Latest Health News

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Fewer U.S. women these days are aware that heart disease is the number-one threat to their lives -- especially younger and minority women, a new study finds. Historically, heart disease was seen as a "man's disease," partly because men tend to suffer heart attacks at a younger age than women do. Yet heart disease is the top killer of women in the United States -- causing about 300,000 deaths in 2017, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2004, the American Heart Association (AHA) launched an education campaign called Go Red for Women. That effort, along with others, seemed to raise women's awareness of heart disease. AHA surveys showed that in 2012, more U.S. women were aware that heart disease is the...

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- We interrupt your latest binge of breaking political news, fear-provoking campaign commercials and angry posts from your favorite pundit to report that politics can be stressful. That stress can be bad for your health. But – some good news here – you can take steps to manage it. If the election has your heart racing and stomach churning, you have company. According to the American Psychological Association's Stress in America survey for July, 77% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans said the political climate was a significant source of stress. A study published last September in the journal PLoS ONE hinted at the toll such stress can take: Roughly a fifth or more of 800 respondents reported losing sleep, being fatigued or...

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- The loss of a pet may be a child's first encounter with death, and new research suggests no one should underestimate the psychological trauma that the loss can bring. Previous studies have found that kids form deep emotional attachments to their pets and having a furry companion in your youth has been linked to greater empathy, self-esteem and social skills. "The effects of pet loss were unique," said study co-author Erin Dunn, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Center for Genomic Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. To learn more, she and her hospital colleagues looked at a sample of more than 6,000 British children. Almost 9 out of 10 had owned a pet during their youth, and more than half had lost one during...

WEDNESDAY, Sept. 23, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- If you sing indoors without a face mask, you run the risk of spreading COVID-19 through tiny airborne particles known as aerosols. That's the conclusion researchers reached after studying a choir practice. In Skagit Valley, Wash., one person with mild symptoms of COVID-19 attended a 2.5-hour-long indoor choir practice on March 10. Over the next several weeks, more than 50 others from the rehearsal got sick and two died. "This study documents in great detail that the only plausible explanation for this super-spreading event was transmission by aerosols," said lead author Shelly Miller, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder. "Shared air is important because you can be inhaling what someone else...