Latest Health News

MONDAY, July 11, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Babies' babble may be smarter than you think.A new study shows that infants as young as 3- to 5-months of age can tell that the unintelligible sounds they make before they learn to talk can impact the people around them.Traditionally, this babbling has been regarded simply as a byproduct of babies trying to work their mouths and exercise their voices. Instead, the new research shows that adults' reactions to their vocalizations influences babies' understanding of how they need to respond to properly communicate.“A baby’s babbling functions as a tool, to probe the social world and figure out who to pay attention to,” said corresponding author Michael Goldstein, a professor of psychology at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. “Babies...

MONDAY, July 11, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- It’s already hard enough to understand all your doctor’s technical talk – now imagine speaking a whole other language on top of that.Hospital patients who don’t speak the same language as their doctor get worse care and are more likely to die, a new Canadian study shows.Research done in Ontario – a linguistically diverse part of Canada – showed that French-speaking people who were treated by a doctor who also speaks French had 24% lower odds of dying in a hospital.The results were even more striking for English speakers, who had 54% lower odds of death when treated by someone who spoke their language."These are staggering findings that make a strong case for providing care in the same language for linguistic minorities in...

MONDAY, July 11, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Transgender patients who get gender-affirming surgery to create more feminine facial features say it's a big boost to their mental health, a new study reports.Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), compared the mental health of 107 patients awaiting surgery to that of 62 individuals who had completed it roughly six months earlier. People who had received the procedure reported higher scores in seven of 11 measures of psychosocial health: anxiety; anger; depression; global mental health; positive moods; social isolation; and meaning and purpose.Insurers often treat the gender-affirming facial surgery as cosmetic, in part due to a lack of evidence that it improves quality of life, the researchers noted."Access to facial...

MONDAY, July 11, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- In a promising development, new research has discovered that most adults with blood cancers develop at least some immunity to COVID-19 after getting booster shots."Our findings build on the wealth of literature showing that patients with hematologic malignancies have an impaired response to COVID vaccination," said study author Dr. Thomas Ollila, an assistant professor of medicine in the department of hematology and oncology at Brown University in Rhode Island. "Importantly, we show that many of these patients who did not respond initially will in fact have a response to booster vaccination," he added in a university news release.People with blood cancer, including leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma, have impaired immune systems due to the...