“Introduction In 1985, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Margaret M. Heckler issued the Report of the Secretary’s Task Force on Black and Minority Health, also known as the Heckler Report. The landmark report found that the Black population had strikingly higher mortality rates than the White population, resulting in almost 60 000 excess deaths a year relative to the White population. Race offers no intrinsic biological reason for those categorized as Black individuals to have worse outcomes than White individuals, indicating therefore that these disparities are driven by the burden of acquired risk factors, influence of … Read More
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What a subway killing reveals about New York City’s revolving-door approach to mental illness and homelessness. “There are more than two hundred thousand residents of New York City living with severe mental illness; roughly five per cent of them are homeless. That’s thirteen thousand people with schizophrenia, major depressive and bipolar disorders, or other significant mental- or behavioral-health diagnoses, all of whom regularly spend the night at a shelter, in the subway, on the street. They’re the ones you recognize—the people whom, for the past fifty years, every mayor has either tried to help, harass, or hide from view. Rudy … Read More
“Exposure to firearm violence is associated with lasting consequences for youth and their loved ones. Indirect exposure (eg, witnessing violence) and direct exposure (eg, surviving an assault) can influence mental and physical health outcomes over the life course. In a subset of individuals, exposure is associated with the future enactment of firearm violence, feeding cycles of firearm violence at the community level. [..] At the same time, efforts must directly target the systemic inequities that concentrate firearm violence exposure among Black and Hispanic youth. Racial and ethnic disparities in these outcomes are profound and longstanding. In the study by Lanfear … Read More
An excerpt: Introduction [..] Although an increasing number of studies have focused on the impact of single cardiometabolic diseases on cognitive aging, only a few have considered the associations between their frequent co-occurrence and the loss of cognitive health. Additionally, previous studies of cardiometabolic multimorbidity and cognitive ageing have been limited to only examining individuals from European regions. These countries have a lower prevalence of individuals with cardiometabolic diseases than some countries in Asia, which could potentially lead to different effect estimations regarding the associations between these types of disease and cognitive ageing. [..] Methods This pooled multicohort study utilised data … Read More
“Tens of millions of Americans are suffering pain. But chronic pain is not just a result of car accidents and workplace injuries but is also linked to troubled childhoods, loneliness, job insecurity and a hundred other pressures on working families. [..] [..] cluster of tightly woven problems that hold back our people and our country: childhood trauma, educational failure, addiction, mental health issues, homelessness, loneliness, family breakdown, unemployment — and, we increasingly recognize, physical pain. “People’s lives are coming apart, and this leads to huge increases in physical pain,” said Angus Deaton, a Nobel Prize winner in economics who with … Read More
“Oral anticoagulation reduces thromboembolic events in patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation (AF); however, underuse of anticoagulation is a major issue in treating patients with nonvalvular AF at high stroke risk. Prior data from the American College of Cardiology’s (ACC) Practice Innovation and Clinical Excellence Registry (PINNACLE Registry) has found approximately 40% of patients are not receiving anticoagulants, with little change over time, despite the availability of the nonvitamin K antagonists. Studies examining the reasons for nonuse are sparse. Because underuse may relate to both physician prescribing and patient factors, some studies have looked at physician assessment of the risk of bleeding … Read More
“Herpes care providers and advocates have a variety of concerns, including vaccines and drugs. Although there have been antivirals available for 40 years, they only temporarily suppress the virus. And there are no vaccines; the last major effort to develop one, from GSK, failed in 2010, and there have been few efforts since, though BioNTech and Moderna have recently shown interest in deploying mRNA to that effect. More basically, though, advocates lament that it is difficult for them to even find out if they have the virus. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention does not recommend that standard STI panels include … Read More
“[Hadley] Freeman, the author of a riveting new memoir, “Good Girls: A Study and Story of Anorexia,” became sick during the 1990s, but over the last few years, the incidence of anorexia, which predominantly affects preteen and teenage girls, seems to have gone up. “During Covid, a lot of published data showed increases in eating disorders both inpatient and some outpatient as well,” Joanna Steinglass, the director of research at the Eating Disorders Research Clinic at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, told me. This increase was true not only in the United States, where Freeman was born, … Read More
“Sun et al studied more than 8000 cigarette-naive youths from [Population Assessment on Tobacco Use and Health (PATH)] waves 3 to 5. They found that youths who had used e-cigarettes at baseline (wave 3) had higher odds of continued cigarette smoking, but the absolute risks of continued smoking at wave 5 were very small and did not significantly differ by baseline e-cigarette use. Moreover, the prevalence of frequent smoking, defined as 20 or more days in the past 30 days, 2 years later (wave 5) was so low (0.2%), the authors could not model this outcome due to its rarity. In … Read More
“The concept of cardiovascular health (CVH) was proposed by the American Heart Association (AHA) in 2010 and is composed of both lifestyle factors and biological metrics. The original algorithm for evaluating CVH was the Life’s Simple 7 (LS7) score. In 2022, the AHA published the new algorithm for evaluating CVH, the Life’s Essential 8 (LE8) score, on the basis of feedback on the LS7 score and new evidence. The LE8 score adopts a new scoring algorithm and incorporates sleep health into CVH.8 Intriguingly, previous studies have shown that having a higher CVH level was not only associated with a lower … Read More