Health

For many people, stress is part of everyday life. The demands of work, family, and other quotidian pressures can leave one feeling angry, agitated, anxious, downtrodden, or burned out. While these kinds of day-to-day challenges are often described as mild forms of stress, the reality is that some people will experience them more often and more significantly than others. And there’s mounting evidence linking these and other forms of stress to heart-related health problems.“We know from several studies in different populations that emotional and psychological stress is associated with an increased likelihood of developing and dying of cardiovascular disease,” says Dr. Beth Cohen, a stress researcher and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For example, resear...

Social media can be harmful. That's something all behavioral researchers can agree on. There is much less consensus on how exactly its harmful use is defined, and whether or not there’s a corresponding beneficial way to use social media. And at the very center of this academic debate is the question: Can a person become addicted to social media? Settling on an answer to this question has a surprising number of implications: for the internet, for policy (most notably in a recent lawsuit against Meta), and even for people who suffer from or treat more well-defined forms of addiction. Attempts to do so have resulted in fairly conflicting findings, explains Niklas Ihssen, an associate psychology professor at Durham University in the U.K. In particular, some studies suggest abstaining from soci...

Weight loss drugs have dominated the headlines over the past year, and now there’s a new medication that may be the most effective one yet.On Nov. 11, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved tirzepatide (which will be sold under the brand name Zepbound), to treat overweight and obesity. Made by Eli Lilly and Co., the drug is already approved, in different doses, for type 2 diabetes, as Mounjaro, and its effectiveness in those patients is due in part to its weight loss effects.About 70% of Americans are overweight, with a body mass index (BMI) between 27 and 30, or obese, with a BMI over 30—which increase the risk of a host of other health problems, including heart disease, diabetes, osteoarthritis and more. Yet there really haven’t been effective medications to treat obesity. ...

Surgeons at NYU Langone Health have performed what they say is the world’s first whole-eye transplant, combined with a partial face transplant, in an important step forward for the fields of both transplantation and vision restoration.In May, a team of more than 140 health care workers performed the 21-hour procedure on Aaron James, a 46-year-old Arkansas man badly injured in a workplace accident in 2021. James, a high-voltage power lineman and military veteran, suffered a massive electric shock when his face accidentally touched a live wire on the job. James was lucky to survive, but lost his left eye, much of his face, and part of his left arm.It’s not clear whether James will ever be able to see from his donated eye. Still, the novel combined transplant has given James major cosmetic be...

After serving in the Vietnam War, Charles Figley became interested in the concept of trauma—not only the lasting psychological wounds that people experienced after living through traumatic events themselves, but also how their loved ones often came to share those burdens. "Simply being a member of a family and caring deeply about its members makes us emotionally vulnerable to the catastrophes which impact them," he wrote in 1983.At the time, Figley—who now runs the Tulane University Traumatology Institute—called these trickle-down effects "secondary traumatic stress reactions." Today, however, he often uses the term “compassion fatigue" to refer to the emotional and physical exhaustion that sometimes afflicts people who are exposed to others’ trauma.In the nearly 50 years since Figley bega...

What is obesity?Some people will tell you it’s a fancy word for being fat; others might say it’s a slur that pathologizes bigger bodies. And yet others will insist it’s a moral failing—one of laziness and poor willpower.For the past decade, however, the medical community has recognized that obesity is a chronic disease, much like cancer, diabetes, and high blood pressure. Obesity triples the risk of hospitalization due to COVID-19, is linked with hundreds of medical complications, and accounts for 4 million preventable deaths every year.Obesity is also heterogeneous, with manifold different causes, clinical presentations, and responses to treatment. The astronomical rise of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro has glossed over such nuance, with bold promises that medication is...

Firearms have accounted for the deaths of more American children than any other cause since 2020. The true damage guns inflict on children is larger still, as demonstrated by a new study showing that emergency-room visits for children injured by firearms nearly doubled during the pandemic. In a survey of nine U.S. hospitals, a team led by Dr. Jennifer Hoffmann, a pediatric emergency medicine physician at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, found that pediatric emergency room visits due to gun shots increased from 694 in the years before the pandemic to 1,210 during the pandemic, a 74% increase, according to data from 2017 through 2022. During that time, the death rate among gun victims age 18 and under nearly doubled as well, from 3.1% to 6.1% of all children injured by firearms.That inc...

On the same day whistleblower Frances Haugen was testifying before Congress about the harms of Facebook and Instagram to children in the fall of 2021, Arturo Béjar, then a contractor at the social media giant, sent an alarming email to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the same topic.In the note, as first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Béjar, who worked as an engineering director at Facebook from 2009 to 2015, outlined a “critical gap” between how the company approached harm and how the people who use its products — most notably young people — experience it.“Two weeks ago my daughter, 16, and an experimenting creator on Instagram, made a post about cars, and someone commented ‘Get back to the kitchen.’ It was deeply upsetting to her,” he wrote. “At the same time the comment is far from ...

If you’ve traveled overseas recently, you might have been greeted upon your return by people in a handful of airport terminals in the U.S. recruiting passengers to get tested for the COVID-19 virus. It’s been a surprisingly productive way to keep track of how much COVID-19 might be entering the country, via travelers, as well as which variants they are bringing in.Just in time for the busy holiday travel season, the program’s operators, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Concentric by Ginkgo Bioworks (a Boston-based biotech firm), and XpresCheck, which recruits and tests the passengers, are expanding the screening to include viruses other than SARS-CoV-2. Since October, the program has been screening a subset of samples from travelers for influenza and RSV. Eventually, t...