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WEDNESDAY, May 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- In rare cases, people who receive the two-dose Moderna COVID-19 vaccine may experience a red, itchy patch of skin a few days later at the injection site, a new report finds.They shouldn't panic: This "COVID arm" reaction, although annoying, was short-lived in all cases and was easily treated with topical steroid creams, according to a team of researchers at Yale University."No serious vaccine adverse events occurred in association with these cutaneous [skin] reactions," the team reported, and the side effect is certainly no reason to avoid getting vaccinated against COVID-19.The study was led by Dr. Alicia Little, an assistant professor of dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., and published online May 12 in the...

WEDNESDAY, May 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- An estimated 9 million Americans turn to prescription pills when they can't sleep, but a new study of middle-aged women finds taking the drugs for a year or longer may do little good.Comparing a group of about 200 women who were medicated for sleep problems with over 400 women who had sleeping problems but did not take medication, researchers from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found that sleep meds don't seem to be beneficial for long-term use. After one or two years on sleep medications, the women in the medicated group did not sleep any better or longer than those who weren't medicated."The simple conclusion is that long-term use of sleep medications does not have a clear benefit with respect to chronic sleep problems," said study...

WEDNESDAY, May 12, 2021 (American Heart Association News) -- Blood pressure is more than just numbers your doctor writes on a chart.To explain it, Dr. Shawna Nesbitt, medical director of the Hypertension Clinic at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, talks about plumbing.Think of blood vessels as pipes in a house, she said. Those pipes feed blood to the whole body. If the pressure in them gets too high, it can damage the pipes or whatever they connect to – such as the heart, brain or kidneys."Controlling it doesn't just matter to one of those organs. It matters to all of those organs," said Nesbitt, also a professor of medicine and associate dean of student diversity and inclusion at UT Southwestern Medical Center.In other words – high blood pressure, or hypertension, is a big deal. Here...

WEDNESDAY, May 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Cora Oakley is a rough-and-tumble 4-year-old who loves gymnastics and outdoor activities, particularly if it involves bouncing on a trampoline.It's hard to tell from looking at her that she was born without an immune system. Kids with this condition can acquire dangerous, life-threatening infections from day-to-day activities as simple as going to school or playing with friends."I remember asking the doctor if she was going to die, and he said to me, 'I hope not,'" remembers her mother, Chelsea Oakley, 38, of Morristown, N.J. "It was everything you didn't want to hear as a new mom."Instead, Cora now has essentially a normal immune system, thanks to an experimental gene therapy that journeyed inside her newborn body and fixed the genetic...