Keeping up with all the latest health news can be a crapshoot. Fortunately, we have you covered. Here are the hottest stories from Yahoo News partners this week.
‘Crapsules’ … May Offer New Hope to Patients’
A clinical trial funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research is investigating whether pills made from dried sprouts in healthy people can help those with advanced liver disease, Sky News reports.
Individuals with cirrhosis – a condition that involves severe scarring and damage to the liver – makes them more vulnerable because they have higher levels of “bad” gut bacteria. to infections. Researchers hope that the “good” bacteria that make up the stools of healthy individuals can improve the health of diseased guts and reduce the need for antibiotics.
Professor Debbie Shawcross of King’s College London said: “Crapsules, which, as the name suggests, have no taste or smell, could offer new hope for cirrhosis patients who have no other medical options. There is a chief investigator of the trial.
About 300 patients are expected to participate in the trial. Participants were randomly assigned to either a frozen stool capsule or a placebo tablet every three months for two years.
Even “safe” levels of pollution can cause changes in children’s brain development
A The study was published this week We found that exposure to pollutants that are considered safe from a regulatory perspective can contribute to changes in a child’s brain over time, reports The Hill.
High concentrations of ozone are associated with connectivity in the brain’s cortex – responsible for processes such as thinking, memory, consciousness and emotion – but less connectivity between the cortex and other brain regions, such as the amygdala, emotional processing and the hippocampus, over long periods of time. Time plays a role in memory.
Researchers say they hope regulators will consider these findings when setting air quality standards in the future.
“Even though the average level of air pollution in the U.S. is very low, we’re still seeing significant effects on the brain,” said study author Devin Cotter, a doctoral candidate at the Keck School of Medicine in Southern California. . It’s something policymakers should consider when considering whether to tighten the current standard.
The study found that daily use of low-dose aspirin increases the risk of anemia in healthy adults
A team of researchers from Australia, New Zealand and the United States found that healthy adults aged 65 and older who took low-dose aspirin daily appeared to have an increased risk of developing the disease. Anemia – A disease that occurs when the body produces too few healthy red blood cells, causing fatigue, shortness of breath, or irregular heartbeat.
of The study was published on Tuesday It looked at a group of 19,114 healthy elderly people who were randomly assigned to either 100mg aspirin or a placebo. Researchers found that those in the aspirin group had less anemia and lower levels of ferritin (an iron-storing protein) and hemoglobin, Fox News reported.
About half of seniors in the United States take aspirin for preventive reasons, including “thinning the blood to prevent cardiovascular disease and stroke,” according to Fox News. The study’s researchers recommend that older patients who regularly take low-dose aspirin should be monitored by their physicians for anemia.
All adults under the age of 65 should be screened for depression, the health panel says
US Defense Services Task Force Tuesday is recommended for the first time All adults under the age of 65 should be screened for depression, even if they don’t have symptoms.
The task force is an independent group of volunteer health experts whose guidelines may affect insurance company payments, but doctors are not required to follow the group’s recommendations. This most recent recommendation specifically identified pregnant and postpartum adults as those who should be screened, but noted that there is insufficient evidence to support screening for adults age 65 and older.
Anxiety testing is usually done through a questionnaire during a doctor’s office visit, and “Doctors want to know if, in the past two weeks, a patient has become irritable or irritable, troubled by uncontrollable worries, or so restless that it is difficult to sit still.” ” NBC News reported.
Although screening tools can help open the conversation about stress and anxiety symptoms, experts note that the screening tool itself is not enough to diagnose the patient with the disease.