Latest Health News

MONDAY, Dec. 7, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- A potentially deadly condition that plagued soldiers in the First World War is showing up in homeless people, Canadian researchers report.They document the case of a 48-year-old man in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who was diagnosed with trench fever, which is caused by Bartonella quintana bacteria that's transmitted by body lice. The condition can lead to an infection of the heart called endocarditis and can be fatal if untreated. During World War I, trench fever killed millions of people. The man in this case study visited an emergency department with chest pain and shortness of breath. In the previous 18 months, he'd sought treatment for chest pain and body lice infestation.The authors of the paper, published Dec. 7 in the Canadian Medical Association...

MONDAY, Dec. 7, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Pregnancy can be exhilarating or exhausting, and sometimes both at the same time. It may not come as a surprise to a woman who has experienced pregnancy once, twice or many times, that it can age her.New research reveals that how many pregnancies a woman has may affect just how much her body ages. And, as it turns out, women who have no babies — or many — seem to age faster than others, according to findings published online recently in Scientific Reports."There seems to be this buffering effect, that having some children, three to four, is better than having no children or having a lot of children" in terms of physiological aging, said study author Waylon Hastings. He's a post-doctoral researcher at Pennsylvania State University in...

MONDAY, Dec. 7, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- In the past 30 years, U.S. women have been in progressively worse physical shape as they become pregnant, a new study finds.A combination of obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and having children later in life have led to potentially more complications, and even infant and maternal death, researchers say.Obesity is a major driver of these complications, said lead researcher Dr. Eran Bornstein. He's vice chair of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City."They're also going to have more hypertensive disorder [high blood pressure] because older women are at a higher risk for all of these complications," he said. "Basically, we showed that over the last three decades, women's health in the United States...

MONDAY, Dec. 7, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- New parents can relax: Research suggests it's normal for infants' sleep patterns to vary widely."Although previous research has shown that infants start sleeping through the night at different stages of development, little is known about individual sleep patterns night after night," explained study leader Marie-Helene Pennestri. She's an assistant professor in the department of educational and counseling psychology at McGill University, in Montreal, Canada.Many new parents expect their baby to start sleeping through the night by about 6 months of age, but Pennestri and colleagues found there's no firm timeline.For the study, the researchers asked the mothers of 44 infants who were 6 months old to keep a sleep diary about their children for two...