Latest Health News

MONDAY, Sept. 14, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- It's a must for any good curry, and a new clinical trial suggests that turmeric might ease arthritis pain, too. Researchers found that an extract of the spice turmeric worked better than a placebo in easing pain from knee arthritis over three months. The treatment was not a home run -- but the pain relief was a bit better than past studies have found with standard medication. It all suggests that turmeric "can be considered an option" for knee osteoarthritis, said senior researcher Dr. Benny Antony, of the Menzies Institute for Medical Research/University of Tasmania in Australia. Osteoarthritis is exceedingly common, affecting more than 32.5 million Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Knee arthritis...

MONDAY, Sept. 14, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Here's evidence that prescription drugs don't have to cost a fortune: New research finds Medicare saved billions as more generic cholesterol-lowering medications became available, even though the number of Americans using the drugs increased. "One of the most important contributors to our health care costs is expenditure on prescription drugs," said study author Dr. Ambarish Pandey, a cardiologist and assistant professor of internal medicine at University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center. "The switch to generics is an effective strategy to cut the costs incurred by health systems." Between 2010 and 2018, patents on a number of cholesterol-lowering drugs expired -- including Crestor and Zetia -- and generic versions became...

MONDAY, Sept. 14, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Failure to "flatten the coronavirus curve" in the United States could lead to even more deaths than previously believed, a new study claims. The researchers concluded that every six additional intensive care unit (ICU) beds or seven additional non-ICU beds filled by COVID-19 patients leads to one additional COVID-19 death over the following week. "A spike in hospitalization naturally leads to more deaths, but these deaths may not only come from those who are hospitalized, but also from those who should have been hospitalized but were not," explained study co-author Anirban Basu. He's a professor of health economics at the University of Washington in Seattle. The results match previous research showing that death rates rise as ICUs handle...

MONDAY, Sept. 14, 2020 (American Heart Association News) -- Black adults with hard-to-treat high blood pressure often don't get the right medications or receive counseling about the use of healthy behaviors to lower blood pressure, according to a new study. Past research shows blood pressure is more difficult to control in Black adults than in white adults, and that an estimated 400,000 strokes, heart attacks and other cardiovascular events among Black adults could be prevented each year if blood pressure control could be achieved. The new study, published Monday in the American Heart Association journal Hypertension, zeroed in on Black adults with so-called resistant hypertension, which is when a person needs four or more drugs to control their blood pressure. Researchers looked at...