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THURSDAY, Jan. 14, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Patients with chronic kidney disease who stop using a class of common blood pressure medications may lower their risk for dialysis, but they also raise their odds of cardiovascular disease, a new study finds. The blood pressure medicines in question are called renin-angiotensin system inhibitors (RAS inhibitors), which include both ACE inhibitors and angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs). Not sure if you take one of these drugs? ACE inhibitors typically have "pril" as the last syllable in their name (for example, benazepril, captopril or enalapril) while ARBs typically end in "sartan" (candesartan, losartan and valsartan, among others).All of these medicines are commonly used to treat high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, heart...

THURSDAY, Jan. 14, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- There's yet another reason to quit smoking: It increases the risk of deadly bleeding strokes, a new study warns.Researchers focused on a type of stroke called subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), which occurs when a blood vessel on the surface of the brain ruptures and bleeds into the space between the brain and the skull.This type of stroke mainly affects middle-aged adults and has high rates of complications and death.In this study, researchers analyzed genetic data gathered from more than 408,000 people, ages 40-69, in the United Kingdom between 2006 and 2010. During that time, more than 900 of these strokes occurred.The more people smoked, the greater their risk of SAH. Compared to those who didn't smoke, those who smoked half a pack to 20...

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 13, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- A rare brain disease that causes loss of language skills doesn't lead to memory loss, a new study finds.The condition is called primary progressive aphasia and about 40% of people who have it have underlying Alzheimer's disease, according to researchers. Their study was published online Jan. 13 in the journal Neurology."While we knew that the memories of people with primary progressive aphasia were not affected at first, we did not know if they maintained their memory functioning over years," said study author Dr. M. Marsel Mesulam, director of the Center for Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "This has been difficult to determine because most memory tests rely on...

WEDNESDAY, Jan. 13, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- The bacteria in your gut may play a role in the severity of COVID-19 infection and the strength of your immune system response, a new study suggests.Not only that, imbalances in the microbiome may cause continued inflammatory symptoms, often called "long-haul" COVID, the researchers added."Imbalance in the microbiome contributes to the severity of COVID-19, and if it persists after viral clearance, could contribute to persistent symptoms and multi-system inflammation syndromes like long COVID syndrome," said lead researcher Dr. Siew Ng, a professor from the Institute of Digestive Disease at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. "Restoration of the missing beneficial bacteria might boost our immunity against SARS-CoV2 virus and hasten recovery...