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FRIDAY, Feb. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Email has become an easy and essential form of communication between patients and physicians -- so much so that doctors are deluged daily with messages from patients.Now, some hospitals and health systems have started charging for doctors' responses to those messages, depending on the amount of work needed to respond. Only a handful of health systems have started billing for these, and those that do say only a tiny percentage of doctor messages cost anything.But advocates say they’re concerned these charges will wind up limiting an option meant to expand patient access to health care.“We already know that even a small dollar amount of cost-sharing results in patients utilizing service less,” said Caitlin Donovan, senior director of the...

FRIDAY, Feb. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- The key to living longer could be eating less. In a new study published in the journal Nature Aging, researchers found that a calorie-restricted diet had substantial health benefits, including delayed aging. “The main take-home of our study is that it is possible to slow the pace of biological aging and that it may be possible to achieve that slowing through modification of lifestyle and behavior,” senior study author Dr. Dan Belsky, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health in New York City, told NBC News.The phase 2 clinical trial included 220 adults who either made a 25% calorie cut to their diet or no changes at all. The body mass index (BMI) for participants ranged from 22 to 27...

FRIDAY, Feb. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) – U.S. health officials are considering using vaccines in poultry to stem an ongoing outbreak of bird flu. Scientists will begin testing the first vaccines for birds in years as the spread of avian influenza has killed about 58 million birds, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.While the outbreak has devastated both wild and commercial bird flocks, many of the dead animals are commercially raised poultry. Nearly every state – 47 of 50 – has spotted the virus in poultry, and all have found it spreading in wild birds. The issue is not simple because there are concerns that vaccinating commercial birds may make it harder to export American poultry products, CBS News reported."What is...

FRIDAY, Feb. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Some patients having surgery for early-stage lung cancer may no longer need to lose an entire lobe of their lung, new research shows.The study results are from a phase 3 clinical trial sponsored by the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology.For the trial, nearly 700 patients with early-stage lung cancer were randomly chosen to receive either lobectomy surgery, which removes an entire lobe, or a sublobar resection, which removes only a portion of one of the five lobes. About half were in each group.Participants were followed for a median of seven years after surgery, meaning half were followed longer, half for less time.Those who lost only a portion of the lobe had somewhat better lung function, the trial showed. Survival rates were similar...