Latest Health News

TUESDAY, Feb. 18, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- Traditional stroke risk factors, such as high blood pressure, smoking and diabetes, impact people of various races and genders differently, new research shows. "The biggest thing we found was that hypertension has a bigger effect on stroke among African American men than it does on (white people) or African American women, even in young adulthood," said lead investigator Elizabeth Aradine, a vascular neurology fellow at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Aradine will present the preliminary findings Wednesday at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference in Los Angeles. The study of more than 2,100 adults ages 18-49 in the Baltimore-Washington, D.C., region found the...

TUESDAY, Feb. 18, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- A key to your baby's asthma risk may be as close as your laundry room. Canadian research shows that an infant's exposure to household cleaning products in the first few months of life is tied to heightened odds for asthma by age 3. Babies may be especially vulnerable because they "typically spend 80% to 90% of their time indoors, and are especially vulnerable to chemical exposures through the lungs and skin due to their higher respiration rates and regular contact with household surfaces," according to study lead researcher Tim Takaro. He's a physician-scientist in the faculty of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia. In their research, Takaro's group examined questionnaires completed by parents of more...

TUESDAY, Feb. 18, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Little ones who stay up late may have a higher risk of becoming overweight by the time they are school-age, a new study suggests. Researchers found that young children who routinely got to sleep after 9 p.m. tended to gain more body fat between the ages of 2 and 6. Compared with kids who had earlier bedtimes, they had bigger increases in both waist size and body mass index (BMI) -- an estimate of body fat based on height and weight. The findings do not prove that later bedtimes cause excess weight gain, said Dr. Nicole Glaser, who wrote a commentary accompanying the study, which was published online Feb. 18 in Pediatrics. But the report adds to evidence linking sleep habits to kids' weight, according to Glaser, a pediatric endocrinologist...

TUESDAY, Feb. 18, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Women remain underrepresented in heart disease research, even though it's the leading cause of death among women worldwide, researchers say. Women accounted for less than 40% of all people enrolled in cardiovascular clinical trials from 2010 through 2017, according to a study published Feb. 17 in the journal Circulation. "One woman dies from cardiovascular disease every 80 seconds. It's the leading killer of all women around the globe, claiming the lives of one in every three women, yet disparities continue to persist when it comes to symptom recognition, treatment times and methodologies, and even lifesaving support measures," said journal editor-in-chief Dr. Joseph Hill, chief of cardiology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical...