Latest Health News

THURSDAY, Sept. 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Gaining weight around your mid-section may be the makings of much more than a wardrobe crisis: It may also signal the start of a serious health crisis. So warns a team of Canadian and Iranian researchers who conducted an extensive review of 72 studies involving more than 2.5 million patients from all over the globe. "We found that excess fat in the abdomen -- called central fatness or belly fat -- is associated with a higher risk of death than overall body fat," said study author Tauseef Ahmad Khan. He is a postdoctoral fellow in the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Medicine. That means that even if other areas of the body are in good shape, once fat starts to accumulate in the belly region,...

THURSDAY, Sept. 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Parents and other caregivers need to be more aware of the potentially lethal "Benadryl Challenge" circulating on social media, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned Thursday. The new internet dare, broadcast widely on teen-friendly TikTok, urges kids to overdose on the over-the-counter antihistamine Benadryl to achieve a hallucinatory state. However, attempts to do so can quickly prove tragic, warned the FDA. Alarmed by reports of severe or even fatal pediatric illnesses tied to the prank, the agency said it has "contacted TikTok and strongly urged them to remove the videos from their platform." Overdosing on the drug, medically known as diphenhydramine, can result in "serious heart problems, seizures, coma, or even death," the...

THURSDAY, Sept. 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Wide variation exists in the accuracy of commercial testing kits that check for antibodies against the new coronavirus, researchers say. Antibody tests can determine whether someone has had the virus in the past. For diagnosis at a later stage of illness or in cases of delayed-onset, antibody tests could also be an important part of hospital diagnosis, the study authors said in the new report. For the study, the researchers developed their own antibody test. They then used it to compare the performance of 10 commercial antibody test kits on an identical panel of 110 positive blood samples from hospitalized COVID-19 patients, and 50 pre-pandemic coronavirus-negative blood samples. The findings were published online Sept. 24 in the journal...

THURSDAY, Sept. 24, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Infants may feel less pain when held by a parent with skin-to-skin contact, a new U.K. study suggests. "We have found when a baby is held by their parent with skin-on-skin contact, the higher-level brain processing in response to pain is somewhat dampened. The baby's brain is also using a different pathway to process its response to pain," said study co-author Lorenzo Fabrizi. He's with University College London in the department of neuroscience, physiology and pharmacology. "While we cannot confirm whether the baby actually feels less pain, our findings reinforce the important role of touch between parents and their newborn babies," Fabrizi said in a college news release. The study included 27 infants, up to about 3 months old, who were...