Latest Health News

MONDAY, July 20, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Limiting food to a narrow window of time each day may help people shed some extra pounds, a small study finds. And restricting your eating to six hours may work as well as a stricter four-hour time frame, researchers found. In an eight-week trial, researchers found that either of two "time-restricted" diets helped obese people drop some pounds -- about 3% of their starting body weight, on average. But while the diets have become trendy of late, they seemed to work the old-fashioned way: by cutting dieters' daily calories. Time-restricted eating is considered a form of intermittent fasting, explained Krista Varady, one of the researchers on the study. The principle is simple: People limit themselves to eating between certain hours of the...

MONDAY, July 20, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- The highly anticipated results of two early-phase clinical trials of candidate COVID-19 vaccines suggest they are safe and may protect recipients, although the duration of the effect is still unknown. "We are rapidly moving to an era in which a vaccine against the novel coronavirus is becoming a reality," noted Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease specialist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore. Adalja wasn't involved in the new trials, but called them "encouraging and important, as they represent phase 1 and 2 data on larger groups of patients." The largest and longest of the two trials was conducted among 1,077 adult Britons averaging 35 years of age, none of whom had any prior known exposure...

MONDAY, July 20, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- U.S. air quality improved after businesses closed to reduce the spread of the new coronavirus, researchers say. For their new study, they compared air pollution data for 122 U.S. counties between March 13 and April 21, to the same dates and locations going back to 2017. "It has been shown that high air pollution may play a role in exacerbating respiratory diseases, including the SARS outbreak in 2002," said lead author Jesse Berman, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. "But decreased air pollution and any potential benefits are likely fleeting as policies are relaxed." The researchers focused on two major types of air pollution -- fine particulate matter (PM2.5) and...

MONDAY, July 20, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- Want to boost colon cancer screening rates? Mail testing kits to patients' homes, a new study says. Colon cancer is easily diagnosed by routine screening, such as colonoscopies and at-home stool testing. But despite recommendations that adults get screened from ages 50 to 75, more than 33% of Americans are not up to date with screening. Ways to increase screening include mailing screening reminders and mailing fecal immunochemical test (FIT) kits, to detect blood in stool. For the study, researchers mailed 35,000 Medicaid patients aged 52 to 64 who were overdue for colon cancer screening a reminder or a reminder plus a FIT screening kit. Over a year, the number of colon cancer screenings, including FITs and screening colonoscopies, was...