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TUESDAY, Feb. 15, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- In yet another sign that climate change strikes the poorest without mercy, a new study shows that low-income people have a 40% higher exposure to heat than those with higher incomes. By the end of the century, heat wave exposure for the poorest 25% people worldwide will equal the rest of the global population combined. That's after taking into account access to air conditioning, cool air shelters, heat safety rules for outdoor workers and heat safety awareness campaigns, according to the study published recently in the journal Earth's Future."We expected to see a discrepancy, but seeing one-quarter of the world facing as much exposure as the other three-quarters combined … that was surprising," study lead author Mojtaba Sadegh said in a...

TUESDAY, Feb. 15, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Many women with epilepsy have breakthrough seizures when they get pregnant, and researchers say they've figured out why.Their new study shows that pregnancy can trigger steep drops in blood levels of certain antiepileptic drugs soon after conception."When it comes to epilepsy, maintaining a fine-tuned medication regimen is critical. Some people mistakenly believe that changes in the drugs' blood concentration won't occur until after 20 weeks of pregnancy, but our study shows how important it is to start monitoring and adjusting patients' medication dosages early on," said lead study author Dr. Page Pennell, chair of neurology at the University of Pittsburgh. "Nearly half of all pregnancies in the United States are unplanned, so it is...

TUESDAY, Feb. 15, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Amphetamines can pull people into a vicious cycle of addiction, but new research now shows that people who abuse these stimulants are also five times more likely to develop psychosis than non-users. The effect of "speed" on neurotransmitter signaling in the brain often causes psychosis symptoms such as paranoia, voices and hallucinations. These typically resolve after a few days, but may persist for years in up to 15% of users. While the link between amphetamine abuse and psychosis is known, the degree of psychosis risk or the effectiveness of drug rehabilitation therapy has been unclear. To learn more, the researchers analyzed data on more than 74,600 illicit amphetamine users in Taiwan and a comparison group of more than 298,000 non-users...

TUESDAY, Feb. 15, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- Gender differences extend to cancer treatments, with women having a higher risk of severe side effects from certain treatments than men, a new study finds.Previous research concluded women tend to have more side effects from chemotherapy, and this new paper shows the same is true for immunotherapy and targeted therapy."It has been understood that women have more toxicity from chemotherapy than men, but almost no research has aimed to understand whether that pattern held for novel treatments like immunotherapy or targeted therapies," said study leader Joseph Unger, a health services researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle."We found similar large differences, especially for immune treatments," he noted in a news...