Latest Health News

FRIDAY, March 6, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Here's more motivation for men to shed pounds if they're overweight: It could lower their risk for advanced prostate cancer. Researchers analyzed data from 15 studies that included a total of nearly 831,000 men, including nearly 52,000 who'd been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Having a BMI (body mass index -- an estimate of body fat based on height and weight) above the range that's considered healthy (21-25) during middle to late adulthood was associated with the highest risk for advanced prostate cancer. "These study results show that risk for advanced prostate cancer can be decreased by maintaining a 'healthy' weight, which is in line with guidelines by the American Cancer Society and World Cancer Research Fund," said study author Jeanine...

FRIDAY, March 6, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- People whose spouse or partner has died are less likely to be diagnosed with melanoma, but more likely to die from it, a new study says. An analysis of data from population-based studies conducted in the United Kingdom and Denmark between 1997 and 2017 found that people who had lost a spouse or partner were 12% less likely to be diagnosed with melanoma than others. But bereaved people with the most serious form of skin cancer were 17% more likely to die from it than others. "Many factors can influence melanoma survival. Our work suggests that melanoma may take longer to detect in bereaved people, potentially because partners play an important role in spotting early signs of skin cancer," said lead author Angel Wong, a research fellow at the...

FRIDAY, March 6, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- Adding sleep to seven established metrics could create a stronger tool for predicting heart disease risk among middle-aged and older adults, new research shows. The preliminary findings, presented Thursday at the American Heart Association's Epidemiology and Prevention/Lifestyle and Cardiometabolic Health Scientific Sessions in Phoenix, recommend changing the AHA's Life's Simple 7 measure of cardiovascular health to the "Simple 8 or Essential 8" to incorporate sleep metrics. "Sleep, like diet and physical activity, is a health behavior we engage in every day," said lead author Nour Makarem, an associate research scientist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. "Increasingly, it is linked to not only the risk...

FRIDAY, March 6, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- Heart attacks are misdiagnosed more often in young women than in men, and one key way to change that, researchers say, is to think differently about how symptom can manifest. For decades, women have been evaluated by a protocol geared toward men. "The historic failings of cardiology to take a balanced approach to research have led to fundamental flaws in the care for women with heart disease and has cost the lives of many women," according to a 2019 editorial in the medical journal The Lancet. Typically, a heart attack diagnosis begins with a health care provider following a procedure to recognize a classic set of common symptoms. The predominant sign of a heart attack for both men and women is chest pain. But a new study...