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TUESDAY, July 18, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- Patients could find lifesaving benefits in using a home blood pressure cuff.New research finds that home blood pressure monitoring saves lives and cuts costs. It also reduces health care disparities in racial and ethnic minorities and rural residents. Furthermore, regular self-testing better controls high blood pressure, especially in underserved patients, reducing the risk of stroke and heart attack, researchers recently reported in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.Home blood pressure monitoring "facilitates early detection, timely intervention and prevention of complications, leading to improved control and better health outcomes,” co-lead investigator Yan Li said in a journal news release. Li is a professor in the School of...

TUESDAY, July 18, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- In areas where Black Americans have been historically affected by discriminatory housing practices, there is higher heart failure risk, according to new research.Researchers studying more than 2.3 million U.S. adults between 2014 and 2019 found that heart failure today was linked to "redlining," which began in the 1930s. Heart failure risk for Black people who lived in these redlined ZIP codes was higher than for those who did not.“Although discriminatory housing policies were effectively outlawed nearly a half-century ago, the relationship between historic redlining practices and people’s health today gives us unique insight into how historical policies may still be exerting their effects on the health of many communities,” study...

TUESDAY, July 18, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- While nursing home residents are at high risk for bad outcomes if they get COVID-19, use of antiviral treatments, such as monoclonal antibodies, was low through most of 2021 and 2022.The authors of a new study, led by Brian McGarry, a health services researcher at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York, called that fact alarming.Using data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Healthcare Safety Network for May 2021 to December 2002, McGarry and collaborators at Harvard University found that just 18% of COVID-19 cases in nursing homes were treated with antiviral medicine.Even after easier-to-administer and widely available oral treatments were authorized, only 1 in 4 nursing home residents received...

MONDAY, July 17, 2023 (HealthDay Now) -- Parents now have a new long-acting drug to protect their children against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a common germ that hospitalizes as many as 3% of children under the age of 1 in the United States each year.The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Monday approved Beyfortus (nirsevimab-alip) for the prevention of RSV in newborns and infants born during or entering their first RSV season.The drug also is approved in children up to 2 years old who remain vulnerable to severe RSV disease through their second RSV season.“RSV can cause serious disease in infants and some children and results in a large number of emergency department and physician office visits each year,” Dr. John Farley, director of the Office of Infectious Diseases in...