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TUESDAY, Nov. 9, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Heart failure remains a major killer among the millions of Americans on Medicare. So, it's alarming that fewer than 10% of eligible Medicare beneficiaries get recommended heart failure rehab treatments, researchers say.Gaps in Medicare coverage and certain criteria are major reasons why, say the authors of a new study focused on the problem."Despite clear benefits of cardiac rehabilitation in preventing death, reducing hospitalizations and improving physical ability, cardiac rehabilitation is used by very few," said study author Dr. Vinay Guduguntla. He's a third-year internal medicine resident at the University of California, San Francisco."Based on the current data, more than 90% of people with heart failure will not receive a treatment that...

TUESDAY, Nov. 9, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Sex Ed -- it's been a staple of public education for decades, but new research shows that only half of American teens are getting instruction that meets minimum standards."The findings show that most adolescents are not receiving sex education that will enable them to manage their sexual lives," said study author Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at Rutgers School of Public Health in New Jersey.Kantor and her team analyzed data from nearly 8,000 U.S. adolescents in the National Survey of Family Growth from 2011-2015 and 2015-2019. They found that in both periods, about half the youths received sex education that met national standards. More than 75% of teens received instruction about "how to say no to sex,"...

TUESDAY, Nov. 9, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Schools could provide solutions for kids who are grappling with depression, a new study suggests.Students who have school-based depression screening are twice as likely to begin treatment as peers who don't get that service, researchers say."Our study is publishing at a time when more adolescents are reporting symptoms of depression," said principal investigator Dr. Deepa Sekhar, a pediatrician at Penn State Health Children's Hospital and an associate professor of pediatrics at Penn State College of Medicine. "From 2008 to 2018, the numbers increased by over 70% from 8.3% to 14.4%. During the pandemic, concerns about increasing student depression have been widespread," Sekhar said in a college news release. Suicides, which are often associated...

TUESDAY, Nov. 9, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- While the lockdowns of the pandemic may have done the planet's atmosphere a favor, a new study predicts that discarded masks, gloves and face shields will add more than 25,000 tons of plastic waste to the world's oceans. Researchers from Nanjing University's School of Atmospheric Sciences in China and the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Scripps Institution of Oceanography used a new model to project how much pandemic-related plastic waste there will be and where it will go.The investigators found that, in total, 8 million tons will be produced, with a significant portion of this ocean plastic debris ending up on beaches or in the seabed within three to four years.A smaller amount will go into the open ocean, where it will be trapped...