys and girls. It was strongest in early childhood…  read on >  read on >

FRIDAY, Nov. 17, 2023 (Healthday News) — Scams are nothing new and older folks are known to be vulnerable to them, but a new poll adds another sad fact to the familiar story. Among people aged 50 to 80, those who reported being in fair or poor physical or mental health, those with disabilities and those who rated their memory as fair or poor were more likely than their healthier peers to say they’d been the victim of fraud. The study “adds important new data to ongoing efforts to reduce the devastating toll of scams on older adults’ finances and well-being,” poll director Dr. Jeffrey Kullgren said in a news release. “We also found that no matter what their health status, older adults feel strongly that government and businesses should do more to educate and protect against scams.” Overall, three of every four older adults said they have experienced a fraud attempt by phone, text, email, mail or online in the past two years, while 39% said they’ve been victims of at least one scam. But the poll uncovered an especially strong link between poor health and their vulnerability to scams – both being able to spot one and becoming the victim of one. Even if they’d hadn’t been scammed, older adults with health issues were more likely to lack confidence in their ability to…  read on >  read on >

Good news is fun to share, but you get more of a charge from it if you keep it under your hat for a while, a new study says. Keeping good news a secret for a bit before telling someone else appears to make people feel more energized and alive, according to findings published Nov. 13 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research provides a positive spin on secrecy, which up to now has only been researched in the context of hiding bad news, said lead researcher Michael Slepian, an associate professor of business at Columbia University in New York City. “Is secrecy inherently bad for our well-being, or do the negative effects of secrecy tend to stem from keeping negative secrets?” Slepian said in an American Psychological Association news release. “While negative secrets are far more common than positive secrets, some of life’s most joyful occasions begin as secrets, including secret marriage proposals, pregnancies, surprise gifts and exciting news.” In all, 3 in 4 people say the first thing they would do upon learning good news is share it with someone, according to a survey of 500 people conducted prior to the study. But five experiments with more than 2,500 participants indicate that keeping a positive secret could have mental health benefits. In one experiment, participants were shown a list of…  read on >  read on >

New mothers living in states with generous mandated paid family and medical leave are less likely to experience postpartum depression, a new study indicates. They also are more likely to breastfeed their newborns. “By increasing mothers’ ability to breastfeed and reducing postpartum-depressive symptoms, strong state paid family and medical leave laws provide a major boost to the health of postpartum women and infants,” said senior study author Joe Feinglass, a research professor of general internal medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. The United States remains one of the few wealthy countries without federally mandated paid parental leave. For this study, researchers used data gathered by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to compare pregnancy outcomes in 43 states, taking into account each state’s level of support for parental leave. Women living in the eight states with the most generous paid family leave had a 9% greater chance of breastfeeding at six months postpartum, compared to the 26 states with little to no paid leave. And those living in states with moderate leave coverage had a 10% lower likelihood of developing symptoms related to postpartum depression. “Mental health conditions are the leading cause of maternal mortality in the U.S., with perinatal depression symptoms affecting about one in eight new mothers,” researcher Dr. Madeline Perry, a fourth-year resident in obstetrics and…  read on >  read on >

WEDNESDAY, Nov. 15, 2023 (Healthday News) — As U.S. suicide rates continue to rise, new government data shows older men have become the most susceptible. In a report published Wednesday, researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found there were about 30 suicide deaths for every 100,000 men aged 55 and older in 2021. That number is more than double the overall rate of just over 14 suicide deaths for every 100,000 people that year. The older a man, the greater his risk for suicide: Those 85 and older saw 56 suicide deaths for every 100,000 people, a statistic that surpassed any other age group. Suicide is complex, Dr. Yeates Conwell, a psychiatry professor at the University of Rochester, told CNN. Five factors can fuel suicide risk — depression, disease, disability, disconnection and deadly means — and these risk factors can be “relatively more salient for older adults,” he said. “Imagine a Venn diagram with these five circles, each representing one of those ‘Ds’ that overlap. The more of the intersecting circles one is in, the greater the risk,” said Conwell, who also leads a geriatric psychiatry program and co-directs the university’s Center for the Study and Prevention of Suicide. A combination of more physical illness and disability, along with more social isolation and more loss, leaves older adults more vulnerable to suicide, he…  read on >  read on >

