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TUESDAY, Oct. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- In rare cases, some patients may develop an autoimmune disease following a bout of COVID, Korean researchers report. Conditions such as alopecia (hair loss), psoriasis, vitiligo (white skin patches), vasculitis (inflammation of blood vessels), Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, adult-onset Still's disease (painful skin rash), Sjogren's syndrome (autoimmune disease), ankylosing spondylitis (spinal arthritis) and sarcoidosis (enlarged lymph nodes) can all be triggered by COVID-19 infection, according to the new report.COVID-19 patients faced 12% to 74% higher odds for various types of alopecia, a tripled risk for vasculitis, 68% higher odds for Crohn's and 59% higher odds for sarcoidosis, the study found."Our findings...

TUESDAY, Oct. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- The signs of climate change are everywhere, from raging wildfires to flash flooding to soaring temperatures. Now, a new study warns that things could get worse, with scientists reporting that even small increases in global temperatures will make some parts of the Earth too hot for humans to endure.“As long as we continue to put greenhouse gases emissions into the atmosphere, we're going to continue warming,” said study author Daniel Vecellio, a postdoctoral research scholar at the George Mason University’s Virginia Climate Center.“The take-home message is that we want to keep global warming to as much of a minimum as we can,” said Vecellio, who conducted the research while at Penn State University. "The easiest thing to say, but I...

TUESDAY, Oct. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- For people with tough-to-treat epilepsy, seizures can be both frightening and dangerous, but a new experimental pill may bring significant relief to over one-third of them.Dubbed XEN1101, the new drug reduced the frequency of seizures by more than 50%, or even eliminated them, in some patients with focal epilepsy who did not respond to an average of six other drugs."I am predicting that with this drug there are going to be far fewer people with epilepsy who are going to be walking around and have no chance of getting their seizures controlled," said lead researcher Dr. Jacqueline French, a professor of neurology at NYU Langone Health in New York City. Focal epilepsy is the most common type of epilepsy, French noted. "Two-thirds of people with...

TUESDAY, Oct. 10, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- It has long been believed that the 1918 flu pandemic disproportionately affected healthy young adults, but a study of human remains tells a different story.Together, Canadian and American researchers found that preexisting medical conditions like asthma and lower income increased the likelihood of death, just as in other pandemics, including COVID-19.“Our circumstances -- social, cultural and immunological -- are all intertwined and have always shaped the life and death of people, even in the distant past,” said lead study author Amanda Wissler, an assistant professor of anthropology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.“We saw this during COVID-19, where our social backgrounds and our cultural backgrounds influenced who was more...