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MONDAY, April 4, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- It turns out that trees might be good medicine.How so? New research shows that having lots of trees in your neighborhood could improve your health and lower your medical costs.“It’s time to stop looking at trees simply as an amenity and start recognizing the essential services they provide," said study author Ming Kuo, director of the Landscape and Human Health Lab the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana.Her team analyzed 13 years of data from Kaiser Permanente Northern California on 5 million people. The aim: to compare levels of tree cover in the five blocks around people's homes with their medical care and costs.After accounting for income and other factors, researchers found that people with the fewest trees in their neighborhood...

MONDAY, April 4, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- After a child shows up in the emergency room in the throes of an asthma attack, follow-up care is the best way to avoid another visit to the hospital down the road.But when researchers analyzed claims data on more than 90,000 asthma-related emergency department (ED) visits by children ages 3 to 21 in California, Massachusetts and Vermont, they found that only 23% actually received follow-up care, even though guidelines recommend all patients be referred for follow-up within a month of an ED visit for asthma."An urgent ED visit for asthma may suggest the child needs daily asthma medications to better control their asthma, or that they are having difficulty avoiding asthma triggers or recognizing symptoms," said study lead author Dr. Naomi...

MONDAY, April 4, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Correcting low blood sugar in infants reduces their risk of brain development problems later in life, new studies show.Low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) is common in babies, affecting more than 1 in 6. Glucose (sugar) is the main source of energy for the brain, and untreated hypoglycemia in infancy can affect a child's brain development up to 4.5 years of age, the researchers explained.One of their studies included 480 children who were born at risk of hypoglycemia. Their brain development was assessed at 2 and 4.5 years of age, and their academic achievement and other measures of brain function were checked at ages 9 and 10.Researchers found no difference in academic performance between children who had hypoglycemia as newborns and those who did...

SUNDAY, April 3, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Could an annual eye exam save your sight if you have diabetes? Most definitely, one vision expert says."Diabetes is known to alter the health of the blood vessels in the retina and these vascular changes do not cause symptoms in the early stages," explained Dr. Jeffrey Sundstrom, an ophthalmologist and retina specialist at Penn State Health Eye Center in Hershey, Pa."It's extremely important to detect any changes early so we can take steps to prevent vision loss -- and the way to do that is with an annual dilated eye exam," he said in a Penn State news release.With diabetes, the blood vessels in the retina often become leaky, and this can trigger a swelling of the macula -- the part of the retina at the back of the eye that is responsible for...