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TUESDAY, Oct. 3, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- The ChatGPT artificial intelligence (AI) program could grow into a source of accurate and comprehensive medical information, but it’s not quite ready for prime time yet, a new study reports.ChatGPT’s responses to more than 280 medical questions across diverse specialties averaged between mostly to almost completely correct, according to a report published online Oct. 2 in JAMA Network Open.“Overall, it performed fairly well as far as both accuracy and completions,” said senior researcher Dr. Douglas Johnson, director of the Melanoma Clinical Research Program at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville, Tenn.“Certainly, it was not perfect. It was not completely reliable,” Johnson continued. “But at the time we were entering the...

TUESDAY, Oct. 3, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- In yet another reminder of the psychic toll the pandemic has taken on young people, new research shows spending on mental health services for U.S. children and adolescents has risen sharply since 2020.It climbed 26% for youths aged 19 and younger between March 2020 and August 2022, the RAND Corp. study found. Among a large group whose families had employer-provided insurance, use of mental health services increased by 22%.Use of telehealth for young patients skyrocketed more than 30-fold in the early days of the pandemic and remained 23 times higher than normal by August 2022. In-person care stood at 75% of pre-pandemic levels by that time.“Our findings suggest that telehealth care for mental health filled a critical need for pediatric...

TUESDAY, Oct. 3, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Some common medications -- including antidepressants, sleep aids and painkillers -- may dull the driving skills of seniors, a new study finds.Many different medication classes have been linked to the risk of driving impairment, as anyone who has ever read the label warning "do not operate heavy machinery" might have guessed.But the new study took a particularly rigorous approach to investigating the issue -- following older adults for up to 10 years and testing their driving skills with annual road tests.And it turned out that those using certain classes of medications were at greater risk of failing the road test at some point.When older folks were taking either antidepressants, sedative/hypnotics (sleep medications) or non-steroidal...

TUESDAY, Oct. 3, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Loneliness can leave many feeling desolate, but new research now suggests it may also leave people vulnerable to Parkinson's disease.Among more than 490,000 people listed in the UK Biobank who were followed for up to 15 years, loneliness appeared to increase the chances of a Parkinson's diagnosis by 37%."The association between loneliness and incident Parkinson's disease was not due to shared genetic, clinical or behavioral risk factors," said senior researcher Angelina Sutin, a professor in the department of behavioral sciences and social medicine at Florida State University's College of Medicine in Tallahassee.Although this study can't prove that loneliness causes Parkinson's disease, there appears to be a connection, Sutin said."We show that...