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TUESDAY, Jan. 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Diabetics who've contracted COVID-19 should suspend their use of a class of common diabetes drugs known as sodium-glucose co-transporter 2 inhibitors (SGLT2i), new research warns.People using these medications for diabetes are at risk of a potentially fatal complication called diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA), and it now appears that risk increases even more if they become sick with COVID-19, said senior researcher Dr. Naomi Fisher, director of the Hypertension Service and Hypertension Specialty Clinic at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Diabetic ketoacidosis occurs when there's not enough insulin to allow cells to absorb glucose from the bloodstream, Fisher said."Because the body can't use glucose for energy, it begins to break down fat as...

TUESDAY, Jan. 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- In a finding that highlights another health consequence of the coronavirus pandemic, researchers report that the risk of dying from heart disease increased during the coronavirus lockdowns last spring, likely because people were too scared to go to the hospital.But the dangers of not seeking treatment for a medical emergency far outweigh that of catching COVID-19, especially now that precautions are in place to make hospitals and health care facilities safer for everyone, said study author Dr. Rishi Wadhera, a cardiologist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.Wadhera and his colleagues culled data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics to compare death rates from heart-related causes in the United States after the...

TUESDAY, Jan. 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Unlike regular pneumonia, COVID-19 pneumonia spreads like many "wildfires" throughout the lungs, researchers say.This may explain why COVID-19 pneumonia lasts longer and causes more harm than typical pneumonia, according to the researchers at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. The research team said that their aim is to make COVID-19 more like a bad cold.For the study, the team analyzed immune cells from the lungs of COVID-19 pneumonia patients and compared them to cells from patients with pneumonia caused by other viruses or bacteria.While other types of pneumonia rapidly infect large regions of the lungs, COVID-19 begins in numerous small areas of the lungs. It then uses the lungs' own immune cells to spread across the lungs over many days or...

TUESDAY, Jan. 12, 2021 (HealthDay News) -- Gut microbes may play a significant role in the eating disorder anorexia, a new British study says.Researchers from the University of Oxford reviewed available evidence suggesting that in people with anorexia gut microbes could affect affect appetite, weight, and mental health conditions such as anxiety and compulsive behavior.The findings appear online Jan. 12 in the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry. "Anorexia nervosa is a very common psychiatric disorder and can be incredibly debilitating or even fatal, but is unfortunately still quite challenging to treat," said study co-author Ana Ghenciulescu, from Oxford's Corpus Christi College. "Moreover, there has been a great deal of recent excitement about the idea that gut microbes affect many...