Архив рубрики: Здоровье Америка

If there’s anything worse than being sick, it’s being sick while dealing with insurance issues. But unfortunately, that situation is all too common. Recent research from the Commonwealth Fund, a private foundation that researches health care issues, finds that 17% of U.S. adults have in the past year had their insurance company deny doctor-recommended care, with denials happening about as frequently for people on both commercial and government insurance plans.

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Denials can occur either before you’ve gotten a test, procedure, or treatment—when a provider submits a request for prior authorization, for example—or after you’ve already received care. The insurer may argue the service isn’t one it covers or is medically unnecessary for you, or it may deny care on logistical grounds, like a claim having incorrect information or coming from an out-of-network provider.

Receiving a denial letter can be discouraging, but you can take certain steps to fight bac..

It was early morning in Burundi when one of our patients set out for the hospital, her baby strapped to her back and her sick four-year-old son cradled in her arms. When her little boy’s itchy sores started to weep and he would not stop crying, she knew she had to get him there as quickly as possible. They trekked for miles up a dusty red path, passing palm groves and rice fields as they made their way. When she finally arrived, the doctors told her they’d have to move her son to a separate building. “He has mpox,” they said.

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Scenes like this are playing out daily all over Burundi—and in other Central African countries—as thousands of people are falling sick with a new strain of mpox that is ravaging the region. On Aug. 14, 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the multiple mpox outbreaks occurring on the African continent were a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Although mpox has been around for decades, a new strai..

These days, many people use at-home COVID-19 tests when they feel ill, rather than going out to get tested by a professional. (That’s when they bother to test at all.) But for all their convenience, the antigen tests commonly used at home have never been as accurate as PCR tests done in a lab—and the continued mutation of the virus raises additional concerns about their performance.

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Rapid COVID-19 tests have never been perfect. How are they holding up as new variants emerge?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) continues to monitor the efficacy of the diagnostics it regulates—and as of August 2023, the FDA said none of the antigen tests on the market were expected to have reduced performance against Omicron or its subvariants. (All of the variants that have emerged since late 2021, including recent ones like KP.3.1.1, are relatives of the original Omicron strain.)

The FDA has also collaborated with a U.S. National Institutes of Health task f..

(WASHINGTON) — Fewer adolescents are vaping this year than at any point in the last decade, government officials reported Thursday, pointing to a shrinking number of high school students who are using Elf Bar and other fruity, unauthorized e-cigarettes.

The latest survey numbers show the teen vaping rate fell to under 6% this year, down from 7.7% in 2023. More than 1.6 million students reported vaping in the previous month — about one-third the number in 2019, when underage vaping peaked with the use of discrete, high-nicotine e-cigarettes like Juul.

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This year’s decline was mainly driven by a half-million fewer high school students who reported using e-cigarettes in the past month, officials said. Vaping was unchanged among middle schoolers, but remains less common in that group, at 3.5% of students.

“This is a monumental public health win,” FDA’s tobacco director Brian King told reporters. “But we can’t rest on our laurels. There’s clearly more wor..

With multiple game-changing developments over the past two decades, kidney cancer patients are now living longer and better.

A big part of the reason is that many are being diagnosed at earlier stages of the disease, when it can often be more easily treated and sometimes cured. Even when cancers are caught later, advances in medications and in methods of targeting cancer cells are significantly extending survival.

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“When I started two decades ago, the average survival for patients with advanced kidney cancer was one year,” says Dr. Brian Rini, a professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. “Now, the median survival is between five and six years. It’s amazing.”

The growing use of scanning technologies in medicine overall has been one of the most important changes over the last couple of decades: Tumors are being detected during scans for non-cancerous conditions.

“Most kidney cancers are found by accident quite ea..

When I left my father’s condo for the airport on a sunny March day in 2018, I did not once think that he might kill himself. Yes, his depression had returned, dense and unsteadying. But he had just come home from a week of voluntary inpatient care at the psychiatric hospital. He had a psychiatrist, an acupuncturist, and a sunlamp. During my visit, I drove him to his outpatient group therapy. We played Scrabble and listened to 80s dance hits.

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What I saw when I spent that week with my father was a man doing everything he could to shrug the mantle of depression from his shoulders. But within 48 hours of me leaving, my father ended his life.

He was one of more than 48,000 Americans who died by suicide in 2018, a then-record that has since been surpassed by steadily rising suicide rates in the midst of a mental health crisis the surgeon general called “the defining public health crisis of our time.”

As this crisis rages on, we have made strides in fighti..

Priya, an engineer in California, was on a deadline. Under pressure, she emailed a younger friend working on the same project to ask for some data that the project needed to get done on time. She and the woman weren’t super close, but Priya considered her colleague an ally and a buddy—previously they had “trauma-bonded,” as Priya puts it, over the way the project had been mismanaged. “I said, ‘Hey, can you grab this information for me?’” she says. Her friend emailed back a single-word response: “No.”

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Priya, who is not giving her full name so as not to cause issues at work, couldn’t understand why the woman had been so short with her. During an in-office gathering the next week, Priya told her colleague that her one-word response made her feel like she was mad at her. She asked, “Can you please just communicate with me about why you don’t want to do this, so I understand?” Priya was as puzzled by her friend’s reaction to this conversation as she was b..

The weight-loss drugs that have become so popular in recent years actually began as diabetes medications, and a new study shows that they continue to provide strong protection against that chronic disease.

Eli Lilly, the makers of tirzepatide—which they sell as Mounjaro for diabetes and Zepbound for weight loss—announced recently that in its longest study yet on tirzepatide, the drug reduced the risk of people with prediabetes moving on to develop diabetes by 94% compared to those taking a placebo.

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For nearly three years, the study followed more than 1,000 people who were overweight or obese and had prediabetes. By the end of the study, those on any of three doses of the drug lost up to nearly 20% of their body mass from the start of the study compared to those taking a placebo. The drug also contributed to a 94% lower chance of progressing from prediabetes to diabetes compared to placebo.

Tirzepatide targets two hormones related to appetite and wei..

Mosquito-borne diseases seem to be everywhere this year. Towns in Massachusetts are shutting down public parks and other outdoor areas after officials learned that mosquitoes in the region are carrying eastern equine encephalitis, a rare but deadly virus. And Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former top infectious-disease expert in the U.S., recently was hospitalized with West Nile virus that he allegedly acquired from a mosquito buzzing through his backyard.

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Is this a particularly bad year for disease-spreading mosquitoes in the U.S.? And what can we expect in the future?

Why are mosquitoes are such a big threat

Mosquitoes carry a number of viruses and parasites that can be harmful to human health, including malaria, dengue, yellow fever, chikungunya, West Nile virus, and eastern equine encephalitis. Different species of mosquitoes are adept at spreading different viruses.

The species primarily responsible for spreading eastern equine encephalitis, Culise..

We all know the importance of fostering close social connections. Friends are great—until they’re not.

Psychologists say they hear often about so-called toxic friendships, which veer away from the health benefits we’re accustomed to and instead take a hammer to emotional and psychological well-being. “A lot of what I see in these dynamics is that one person is acting in good faith, and the other is being manipulative or controlling,” says Brooke Sprowl, a therapist in Santa Monica, Calif. “It really takes a toll on your self-trust, because you’re being told that if you set boundaries, you’re being selfish, or if you’re not giving in to all of their needs, you’re letting them down.” People with toxic friends might also experience self-doubt, she adds, constantly questioning if they’re seeing things the right way, or if they’re missing something. It’s no wonder these relationships can trigger anxiety, depression, and self-esteem issues.

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With that in mi..