From a friendly game of soccer to sweating it solo in the gym, most of us know that exercise is good for our health. But beyond the obvious physical benefits, research led by UniSA expert in sports sociology Dr. Katja Siefken shows that sport can also protect us from developing serious mental health disorders.
Read More

A team of Brazilian scientists discovered a puzzling new virus made of genetic material never seen before. But the virus won’t pose a serious health threat to humanity since it seems to only hunt amoebas.
Read More

Popular diets low in carbs and high in fat and protein might be good for the waistline, but a new UNLV study shows that just the opposite may help to alleviate the hospital-acquired infection Clostridioides difficile.
Read More

Nearly half of all U.S. adults say they can’t live without their smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center. But what happens when our fondness for the latest electronic gadgets creates more pain than gain?
Read More

The UN health agency on Wednesday cautioned it was “way too early” to say whether COVID-19 might have peaked or when it might end, following a drop in new cases.
Read More

Around the country, the collective voice of eight directors of health workforce research centers came together to call for a reforming of laws and regulations that limit the practice of health professionals.
Read More

A decade-spanning trial found that for patients with antineutrophil cytoplasmic antibody (ANCA)-associated vasculitis, two common methods of treatment actually do not have an impact on their long-term survival. The study, called PEXIVAS, was co-led by Peter A. Merkel, MD, MPH, chief of Rheumatology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, and was the largest ever conducted in vasculitis. It demonstrated that survival and progression to kidney failure (with the need for dialysis) for patients with ANCA-associated vasculitis remained virtually unchanged whether or not they underwent plasma exchange or if they took approximately half the typically prescribed dosage of oral glucocorticoids—which are commonly referred to as “steroids.” The study was published today in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Read More

A common variation in a human gene that affects the brain’s reward processing circuit increases vulnerability to the rewarding effects of the main psychoactive ingredient of cannabis in adolescent females, but not males, according to preclinical research by Weill Cornell Medicine investigators. As adolescence represents a highly sensitive period of brain development with the highest risk for initiating cannabis use, these findings in mice have important implications for understanding the influence of genetics on cannabis dependence in humans.
Read More

The emergency department is being increasingly utilized as a patient’s best or only treatment option for opioid use disorder (OUD). New analysis in Annals of Emergency Medicine shows that the prevalence of patients who visited emergency departments at four Indiana hospital systems for repeat opioid-related emergencies jumped from 8.8 percent of all opioid-related visits in 2012 to 34.1 percent in 2017—nearly a four-fold increase in just five years.
Read More

A number of test kits sent out by US health authorities to labs across the country to diagnose the deadly novel coronavirus are faulty, a senior official said Wednesday.
Read More