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MONDAY, Jan. 27, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Could you imagine not being able to smell bacon frying, or freshly cut grass, or the presence of smoke? People who lose their sense of smell face difficulties that can affect their daily lives and put their health and safety at risk, a new British study suggests. It included 71 patients, ages 31 to 80, who lost their sense of smell. They reported a number of problems -- from concerns about personal hygiene to loss of sexual intimacy and the breakdown of personal relationships. They also reported physical health consequences and the difficulties and cost of seeking help. "Smell disorders affect around 5% of the population and cause people to lose their sense of smell, or change the way they perceive odors. Some people perceive smells that...

MONDAY, Jan. 27, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Young Americans who live in urban areas or live with low income or low education levels are more likely to die if they get colon cancer, a new study finds. "There are a lot of disparities in health care," said lead investigator Dr. Ashley Matusz-Fisher, an internist at the Levine Cancer Institute in Charlotte, N.C. "It is important to look at the sociodemographic disparities so that we can learn more and try to eliminate them." She and her colleagues analyzed information from nearly 27,000 U.S. patients from a national database, aged 40 and younger, who were diagnosed with colon cancer between 2004 and 2016. Those patients who lived in areas with the lowest income (under $38,000/year) and least education (high school graduation rate below...

MONDAY, Jan. 27, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- When it comes to parts of your brain, bigger isn't necessarily better. Experts long believed that a bigger hippocampus meant better memory. But new research finds that the size of this seahorse-shaped structure deep in the brain doesn't always predict learning and memory abilities. Researchers looked at more than 330 older adults in Germany and found that a larger hippocampus is only an advantage in people who also have more white-matter circuitry intact to link the hippocampus to the rest of the brain. "Our findings highlight the need to measure not just the size of the hippocampus but also how well it's connected to the rest of the brain when we look for physical markers of memory decline in older adults," said study lead author Andrew...

MONDAY, Jan. 27, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- New research shows that children and teens in U.S. areas with greater levels of poverty face a higher risk of suicide. "Our findings suggest that community poverty is a serious risk factor for youth suicide, which should help target prevention efforts," said lead study author Dr. Jennifer Hoffmann. She is a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago. For the study, Hoffmann and her colleagues analyzed federal government data on suicides in children and teens aged 5 to 19 that occurred from 2007 to 2016. They identified nearly 21,000 suicides in this age group, which works out to an annual suicide rate of 3.4/100,000 children. The majority of these suicides (85%) were among teens aged 15 to...