Latest Health News

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 7, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- The antiviral Paxlovid has kept people from getting really sick and dying from COVID-19 since it became available -- at no cost to them. But by the middle of next year, the U.S. government will stop subsidizing the medication. Instead, it will be billed for like many other medications. While the Biden administration has paid about $530 for each course of the medication by buying 20 million courses in bulk, the drug is expected to cost much more when it reaches the open market, Kaiser Health News reported. Pfizer, Paxlovid's maker, has declined to share its pricing plan, but the company has announced that its COVID vaccine will cost $120 per dose when it is no longer provided by the government, about four times as much as it had previously...

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 7, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Many Americans believe that suicide rates spike every time the holiday season comes around. There’s just one catch: It's not true.Yet, a new analysis reveals that 56% of stories published last year in U.S. newspapers that touched on a potential connection between the holidays and suicide perpetuated the falsehood. Only 44% debunked the notion.When it comes to suicide rates, "we have consistently found that the winter months of November, December and January are the lowest, or close to lowest, every year, and there is no evidence of a surge in suicides during the end-of-year holidays," said Dan Romer, research director for the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.Romer and his Annenberg colleagues have conducted...

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 7, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Children with type 1 diabetes miss more school than their peers without this condition, but the good news is these absences don’t have to affect their grades or chances of going on to college, new research shows.Kids who had the tightest control of their diabetes missed seven sessions a year, while those who had challenges managing their blood sugar levels were absent for 15 sessions a year, U.K. researchers found. (Sessions are defined as a half day in the study.)“The most important thing is that children with type 1 diabetes are doing really well, on average, even though they are missing more school and have more challenges than kids without type 1 diabetes,” said study author Robert French. He is a senior research fellow at Cardiff...

WEDNESDAY, Dec. 7, 2022 (American Heart Association News) -- As she walked up to her fourth-floor apartment, Marisa MacDonnell figured something was different with this pregnancy, her second.She felt winded. She had to take deeper breaths. And when she carried her then-2-year-old son, Sam, he felt heavier than his actual weight. Even the activities she loved – walking and running – seemed more laborious.She chalked it all up to working full time and having an active toddler. The possibility that it was her heart didn't cross her mind.MacDonnell was born with a misconfigured aortic valve; instead of having three flaps (known as cusps), she was told she had two. She also had a narrowing of the aorta, which reduces blood flow. However, she'd been living with those conditions since...