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THURSDAY, July 27, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Airlines will now be required to make bathrooms on their planes more accessible for the disabled, the U.S. Department of Transportation announced Wednesday.The new rule, authorized under the Air Carrier Access Act, requires airlines to make lavatories on any new single-aisle aircraft large enough to allow a passenger with a disability and an attendant to maneuver within the aircraft's lavatory."Traveling can be stressful enough without worrying about being able to access a restroom; yet today, millions of wheelchair users are forced to choose between dehydrating themselves before boarding a plane or avoiding air travel altogether," U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in an agency news release. "We are proud to announce this rule...

THURSDAY, July 27, 2023 (American Heart Association News) -- Late one evening, Dawn Berry took a call from her grandmother's nursing home. Her grandmother had been found unresponsive in bed. What should they do?Dawn, who was then 43, had worked in the medical field for more than 20 years in her hometown of Oklahoma City. When her grandmother had a severe stroke at home a few months earlier, Dawn's aunts and uncles authorized her to make medical decisions. Now she made another: Send Grandma to the emergency room.Dawn arrived around 9 p.m. Awake most of the night coordinating care, she was talking to a doctor about her grandmother – who was having complications from the stroke – when Dawn felt the room start spinning. By now it was around 5 a.m. She blamed the episode on stress.After...

THURSDAY, July 27, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- In recent years, the legalization of both medical and recreational marijuana has become the new normal across much of North America.The problem: New research finds that as legalization has spread, so have cases of cannabis poisoning.“We did a systematic review of published studies reporting on what happened to the rates of poisoning after legalization or decriminalization,” explained study author Nicholas Buckley, a professor of clinical pharmacology, biomedical informatics and digital health at the University of Sydney in Australia.“With either, the rate generally went up,” Buckley noted. “The extent to which it did was quite variable. But on average [poisoning risk] went up three to four times. The rises in children were even more...

THURSDAY, July 27, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Americans in ethnic and racial minority groups are underrepresented in Alzheimer's research, a new study finds. Still, the review of U.S.-based Alzheimer’s disease brain imaging studies found the gap is closing. Compared with white patients, Hispanic Americans are nearly two times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s as are Black Americans.For the study, researchers analyzed nearly 12,000 published studies on Alzheimer’s brain imaging.They found that about 84% to 87% of the participants were white."As far as we know, this is the most comprehensive review of representation in the Alzheimer’s disease neuro-imaging literature," said review co-author Duke Han, director of neuropsychology in the Department of Family Medicine at the...