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WEDNESDAY, Feb. 23, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Millions of American adults take a potentially deadly duo of prescription opioid painkillers and sedatives at the same time, researchers warn. The side effects of concurrent use of opioids and sedatives such as benzodiazepines (such as Xanax or Valium) may be even stronger in people who are also prescribed other types of sedatives or anxiety medications, the new research shows. To assess the extent of dual sedative use among adults with opioid prescriptions, the investigators analyzed Medical Expenditure Panel Survey data from 2016-2019 and identified 28.4 million prescription opioid users aged 18 and older. Of those, just over 9% (10,700) had also been prescribed benzodiazepines plus other types of sedatives in the same calendar year....

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 23, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- If a great singer seems to light up your mind, it's not your imagination.Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have identified a group of neurons in the brain that react to singing but not to other types of music."This was a finding we really didn't expect, so it very much justifies the whole point of the approach, which is to reveal potentially novel things you might not think to look for," said lead author Sam Norman-Haignere. He is a former MIT postdoctoral researcher who is now an assistant professor of neuroscience at University of Rochester Medical Center, in New York. Norman-Haignere and his team said the neurons respond to the specific combo of voice and music, but not to instrumental music or regular speech. The...

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 23, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Smoking in the weeks before and after conception has a potentially unhealthy effect on an embryo, Dutch research shows."Smoking not only impacts an embryo’s growth during pregnancy and birth weight, but also embryo development right from the very early stages of pregnancy," said study leader Dr. Melek Rousian, a gynecologist at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands.The study included nearly 700 women in the Netherlands who had single-baby pregnancies between 2010 and 2018.By the 10th week of pregnancy, fetal development was nearly one day behind in mothers who smoked 10 or more cigarettes a day compared to nonsmokers, the study found. It was behind by 1.6 days in smokers who conceived through assisted...

WEDNESDAY, Feb. 23, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- If they quit early on, there's a good chance that teenage drug abusers can still succeed in life, researchers say.The findings show the importance of stopping drug use by early adulthood in order to protect future health and well-being, according to Jake Najman, a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, and co-author of a new study. "Adolescent behavior problems predict drug use at 21 years, and drug use and life success at 30 years," Najman said. "But teenage drug use or disorders don't appear to predict life success in adulthood among those who've ceased taking drugs before the age of 30," Najman added. "What seems to best predict low life success outcomes is the persistence (over a longer course of time) of cannabis and...