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MONDAY, Aug. 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Cholesterol-lowering statins are proven lifesavers, but they’ve also gained a reputation for causing muscle aches and pains in a good number of patients.That reputation is undeserved, according to a new large-scale analysis of data from nearly two dozen clinical trials of statins.There’s a less than 10% chance that muscle symptoms reported by patients are caused by the statin they are taking, researchers report.“Our analysis showed that over 90% of muscle symptoms were not attributable to the statin, and those cases that were due to statins occurred mainly within the first year of treatment,” said joint lead researcher Colin Baigent, director of the Medical Research Council Population Health Research Unit at the University of Oxford, in...

MONDAY, Aug. 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- It doesn't seem to matter what time of day or night you take your blood pressure medication, a new study finds. The results of a randomized trial of more than 21,000 patients with high blood pressure who were followed for over five years show that protection against heart attack, stroke and vascular death is not affected if the drugs are taken in the morning or evening. These findings contradict previous research that suggested a large benefit when the medications are taken at night. For the study, men and women were randomly assigned to take their blood pressure drugs in the morning or evening. The researchers then looked for hospitalization for heart attack, stroke, or death from cardiovascular disease.Over a median of five years, 3.4% of...

MONDAY, Aug. 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- It’s safe to say that when searching for somewhere to live most people prefer open, airy spaces over dark and dingy ones. Now, new research suggests why: Homes filled with lots of natural light makes for happier residents."We sought to explore the relationship between natural light and emotional well-being in residential indoor spaces," explained study co-author Javiera Morales-Bravo, an architect at the University of Chile in Santiago.The idea for the study "came after a year of [COVID] lockdown, during which people spent most of their time at home, and we saw increased cases of anxiety and depression," Morales-Bravo said.So, to explore how home light might impact mood, she and co-author Pablo Navarrete-Hernandez launched a virtual...

MONDAY, Aug. 29, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. doctors administered more than 150,000 doses of useless monoclonal antibody treatments to COVID-19 patients early this year, spending loads of cash on therapies that had been deemed of no benefit, a new study has found.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration deauthorized the use of two COVID monoclonal antibody treatments in January, after it was found that the therapies did not work against the Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2.Despite this, COVID-19 patients received more than 158,000 doses of bamlanivimab/etesevimab and casirivimab/imdevimab well into 2022, potentially costing millions of dollars while providing little to no relief, according to the study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) in Boston.The proportion...