Health

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...

CHICAGO (AP) — Brunch dates and flag football games might be a little easier to get to this Sunday, when phones grace early-risers with an extra hour of rest before alarm clocks go off.The downside: Next week across most of the U.S., the sun will set well before many folks step foot out of the office, leaving them to run errands or take walks in utter darkness. Come Nov. 5, daylight saving time is out and standard time is in, and will last until March 10.No need to wait till the midnight hour to prepare for the time change that clocks in early Sunday, when 2 a.m. becomes 1 a.m. Before bed beckons Saturday night, rewind the clock on the microwave, oven, car, or any other device not yet clever enough to make the leap on its own.Time to set clocks back an hour for a return to standard time ac...

The human heart is a muscle, but it’s also a kind of complicated balloon—a balloon that fills and empties roughly 60 to 100 times every minute, and several billion times during the course of a lifetime. Among people with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, the walls of the heart muscle are abnormally thick. This thickness can interfere with the heart’s normal filling-and-emptying operation. “If you think of a balloon made with super-thick rubber, you have to blow harder to fill it, and it’s the same with a hypertrophic heart,” says Dr. Daphne Hsu, professor of pediatrics and medicine at Pediatric Heart Center of Montefiore/Einstein in New York. Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy is the most common form of genetic heart disease in the U.S. and the second commonest heart-muscle disease among children. Rou...

The infant mortality rate in the U.S. is on its way up. New data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show a nearly 3% rise in the rate of infant deaths between 2021 and 2022, which is the largest year-over-year increase the agency has recorded since 2002. The total number of infant deaths, as well as the rate at which they occur, has increased at times in the last two decades. Indeed, both rose just a year earlier, from  2020 to 2021. But, says Danielle Ely, the lead author of the CDC’s new report, that reflected a year—2021—when many more babies were being born than in the previous year—2020—which was the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The even larger rise in infant mortality in 2022 “was a bit of a surprise,” she says, given the decades-long downward trend. The 20...

Many sleep experts take a dim view of using the snooze button in the morning. Setting serial alarms beginning earlier than you need to get up, rather than sleeping straight through until a single alarm, may prematurely pull you out of deep, restorative sleep, the thinking goes. And if you’re snoozing beyond the time you actually meant to get out of bed, that may be a signal that you’re not getting enough rest at night, says Philip Cheng, a sleep expert at Henry Ford Health.But when Stephen Mattingly—a serial snoozer who completed his Ph.D. in cognition at the University of Notre Dame and then became a postdoctoral researcher at the university—turned to the scientific literature to see if the data backed up those warnings, he couldn’t find much.Previous studies had found that fragmented sle...