High fitness levels may reduce the risk of death from cardiovascular disease in men with high blood pressure, according to a 29-year study published today in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, a journal of the ESC. Nearly 1.3 billion adults aged 30 to 79 years worldwide have high blood pressure (hypertension). Hypertension is a major risk factor for heart attack and stroke and a leading cause of premature death globally. Previous studies have shown that high cardiorespiratory fitness is linked with greater longevity. This study examined the interplay between blood pressure, fitness and risk of death from cardiovascular disease. The study included 2,280 men aged 42 to 61 years living in eastern Finland and enrolled in the Kuopio Ischaemic Heart Disease Risk Factor Study. Baseline measurements were conducted between 1984 and 1989. These included blood pressure and cardiorespiratory fitness, which was assessed as maximal oxygen uptake while riding ...
When Marina Noordegraaf was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at age 49, she noticed when it came to treatment decisions, she sometimes felt powerless. She observed that she herself played an active role in communicating her hopes and wishes to her healthcare professionals, which were not automatically taken into account. She took back control by taking her own hope seriously, prescribing her own recipe of “hopamine,” a self-invented word representing the uniquely personal set of hopes, desires, experiences, and skills of each individual with Parkinson’s disease, which is caused by a dopamine deficit. Marina Noordegraaf, MSc, together with a team of healthcare professionals at Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, led by Professor Bastiaan R. Bloem, MD, PhD, recognized the importance of conveying the message of hopamine to the broader Parkinson’s world. In a commentary published in the Journal of Parkinson’s Disease, the authors propose that ...
If you have type 2 diabetes, drinking more coffee, tea or plain water may lower your risk of dying prematurely from any cause by about 25%, a new study found. However, drinking more sugar-sweetened beverages raised the risk of heart disease by 25% and the risk of dying from a heart attack or another cardiovascular event by 29%, the study said. Research has shown cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death for people with type 2 diabetes. “Certain beverages are absolutely more beneficial than others, depending on which type of beverage you’re comparing,” said study author Qi Sun, an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. “Based on our study I would rank black coffee, unsweetened tea and plain water higher than low-fat milk, fruit juice or artificially sweetened beverages,” he said. “Sugar-sweetened beverages like ...
Nurses exposed to 40 minutes of bright light before their night shifts feel less fatigued and make fewer errors at work, according to a study led by McGill University. The nurses also slept better after their shifts. “Healthcare workers are experiencing high levels of fatigue due to staffing shortages, difficult schedules, and heavy workloads. Further, the cost of medical errors has been estimated at tens of billions of dollars per year in North America,” says Jay Olson, the senior author of the recent study in Sleep Health, who completed his PhD at McGill University and is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto. “Our study shows that feasible changes, such as getting light exposure before the night shift, may help reduce fatigue and its effects on performance at work, something which could benefit both the nurses and their patients.” Light exposure leads to a significant reduction ...
by John Pinching Brachytherapy is a precise type of radiotherapy that can be used to treat several cancers Elekta has announced that around two million brachytherapy treatments have been delivered by healthcare providers using the company’s Flexitron therapy. Brachytherapy is a very precise type of radiotherapy that can be used to treat a wide variety of cancers. Also known as interventional radiotherapy, it sends a high level of radiation directly onto the tumour, while also minimising exposure to healthy tissue. The treatment has been administered at a high dose rate (HDR) at several locations. One of the most notable sites – Amsterdam University Medical Centers (Amsterdam UMC) – recently contributed to the significant milestone by acquiring the 1,000th Flexitron treatment to be manufactured at Elekta’s production facility in Veenendaal. Indeed, Amsterdam UMC has been providing brachytherapy treatments for more than four decades, using earlier generation brachy afterloaders and Flexitron. The ...
By Nadine Yousif & Robin Levinson-King BBC News The US Supreme Court has extended until Friday a temporary block on limits to access of a popular abortion pill. A Texas judge suspended approval of abortion drug mifepristone on 7 April, questioning its safety. Parts of that decision were upheld on appeal, prompting the Biden administration to make an emergency request to the Supreme Court. It’s the most significant such case since the Supreme Court last year ended the nationwide right to abortion. The pill – used in more than half of abortions in the US – was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) more than two decades ago. Here’s how we got here. What has happened so far? Earlier this month, a federal judge in Texas issued a preliminary injunction revoking the FDA’s approval for the drug while he hears a lawsuit brought by a group of ...
The outbreak of Covid-19 presented many dangers for children, and a new study suggests increased illicit substance ingestions were among them. In the first month of the pandemic in 2020, a 25% increase in overall ingestions occurred among children under 6 years old in the United States, according to the study published Friday in JAMA Network Open. Those numbers grew by 1.8% more per month than they did before the pandemic, the study said. “The immediate and sustained increase in opioids ingestions occurred during the largest ever rise in adult overdose deaths, largely driven by synthetic opioids,” said lead study author Dr. Brittany Raffa, a clinical instructor in pediatrics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a National Research Service Award primary care research fellow. The study looked at data from 7,659 children under age 6 who were treated for ingestion of amphetamines, benzodiazepines, cannabis, cocaine, ethanol and ...
What you eat might influence when you go to sleep, according to a new study of elite female college athletes. Researchers will present their work this week at the American Physiology Summit, the flagship annual meeting of the American Physiological Society (APS), in Long Beach, California. The study revealed that athletes who consumed more carbohydrates and vitamins B12 and C tended to go to sleep earlier and wake earlier than those who consumed less of these nutrients. According to the researchers, these nutrients might increase synthesis of vital hormones that regulate sleep, including serotonin and melatonin. “For athletes, success is measured not only by readiness to perform but also resiliency on and off the field,” said the study’s first author Lauren Rentz, a doctoral student at West Virginia University. “We know that sleep helps the body heal from daily physical and mental stress and influences future physical and mental ...
Although many people admire the actions of people who engage in acts of extraordinary altruism, like altruistic organ donors, bone marrow donors, and heroes who rescue people from fires or accidents, they are also often mystified at what motivates these altruists to act. Published in Nature Communications, a new paper from a team of Georgetown researchers aims to answer this question by mapping out the psychological profiles of a range of extreme real-world altruists, like heroic rescuers, humanitarian aid workers, and people who donate organs or bone marrow to strangers at no benefit to themselves. “After evaluating more than 300 extreme altruists, and comparing them to a baseline cohort of typical adults, we found that exceedingly generous people are best distinguished from typical adults by their unselfish traits and preferences,” said Abigail Marsh, the paper’s senior author. “But they are not different in a lot of other ways. They are not ...
The blood–brain barrier (BBB) is a stringent, nearly impenetrable layer of cells that guards the brain, protecting the vital organ from hazards in the bloodstream such as toxins or bacteria and allowing only a very limited set of small molecules, such as nutrients, to pass through. This layer of protection, however, makes it difficult for researchers to study the brain and to design drugs that can treat brain disorders. Now, a new study from Caltech has identified a previously unknown mechanism by which certain viral vectors—protein shells engineered to carry various desired cargo—can cross through the BBB. This mechanistic insight may provide a new approach to designing viral vectors for research and therapeutic applications. Understanding this and other new mechanisms could also give insight into how the brain’s defenses may be exploited by emergent pathogens, enabling researchers to prepare methods to block them. The research was conducted in the laboratory of ...
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