Pesticide exposure appears to be linked to lower sperm concentrations in men around the world, a new large-scale evidence review has concluded. A review of 25 studies spanning nearly 50 years found consistent links between lower sperm concentrations and two widely used classes of insecticides, organophosphates and N-methyl carbamates, researchers said. “This review is the most comprehensive review to date,” said senior researcher Melissa Perry, dean of the George Mason University College of Public Health in Fairfax, Va. “The evidence available has reached a point that we must take regulatory action to reduce insecticide exposure.” Perry’s team systematically reviewed 25 human studies of occupational and environmental insecticide exposure, conducted over the past half-century. The findings, published Nov. 15 in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, revealed evidence of robust associations between insecticide exposure and lower sperm concentration. “Understanding how insecticides affect sperm concentration in humans is critical given their ubiquity in the environment and documented reproductive hazards,” said co-researcher Lauren Ellis, a doctoral student at Northeastern University. “Insecticides are a concern for public health and all men, who are exposed primarily through the consumption of contaminated food and water.” More information The Mayo Clinic has more on healthy sperm. SOURCE: George Mason University, news release, Nov. 15, 2023  read on >

Controlled forest burns can prevent the sort of high-intensity wildfires that have plagued the Western U.S. and Canada as a result of climate change, a new study argues. A low-intensity fire in the mixed conifer forests of California provides an estimated 60% reduction in the risk of a catastrophic wildfire, and that effect lasts at least six years, researchers report in the journal Science Advances. Controlled burns also could provide a smaller but still significant reduction in risk in oak-dominated forests, researchers added. “I’m hopeful that policymakers will rely on this work as motivation and support for the scale-up of beneficial fire as a key strategy in preventing wildfire catastrophes,” co-author Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, said in a Stanford news release. “Beneficial fire is not without its own risks – but what our study shows is just how large and long-lasting the benefits are of this crucial risk reduction strategy,” Wara said. The U.S. Forest Service has proposed treating about 50 million acres of forest through a mixture of “fuel treatment strategies,” which can include burns as well as thinning, pruning and logging to reduce the amount of combustible vegetation, researchers noted. For the study, researchers reviewed two decades of satellite monitoring of wildfires covering nearly 25 million acres of California…  read on >  read on >

The party drug and anesthetic ketamine is starting to show promise in trials as a treatment for depression. But new research also suggests that hundreds of U.S. clinics may be misleading consumers, hawking off-label and unapproved ketamine to treat a variety of mental health and pain conditions. “These are expensive treatments for which patients generally must pay out of pocket and the evidence base is often not robust for many of the advertised uses,” said co-lead study author Michael DiStefano, an assistant professor in the department of clinical pharmacy at Colorado University’s Skaggs School of Pharmacy. “It is important that people considering these treatments are provided with an accurate and balanced statement of the possible risks and benefits.” In the study published Nov. 7 in the journal JAMA Network Open, the researchers noted that ketamine delivered intravenously is not yet approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat any mental health condition, but it is sometimes used off-label for such use. Ketamine in pill form isn’t approved to treat anything, either, but is often advertised to produce a hallucinogenic experience at home, the researchers said. Using six national ketamine databases, DiStefano’s team tracked how ketamine is being sold. They identified online direct-to-consumer ketamine advertisers who had websites plus at least one clinic in Maryland. The researchers found 17 advertisers operating across 26 locations…  read on >  read on >

The gap in life expectancy between American men and women is now the biggest it has been since the mid-1990s — almost six years. The pandemic and opioid overdoses are key factors in the gender difference in longevity, said researchers from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and Harvard University T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “There’s been a lot of research into the decline in life expectancy in recent years, but no one has systematically analyzed why the gap between men and women has been widening since 2010,” said first study author Dr. Brandon Yan, a resident in internal medicine at UCSF. In 2021, the gender gap in life expectancy rose to 5.8 years, its largest since 1996, he and his colleagues report. In 2010, the gap was its smallest in recent history, 4.8 years. Life expectancy in the United States was 76.1 years in 2021. That’s down from 78.8 years in 2019 and 77 years in 2020. Researchers cited the pandemic as the biggest factor in the widening gender gap; it took a heavier toll on men. Unintentional injuries and poisonings (mostly drug overdoses), accidents and suicide were other contributors. Another factor in Americans’ shrinking lifespan: so-called “deaths of despair.” That’s a nod to the rise in deaths owing to such causes as suicide, drug use disorders and alcoholic liver disease. These…  read on >  read on >