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WEDNESDAY, Sept. 30, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- The patients, most of them young, began showing up at hospitals in the spring of 2019. Some were coughing, out of breath or feverish. Some were vomiting or had diarrhea. Some ended up in intensive care, needing oxygen. Some died. They had been vaping, and their condition acquired the name EVALI, for e-cigarette or vaping product use-associated lung injury. In simple terms, it's a miserable experience, said a doctor who saw several EVALI patients. "I tell you, it's not an easy thing to go through," said Dr. Fariba Rezaee, a pediatric pulmonologist at Cleveland Clinic Children's in Ohio, who published a small study about the disease earlier this year in Pediatric Pulmonology. EVALI peaked in September 2019, according to the...

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 30, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Elderly people who get COVID-19 have lower levels of important immune cells, which may explain why they are more likely than younger patients to have severe symptoms or die, new research suggests. For the study, the researchers analyzed blood samples from 30 people with mild COVID-19, ranging in age from the mid-20s to late-90s. Compared with healthy people, all of the COVID-19 patients had lower numbers of T cells -- which target virus-infected cells -- in their blood. But COVID-19 patients over 80 years of age had fewer T cells than those who were younger, and so-called "killer" T cells in older patients produced lower amounts of cytotoxic molecules that find and kill infected cells, the investigators found. This age-related difference...

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 30, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Pets helped many people cope with the mental stress of being locked down during the coronavirus pandemic, a new study finds. It included 6,000 people in Britain who were under lockdown between March 23 and June 1. About 90% had at least one pet. Of those, more than 90% said their pet helped them cope emotionally with the lockdown and 96% said their pet helped keep them fit and active. "Findings from this study also demonstrated potential links between people's mental health and the emotional bonds they form with their pets: measures of the strength of the human-animal bond were higher among people who reported lower scores for mental health-related outcomes at baseline," said lead author Elena Ratschen, a senior lecturer in health...

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 30, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- For at least two decades, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been approving new formulations of prescription opioids without requiring drug manufacturers to gather important information on safety and effectiveness, a new study claims. The FDA approved dozens of these highly addictive medications for treatment of chronic pain between 1997 and 2018 based on clinical trials that: Lasted no longer than 12 weeks, Failed to systematically gather data on adverse events or safety concerns, Actually weeded out of the final results from people who didn't initially respond well to the drug. "No trial was longer than 84 days, whereas people take these medicines for years and they're labeled for chronic use," said senior researcher Dr. G....