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TUESDAY, Jan. 31, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- There's good news for American mothers-to-be and their newborns: Rates of smoking during pregnancy have fallen by 36% since 2016, a new report finds.The percentage of pregnant women who smoked was already low in 2016 compared to decades past: 7.2%. But by 2021, that rate had fallen to just 4.6%. That's according to the latest data from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), part of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.Keeping tobacco toxins away from the developing fetus is crucial to infant health. According to the March of Dimes, smoking while pregnant has been linked to higher risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, premature delivery, ectopic pregnancy, birth defects and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), among other...

TUESDAY, Jan. 31, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- People who have autism feel pain at a higher intensity than others, which is the opposite of what many believe to be true, new research suggests. The prevailing belief is that those with autism are indifferent to pain, possibly because of a tendency for self-harm. However, "this assumption is not necessarily true," said Dr. Tami Bar-Shalita, of the Sackler Faculty of Medicine at Tel Aviv University in Israel."We know that self-harm could stem from attempts to suppress pain, and it could be that they hurt themselves in order to activate, unconsciously, a physical mechanism of 'pain inhibits pain,'" Bar-Shalita said in a university news release.The researchers wanted to know whether people with autism hurt more than the general population.About...

MONDAY, Jan. 30, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Living in a U.S. state where recreational weed is legal does not appear to increase the average adult’s risk of succumbing to “reefer madness,” a new study of twins has determined.An adult living in a “legal” state is not more likely to develop any sort of substance abuse disorder than their twin residing in a state where marijuana remains outlawed, researchers found.They also aren’t more likely to break the law or have problems with their mental health, relationships, work, finances, friendships or standing in the community, according to the report published recently in the journal Psychological Medicine.“We found mostly a lot of nothing, which I think is personally interesting,” said lead researcher Stephanie Zellers, a...

MONDAY, Jan. 30, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- The pandemic has reached a “transition point,” the World Health Organization (WHO) said Monday. Still, that doesn’t mean the public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) designation declared by the WHO in January 2020 is over yet.The organization’s International Health Regulations Emergency Committee met last week to discuss COVID-19, saying in a statement released Monday that it urged WHO to propose “alternative mechanisms to maintain the global and national focus on COVID-19 after the PHEIC is terminated."The advisory committee said there was little doubt that the virus would remain a permanently established pathogen in humans and animals for the foreseeable future, even as higher levels of immunity from infection or...