Resources & Information

NPR
September 15, 2024
About three years ago, Soumya Rangarajan struggled day after day with exhaustion, headaches, and heart palpitations. As a front-line hospital doctor during the COVID-19 pandemic, she first attributed her symptoms to the demands of an unprecedented health care crisis.

But a social media post got Rangarajan thinking about the possibility that she might actually be the victim of something more mundane: an iron deficiency. She requested a blood test from her doctor, and the results determined she had anemia, a condition caused by lower-than-normal levels of iron in the blood.

It was the first step toward relief, recalled Rangarajan, who is a geriatrician at the University of Michigan. Her symptoms, she added, had made it so she “had difficulty getting through a full week at work.”

MedPageToday
September 7, 2024
The goal of the COVID vaccine is to keep people out of the hospital and out of the intensive care unit. So the critical question then is: who’s getting hospitalized? Who’s getting hospitalized with COVID? And the answer is, it generally falls into four high-risk groups. One are people who are elderly, which is to say those over 75. Two are people who are immune compromised either because they were born with certain immune deficiencies or they’re taking drugs that suppress their immune system because of cancers or rheumatologic disease. Three are people who are pregnant. And four are people who have high-risk medical conditions like obesity, diabetes, chronic lung disease, chronic heart disease. So that’s who you’re trying to keep out of the hospital.

Time
September 4, 2024
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. Is this a particularly bad year for disease-spreading mosquitoes in the U.S.? And what can we expect in the future?

Medical news Today
August 19, 2024
Everyone knows that as we age, our bodies go through a lot of changes. While changes will occur every year, past research shows that, at the protein level, the most notable changes take place around ages 34, 60, and 78.

Although some of these aging body changes you can see — such as graying hair and skin wrinkles — many of these alterations are not visible as they happen inside the body to organs, tissues, and even on a cellular level.

A new study recently published in the journal Nature Aging adds to what we know about how aging affects the inside of the body. Scientists from the Stanford University School of Medicine have discovered that humans undergo two major changes in their molecules and microorganisms around ages 44 and 60.

Medical News Today
August 16, 2024
Using music to help treat mental illness is one focus of mental illness research. Experts are interested in understanding music therapy and how to achieve the best results from its use. A study published in Cell Reports looked at some of the underlying mechanisms involved in the effectiveness of music therapy as a treatment for depression. The researchers found that subjective enjoyment was a key factor in seeing an effective response in participants with treatment-resistant depression. The results further highlight the underlying reasons why music therapy is helpful and what steps could enhance its effectiveness.

NPR
August 15, 2024
If it seems like a lot of people are getting COVID right now, you’re not imagining it. We’re in the middle of a worldwide summer COVID-19 wave. A high or very high level of COVID-19 virus is being detected in wastewater in almost every state, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At least 10 other states have a high amount of COVID in the wastewater.