Health

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...

It’s uncomfortable to talk about older adults and driving, a fact that many families who’ve worried about a loved one’s dwindling eyesight, reaction time, or cognition behind the wheel are well aware of. The ability to drive isn’t a right, but in many parts of the U.S. it’s become a necessity, the only way to access the world outside the home. When an older adult’s freedom threatens their safety, who gets to make the choice to take a car or license away?For a long time, the answer has been an unsure combination of the U.S. government, physicians, and family members. But as the population of Americans older than 65 grows at a faster rate than any other age bracket, seniors’ presence on the road is growing as well. According to the Federal Highway Administration (FHA), there were 48 million ...

There's a sense, once a whisper, that's growing louder every day. Glaciers are melting; children are being slaughtered; hatred runs rampant. Sometimes it feels like the world's approaching a nadir. Or like you are.The antidote to any despair might be hope, experts say. It’s one of the most powerful—and essential—human mindsets, and possible to achieve even when it feels out of reach. “Hope is a way of thinking,” says Chan Hellman, a psychologist who’s the founding director of the Hope Research Center at the University of Oklahoma. “We know it can be taught; we know it can be nurtured. It’s not something you either have or don’t have.”Many people, he notes, don’t fully understand what hope is—and what it isn’t. Being hopeful doesn’t mean engaging in wishful thinking or blind optimism. Rathe...

Alzheimer’s patients now have more options than ever for treating their disease— two drugs are approved to treat the causes of Alzheimer’s, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is currently considering approving another, which could be available next year. Many researchers are starting to focus on how to get the most out of these treatments: how to identify people who will benefit the most, how long people need to be treated, and how to measure the effect of the drugs. They are also exploring whether these drugs could not only slow, but maybe even prevent some of the more damaging effects of the disease.At the annual Clinical Trials on Alzheimer’s Disease conference in Boston, Eisai and Biogen, makers of the most recently approved drug, lecanemab (Leqembi), as well as Eli Lilly, maker...

The world is entering a new era of vaccines. Following the success of COVID-19 mRNA shots, scientists have a far greater capacity to tailor shots to a virus’s structure, putting a host of new vaccines on the horizon.The most recent arrivals are several new immunizations against respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.These shots are welcome since RSV can be dangerous, even deadly, in the very old and very young. But the shots, produced by Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, are also expensive, costing about $300 for those directed at adults, and up to $1,000 for one of the shots, a monoclonal antibody rather than a traditional vaccine, intended for babies. Many older vaccines cost pennies.And in part because of the high cost, there is a shortage of RSV shots for infants, leading the U.S. Centers for D...