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MONDAY, Jan. 25, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Electronic 'early warning systems' for kidney damage in hospital patients don't improve outcomes, researchers say.These systems are meant to alert for acute kidney injury (AKI). AKI, a sudden decrease in the kidney's filtration function, occurs in 15% of hospital patients and increases the risk of death 10-fold.The systems give an automated alert in the patient's electronic health record when lab tests show a sharp rise in blood levels of creatinine, an indication of AKI. Creatinine is a chemical waste product produced by the muscles."The prevailing wisdom was that these alerts could only benefit patients," said Dr. F. Perry Wilson, director of the Clinical and Translational Research Accelerator at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. "But after...

MONDAY, Jan. 25, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- People with anxiety and depression are more likely to step up their drinking during the COVID-19 pandemic than those without these mental health issues, an online survey revealed.Alcohol use grew the most among young people, but older adults with anxiety and depression were about twice as likely to report increased drinking as older adults without those struggles, New York University researchers said."We expected that younger people and those with mental health issues would report drinking as a coping mechanism, but this is the first time we're learning that mental health is associated with differences in alcohol use by age," study author Yesim Tozan said in a university news release. She is an assistant professor of global health at NYU's...

MONDAY, Jan. 25, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Going into cardiac arrest at night can be particularly deadly, and now new research suggests that it might strike women more than men.Sudden cardiac arrest is an electrical malfunction that causes the heart to stop beating. The survival rate for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest is only 10%, the researchers said."Dying suddenly during nighttime hours is a perplexing and devastating phenomenon," said senior study author Dr. Sumeet Chugh. He is director of the Center for Cardiac Arrest Prevention at Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute, in Los Angeles. "We were surprised to discover that being female is an independent predictor of these events," Chugh said.Between 17% and 41% of the estimated 350,000 sudden cardiac arrests in the United States each...

MONDAY, Jan. 25, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Here's one reason why past or current smoking may handicap you if you are battling breast cancer: New research suggests that nicotine promotes the spread of the disease to your lungs.Smoking is known to increase the risk that breast cancer will spread, which lowers the survival rate by one-third at diagnosis. But the role of nicotine in the spread of breast cancer to the lungs has been less clear.To learn more, researchers studied almost 1,100 breast cancer patients. They found that current smokers and former smokers had higher rates of breast cancer spread to the lungs than those who never smoked.In studies of mice, researchers found that nicotine fosters that spread. And this was true even after no exposure to nicotine for 30 days.That...