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FRIDAY, Dec. 30, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- A new study confirms what many believe: Women tend to be better than men at imagining or understanding what another person is feeling or thinking.Using a test that measures empathy, researchers evaluated more than 300,000 people in 57 countries around the world to come to that conclusion. “Our results provide some of the first evidence that the well-known phenomenon — that females are, on average, more empathic than males — is present in a wide range of countries across the globe. It’s only by using very large data sets that we can say this with confidence,” said study author David Greenberg, from Bar-Ilan University in Israel.The study was led by Cambridge University in England and included collaborators from Bar-Ilan and Haifa...

FRIDAY, Dec. 30, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Most working-age Americans get health insurance through their employer, but even they are finding it tougher to afford medical care these days, a new study shows.Researchers found that over the past 20 years, a growing number of Americans with job-based health insurance have been skipping medical care due to costs. Women have been particularly hard-hit.The study, published Dec. 27 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, could not get at the reasons. But experts said there are some likely explanations, including rising health care costs and moves by insurance plans to foist more payment responsibility onto consumers."The U.S. health care system is unique in how privatized it is," said lead researcher Avni Gupta, a PhD student at the...

THURSDAY, Dec. 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Made infamous as the club drug Special K, ketamine is nowadays being seen as a wonder drug for some folks with hard-to-treat depression.However, a new study finds that some types of patients are more likely to gain a rapid and significant benefit from ketamine than others. Overall, while most patients did benefit from the drug, about one-third experienced a "rapid improvement" in their depression symptoms, the researchers said. Certain patient characteristics appeared to predict that level of benefit."Severely depressed individuals with a history of childhood trauma may have a better likelihood of a rapid and robust response to ketamine," concluded lead researcher Brittany O’Brien, an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral...

THURSDAY, Dec. 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) – All travelers flying from China to the United States will soon be required to produce a negative COVID test or show proof of recovery if they’ve had a recent COVID infection, U.S. health officials announced Wednesday.The new rule, set to go into effect on Jan. 5, was created in response to a surge in COVID cases in China and the “lack of adequate and transparent epidemiological and viral genomic sequence data being reported from” that country, the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention said in an agency news release.“What we want to avoid is having a variant enter into the U.S. and spread like we saw with Delta or Omicron,” Matthew Binnicker, director of clinical virology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., told the...