Архив рубрики: Здоровье Америка

The first bell echoes off the bricked hallways of Lindbergh High School in Renton, Washington, warning dazed and coffee-clutching students to pick up their pace. It’s December. It’s 7:15 a.m. It’s still dark outside. Yet, in five minutes, they are expected to be sitting in class, alert, and ready to learn.

Despite Seattle, Tacoma, and other neighboring school districts delaying their middle and high school start times in recent years, the Renton School District has yet to budge.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“It is inhumane,” says Alyssa Shewey, a teacher at the school. Yet a very early morning arrival is a common ask for teenagers in the U.S., with more than 40% of high schools starting before 8 a.m.

Our circadian rhythms, the internal drumbeats that direct the timely functioning of our sleep and countless other aspects of our physiology, drift later during adolescence. The change conspires with technology, late sports competitions, and social factors to keep older kids awake w..

On Jan. 3, the U.S. Surgeon General issued a sobering report about the cancer risks linked to something that most Americans enjoy frequently: an alcoholic beverage.

In the advisory, Dr. Vivek Murthy outlined the substantial evidence behind the increased risk of developing seven types of cancers among people who consumed as little as one daily drink, or even fewer.

“What we know with a high degree of confidence is that there is a causal link between alcohol and cancer risk,” says Murthy. “The data has been building for some time and getting stronger and stronger.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The advisory cites alcohol as the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the U.S. after tobacco and obesity and notes that there are about 20,000 alcohol-related cancer deaths in the country annually. That’s more than the yearly number of alcohol-associated traffic crash fatalities.

What’s especially concerning, Murthy says, is that 17% of these deaths occur in people who follow the..

A 13-year-old girl in Canada became so sick with H5N1, or bird flu, in late 2024 that she had to be put on a ventilator. Around the same time, a senior in Louisiana was diagnosed with the first “severe” case in the U.S.

As bird flu continues to ramp up, many are wondering what tools—namely, vaccines—we have to fight it if such intervention becomes necessary.

“Public-health and infectious disease folks around the world are watching bird flu very, very carefully,” says Dr. William Schaffner, professor of infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and spokesperson for the Infectious Disease Society of America. “The concern is that this virus could acquire the capacity to attach to human cells and spread widely. That would be opening the door to a new pandemic for sure.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

For that to happen, the H5N1 virus would have to develop the right mutations that allow it to more easily infect human cells—a process that could occur more easily if ..

Years ago, stress kept Hannah Eden up at night before her CrossFit events. Beating her competitors “meant everything,” she says. But having a baby changed her mindset. Training for a half-Ironman in Hawaii, she focused less on the competition, and more on her own performance. “I was so grateful just that my body could do this, eight months postpartum,” she says. Feeling less pressure, she excelled, finishing the June race at a surprisingly fast pace. “It was such an individual journey,” she says.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Like Eden, I’ve been chasing my (far less impressive) personal records lately: I run a 5K at an empty high school track every weekend, stubbornly trying to beat my fastest time ever, which I set years ago. I check my pace and, if I’m near my personal record, I push through agony to try to break it.

My quest for a “PR,” as it’s called, is more exciting than going through the motions at the gym, and the extra exertion is boosting my cardio. Despite the empty ..

The last of 2024 is in the rearview mirror. But before forgetting it ever existed, consider reflecting on everything good and bad and weird and inspiring that happened to you over the past 12 months.

“When we stop and stand and look back at where we’ve been, and how we felt when we were there, it can serve as a blueprint for where we want to go forward,” says Caroline Fenkel, chief clinical officer with the virtual mental-health platform Charlie Health. By asking yourself a series of probing questions, you’ll become more self-aware and figure out how to make changes that can boost your happiness and well-being in the New Year. Think of it as a “gentle inventory, rather than a high-stakes self-assessment,” she adds.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Where to start? Ask yourself who and what strengthens or drains you. These insights can help you better manage your energy. Fenkel likes to regularly take inventory of what’s adding a net positive to her life, for example—like taking care ..

The last of 2024 is in the rearview mirror. But before forgetting it ever existed, consider reflecting on everything good and bad and weird and inspiring that happened to you over the past 12 months.

“When we stop and stand and look back at where we’ve been, and how we felt when we were there, it can serve as a blueprint for where we want to go forward,” says Caroline Fenkel, chief clinical officer with the virtual mental-health platform Charlie Health. By asking yourself a series of probing questions, you’ll become more self-aware and figure out how to make changes that can boost your happiness and well-being in the New Year. Think of it as a “gentle inventory, rather than a high-stakes self-assessment,” she adds.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Where to start? Ask yourself who and what strengthens or drains you. These insights can help you better manage your energy. Fenkel likes to regularly take inventory of what’s adding a net positive to her life, for example—like taking care ..

Your heart is a muscle. As Dr. Noah Moss, an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist at the Mount Sinai Fuster Hospital in New York City, puts it, “a very special muscle, but a muscle.”

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, or HCM, is a genetic disease in which the heart muscle grows thicker than normal. You might think of the term “big-hearted” to connote something good, says Dr. Matthew W. Martinez, director of Atlantic Health System Sports Cardiology at Morristown Medical Center in Morristown, N.J., and a nationally recognized expert in HCM. But with this condition, “there’s too much of a good thing, and that extra thickness leads to the problems associated with this disease,” he explains. The heart is inefficient (it doesn’t squeeze out enough blood), and obstruction in the heart cavity leads to murmurs that can worsen with exercise, make you breathless, and create electrical changes inside the heart.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Here’s what to know about how cardiologists..

Progress in addressing mental health is notoriously slow and mostly incremental. Breakthrough treatments tend to be rare, and trained professionals too few to meet the demand for services, which is increasing. But 2024 was a pivotal year—thanks to the culmination of decades of research and post-pandemic attention to mental-health issues.

In March, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Rejoyn, the first digital therapeutic to treat major depressive disorder. The app opens the door to a new class of therapies that could dramatically increase access to treatment. Six months later, the FDA approved the first new drug for schizophrenia in 30 years, Cobenfy. It targets a different brain chemical system than previous treatments. And psychedelics notched a first when the FDA reviewed a request to approve MDMA for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder. Though this bid ultimately failed—the agency wanted to see more research—the FDA remains open to this group of drugs as..

Lily Brown hears the same thing over and over again from her patients. They’ll say, “‘All day, I’m so busy. I’ve got deadline after deadline, responsibility after responsibility. And finally, I’m exhausted, I’m so excited to get to bed—and I lie down, and that’s when my brain turns on,’” says Brown, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety.

It’s all too common to spiral into worry and rumination once the sun goes down. Research has long suggested that, for many people, anxiety symptoms spike and mental health otherwise suffers at night. A 2022 study labeled this phenomenon the “mind after midnight hypothesis,” noting that risks of suicidal behavior and substance misuse also rise after dark, and people’s mood plummets from roughly 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. Another study, this one published in 2024 in Psychiatry Research, found that general anxiety peaks at various times throughout the day—around 8 a.m., 4 p.m., and 1 a.m., according to the rese..

Remember the days when you didn’t know what raw milk was (and didn’t need to)? Well, those are over: raw—or unpasteurized—milk has been in the news for months. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is an ardent supporter of raw milk; at the same time, as H5N1 circulates, some raw milk is being recalled following the detection of bird flu virus in samples.

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

Here’s what to know about the risks of drinking raw milk.

Can raw milk transmit diseases to humans?

“Infections caused by raw milk are rare,” says Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, “but when they occur they can be deadly, especially to children. This is a risk I would rather not take.”

Nestle is not alone in sounding the alarm. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the U.S. Dep..