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THURSDAY, Aug. 17, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Sometimes patients with pancreatic cancer are prescribed the benzodiazepine lorazepam (Ativan) for anxiety, but that may be harming their health. A new study found this treatment was linked to worse outcomes, with shorter survival times and faster disease progression. Alternatively, those who took alprazolam (Xanax) had a significantly longer progression-free survival than patients who did not.“When we study response to therapy, we think of treatments like chemotherapy or immunotherapy, but patients are also given a lot of medicines for anxiety and pain,” explained senior study author Michael Feigin, an associate professor of pharmacology and therapeutics at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, in New York. “We wanted to understand...

THURSDAY, Aug. 17, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- The idea of “doing your own research” didn’t begin with the pandemic, but new research suggests that those who follow that ideology have been more likely to believe COVID misinformation.“We had heard the phrase a lot before,” prior to the pandemic, said researcher Sedona Chinn, a professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It was “coming from a lot of online, anti-vaccine rhetoric,” she added.The researchers knew people who were willing to “occasionally do weird, unproven stuff, typically around health,” Chinn said. “It’s not like they reject doctors and medical expertise, but they think their opinion can be equally valid if they do their own research.”Then it was 2020, and the...

THURSDAY, Aug. 17, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- A new type of medication, JAK inhibitors, can effectively treat moderate to severe alopecia areata, a hair loss condition that has been historically hard to treat.A study of its effectiveness, by Dr. Brett King and Dr. Brittany Craiglow of Yale University, was published in August in a supplement to the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology.“Because alopecia areata is an inflammatory condition, a JAK inhibitor will essentially reduce the inflammation that is fueling the disease and bring your immune system back into balance,” said dermatologist Dr. Sandra Johnson. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, in Little Rock, who was not involved with the study. “The development of JAK inhibitors...

THURSDAY, Aug. 17, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Despite what you see on TikTok, don’t consume the laundry powder borax to relieve pain and inflammation or boost bone health.Even though videos on the social media site tout it as a treatment, this substance is not safe to consume and could cause kidney failure and multi-organ damage, one expert says.Dr. Karthik Ramani from Michigan Medicine explains why consuming borax is a bad idea.TikTok videos have shown people washing down a pinch of the powder with water, supposedly to help with pain and inflammation, improve bone health and ease osteoarthritis. They claim it’s because borax contains boron, a trace element that’s present in many foods. Boron is not classified as an essential nutrient for humans because research hasn’t identified...