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WEDNESDAY, Aug. 9, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- A large new study challenges the long-held idea that depression makes people more vulnerable to cancer, finding no association between the mental health condition and most types of cancer.The study, of more than 300,000 adults, found that neither depression nor chronic anxiety were linked to increased odds of developing cancer in the coming years. And when researchers looked at specific types of cancer, the findings were largely the same.The one exception was a slightly increased risk of cancers that are strongly linked to smoking, including lung cancer. And the analysis suggests that smoking — as well as alcohol and heavy body weight — are the real culprits, rather than depression or anxiety themselves.Experts said the study, published...

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 9, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- It seems obvious that texting and walking can be a dangerous duo, but now a new Australian study offers solid evidence of the dangers.Emergency room doctors Dr. Michael Levine and Dr. Matthew Harris, who were not involved in the study, weren’t surprised by the findings.“I think we've had, this summer, several people who either have been distracted while walking and have been hit by a car or been hit by a bicycle," said Harris, from Northwell Health in New Hyde Park, N.Y. “I've definitely seen people stepping off curbs when they were not supposed to, not seeing cars come… because they were too busy looking at their phone when they should have realized where the sidewalk ended," added Levine, from UCLA Health. “So, I've seen all...

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 9, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- It’s already known that the “healthy glow” of a tan actually represents damage to skin cells.But a new study of people on vacation has found that sunbathing also can disrupt the skin’s microbiome, altering the populations of bacteria that live on the skin in ways that could be harmful to health.The microbiome recovers within a month, but during that time a person will be more vulnerable to skin problems, said senior researcher Abigail Langton. She is a lecturer with the University of Manchester’s Center for Dermatology Research, in England.“During this 28-day post-holiday period of recovery skin may have reduced health, making it more susceptible to infection or irritation due to the loss of Proteobacteria [a type of bacteria that...

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 9, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- New research shows hard-to-diagnose blood disorders called myelodysplastic syndromes/neoplasms (MDS) are often misdiagnosed and a second opinion may be needed.The difficulty of diagnosis and frequent misdiagnosis puts patients at increased risk for treatment mistakes and other potentially harmful consequences, according to researchers at the University of Miami's Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center.“We found that expert pathologists had major disagreements with local pathologists’ diagnoses in about 20% of overall cases,” said corresponding author Dr. Mikkael Sekeres, chief of Sylvester’s division of hematology. “Some patients were told they had cancer when they didn’t, or the opposite — that they did not have cancer when, in...