Latest Health News

SATURDAY, June 13, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- A particular mutation in one strain of the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus may have helped it infect more human cells and turn it into the dominant strain worldwide, new laboratory research shows. Researchers at Scripps Research in Jupiter, Fla., stressed that their finding doesn't mean the virus is any more lethal. And because this was research conducted in a lab, it doesn't yet confirm that the mutation makes the strain more likely to spread among people, they added. Still, "viruses with this mutation were much more infectious than those without the mutation in the cell culture system we used," study senior author and virologist Hyeryun Choe, said in a Scripps news release. Since the beginning of the global pandemic of COVID-19, experts...

SATURDAY, June 13, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- If you're older and you want to prolong your life, try volunteering, new research suggests. "Humans are social creatures by nature. Perhaps this is why our minds and bodies are rewarded when we give to others," said lead investigator Eric Kim. He is from the department of social and behavioral sciences and the Center for Health and Happiness at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in Boston. For the study, Kim's team looked at nearly 13,000 people older than 50 who took part in the U.S. Health and Retirement Study and were tracked for four years between 2010 and 2016. Compared to those who didn't volunteer, those who volunteered at least 100 hours a year (about two hours per week) had a substantially reduced risk of death and of...

FRIDAY, June 12, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- If you can't sleep well at night, the problem may be rooted in hardened arteries, a new study suggests. "We've discovered that fragmented sleep is associated with a unique pathway -- chronic circulating inflammation throughout the bloodstream -- which, in turn, is linked to higher amounts of plaques in coronary arteries," said researcher Matthew Walker. He's a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. Poor sleep is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, which is the number one killer of Americans, claiming about 12,000 lives each week. For the study, the researchers used a statistical model to analyze data on more than 1,600 middle-aged and older adults who were part of the Multi-Ethnic Study...

FRIDAY, June 12, 2020 (HealthDay News) -- There's been a lot of talk recently about the transmission dangers posed by people who are infected by the new coronavirus but show no symptoms. Are many of these "asymptomatic" carriers simply in a stage of infection that later moves on to symptomatic COVID-19? No, suggests a small, new study of cruise ship passengers and crew. Japanese researchers were able to track outcomes for 96 coronavirus-infected passengers and crew aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess, which made headlines recently. "In this cohort, the majority of asymptomatic infected persons remained asymptomatic throughout the course of their infection," a team led by Dr. Yohei Doi, of Fujita Health University in Japan, reported June 12 in the New England Journal of...