Health

The undeniable popularity of self-help books, wellness podcasts, and happiness workshops reflects the constant human desire to make life better. But could it be that many of our lives are already better than we recognize?While we may have a loving family, a good place to live, and a decent job, we often fail to notice those things. It’s not because we are ungrateful or stupid. It’s because of a basic feature of our brain, known as habituation.Habituation is the tendency of neurons to fire less and less in response to things that are constant. You enter a room filled with roses and after a short while, you cannot detect their scent any longer. And just as you get used to the smell of fresh flowers, you also get used to a loving relationship, to a promotion, to a nice home, to a dazzling wor...

Getting the flu shot any time during respiratory virus season is better than not getting it at all. But vaccine protection wanes, so timing the shot properly can help antibodies peak when cases are highest. Researchers wanted to figure out the optimal time for getting a flu shot, and took advantage of the fact that children tend to get vaccinated in the month they were born. In a study published in BMJ, they analyzed health insurance data from more than 800,000 children, ages 2-5, who got a flu shot from 2011 to 2018. The data showed that kids vaccinated in October had the strongest protection—they were about 12% less likely to get the flu compared to kids vaccinated in August.“It makes sense that October is the ideal time to get vaccinated,” says the study's senior author Dr. Anupam Jena,...

Play is a microcosm of childhood, a protective shell like a butterfly’s chrysalis that safeguards children from the slings and arrows of life, one that allows them to grow. What happens, however, when, through no fault of your own, you are born into conditions—poverty, racism, and other adversities—that groom children for bad outcomes? Can play, if nurtured and supported in such adverse conditions, create resilience? Can increased opportunities for play encourage better-than-expected life outcomes, and possibly even provide a buffer against the odds of the cycle of poverty being perpetuated?I think back to my own childhood; when the violence and abuse started, I think I stopped playing entirely until I managed to escape that home. For me, as for so many other children, school was no place ...

First came the students, who wanted help with their homework and essays. Now, ChatGPT is luring scientists, who are under pressure to publish papers in reputable scientific journals.AI is already disrupting the archaic world of scientific publishing. When Melissa Kacena, vice chair of orthopaedic surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine, reviews articles submitted for publication in journals, she now knows to look out for ones that might have been written by the AI program. “I have a rule of thumb now that if I pull up 10 random references cited in the paper, and if more than one isn’t accurate, then I reject the paper,” she says.But despite the pitfalls, there is also promise. Writing review articles, for example, is a task well suited to AI: it involves sifting through the existi...

None of the tidying clichés ever really clicked with KC Davis, a therapist in Houston and mom to two young kids. “I’ve always been a messy person,” she says. "I've never been able to 'clean as I go.'" Davis knew there were plenty of people just like her: those who wanted a serene space but lacked the time and energy to get started. After finding bite-size strategies that worked for her, Davis wrote How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing. A messy house can feel overwhelming to tackle, and progress may seem incremental at first. But there's good reason to work on building a healthier relationship with your home. Research suggests that clutter increases levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and that cleanliness is associated with better self-rated heal...

Women need to exercise only half as much as men to reap the same longevity benefits, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.That’s good news for women who struggle to motivate themselves to hit the gym, says study co-author Dr. Martha Gulati, director of preventive cardiology at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles. “For me, the news to women is: a little goes a long way,” Gulati says.In the study, men who got about 300 minutes of aerobic exercise every week had an 18% lower risk of dying compared to inactive men, the researchers found. But among women, it took only 140 minutes of weekly exercise to see an equivalent benefit—and the risk of death was 24% lower among those who got about 300 minutes of movement per week. (For both sexes, longevity bene...

Since 2021, people with COVID-19 have been told to isolate themselves for at least five days to avoid spreading the disease. But that practice may soon join most mask mandates as relics of the peak pandemic era.The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is said to be weighing a new, symptom-based approach to isolation for the general public, the Washington Post reported on Feb. 13. Under that potential approach, which may be rolled out for public feedback this spring, people could leave home when their symptoms are mild and improving and they’ve been fever-free for at least 24 hours without medication, according to the Post.That possible shift, which echoes similar moves in California and Oregon, would bring the CDC’s recommendations for COVID-19 in closer step with its guid...

NEW YORK — Smoking has surpassed injecting as the most common way of taking drugs in U.S. overdose deaths, a new government study suggests.The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called its study published Thursday the largest to look at how Americans took the drugs that killed them.CDC officials decided to study the topic after seeing reports from California suggesting that smoking fentanyl was becoming more common than injecting it. Potent, illicit versions of the painkiller are involved in more U.S. overdose deaths than any other drug.Some early research has suggested that smoking fentanyl is somewhat less deadly than injecting it, and any reduction in injection-related overdose deaths is a positive, said the study’s lead author, Lauren Tanz.But “both injection and smoking carry ...

It’s not unusual to fast before a medical test to avoid skewing the results. But Dr. Zoë Gottlieb’s patients often skip meals for a different reason.Gottlieb, a gastroenterologist and assistant professor of medicine at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine in New York City, specializes in treating inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), an umbrella term for conditions involving chronic inflammation of the gastrointestinal tract, specifically Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis. People with IBD have “unreliable bowel habits,” meaning they may need to use the bathroom frequently or urgently, Gottlieb says. So when a patient doesn’t eat before their appointment, it can be a sign that they’re afraid they’ll be caught without a restroom when they need one, she says.That fear is warranted in the U...

When medical treatments or vaccines are hard to get, it's usually because of too much demand and not enough supply. But in the case of COVID-19 vaccines for kids, it’s the other way around: low demand for the shot is tanking supply.While the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that anyone ages six months and older get vaccinated against COVID-19, parents are finding it hard to track down kid-sized doses. Usually, they would rely on their pediatricians for all childhood vaccines, but many are not stocking the latest COVID-19 shot.Why not? And how can you secure a shot for your tot?Stocking the shot is now financially risky for pediatriciansWhen the COVID-19 vaccine was first authorized for kids, it was during the public health emergency, so the federal government boug...