News by Subject Medicine & Health

Children whose parents regularly smoke or vape marijuana may experience viral respiratory infections, such as the common cold, more frequently than those whose parents do not smoke, according to a study published in the journal Pediatric Research.

What The Study Did: Health care workers in Canada expressed their sources of distress and concern during the COVID-19 pandemic on an online forum.

What The Study Did: This review and meta-analysis investigated whether patients with mental health disorders are at increased risk of COVID-19-related death.

Lonely, older adults are nearly twice as likely to use opioids to ease pain and two-and-a-half times more likely to use sedatives and anti-anxiety medications, putting themselves at risk for drug dependency, impaired attention, falls and other accidents, and further cognitive impairment, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco.

What The Study Did: Survey data were used to investigate the relationship between loneliness and high-risk medication use in adults older than age 65.

What The Study Did: Researchers examined the safety of the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines in patients who experienced an allergic reaction to the first dose.

Adolescents who set goals for their future and those with strong parental support are less likely to use e-cigarettes and other tobacco products, according to a new survey of nearly 2,500 high school students. The findings suggests that strategies to prevent youth vaping may be different from what works to dissuade youth from smoking cigarettes.

A prospective cohort study found that quitting smoking after being diagnosed with early-stage non-small cell lung cancer may slow disease progression and decrease mortality. Given that about half of all smokers continue to smoke after a lung cancer diagnosis, these findings present an opportunity to improve overall and progression-free survival in this type of cancer. The study is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

There is an urgent need to develop and implement effective screening, diagnosis and treatment strategies for patients with nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) and nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), common liver conditions with a rising burden in the U.S. and globally. This is particularly important for the most at-risk patients, those with diabetes and obesity.

How early is the course of COVID-19, mild or severe, determined? In Cell, researchers examined nasal cells sampled from patients at the time of diagnosis, looking for differences between those who developed severe disease and those who experienced a mild illness. Cells from patients who developed severe COVID-19 exhibited a more muted antiviral response. If the early stages of infection can determine disease severity, it opens a path for scientists to develop early therapeutic interventions.