Smoking doubles the risk of developing rheumatoid arthritis and continuing to smoke after being diagnosed has negative effects on patients. In an Arthritis Care & Research study of patients with rheumatoid arthritis who smoked, certain healthcare factors were linked with a higher likelihood that patients would quit smoking. In the study that included 507 patients…
Psychological stress has been proposed as a risk factor for melanoma, but clinical evidence is limited. A recent British Journal of Dermatology study funded by the European Academy of Dermatology and Venereology looked for a potential link between the death of a partner, which is one of the most stressful life events, and melanoma. The…
BALTIMORE, MD – March 4, 2020 – Using a combination of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to target and sample suspicious prostate tissue along with a standard prostate biopsy is significantly more likely to detect the most aggressive prostate cancers than standard biopsy alone. This finding, published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, could…
Middle school football players greatly reduce the chance of head injuries if they wear padded helmets and use safe tackling and blocking techniques, according to Rutgers researchers. The study was published in the journal Neurosurgery. With youth players representing 70 percent of all amateur and professional football participants, attention is turning to the safety of…
New Haven, Conn. — People can carry hazardous compounds from cigarette smoke that cling to their bodies and clothes and then release those compounds into non-smoking environments — exposing people nearby to cigarettes’ adverse effects, a new study shows. For the last decade, third-hand smoke has been described as the residual contamination from cigarette smoking…
In a study of Americans over age 50 years who died between 2004 and 2014, individuals who were characterized as lonely based on survey results were burdened by more symptoms and received more intense end-of-life care compared with non-lonely people. In the 2,896-participant study, which is published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society,…
Boston, Mass. – Commonly known as the breast cancer genes, the BRCA gene family plays a role in repairing damaged DNA. Inherited mutations in the genes BRCA1 or BRCA2 raise the risk of developing breast, ovarian, prostate and other cancers. Led by clinician-researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), a first-of-its-kind study provided new…
Use of antibiotics during pregnancy does not appear to affect children’s weight in subsequent years, but use during infancy may increase their risk of becoming overweight or obese. The findings come from an analysis published in the journal Obesity. When investigators examined all relevant published studies that looked at the use of antibiotics during pregnancy…
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Wisconsin have demonstrated that using artificial intelligence to analyze CT scans can produce more accurate risk assessment for major cardiovascular events than current, standard methods such as the Framingham risk score (FRS) and body-mass index (BMI). More than 80 million body CT scans are…
Individuals who undergo weight loss surgery may face an elevated risk of bone fractures, according to a study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine. The study included 2,007 Swedish patients with obesity who were treated with weight loss surgery (either gastric bypass, gastric banding, or vertical banded gastroplasty) and 2,040 matched patients who did…