Health & Fitness

CROWN POINT, Ind. (AP) — When their 11-year-old son started losing weight and drinking lots of water, Tabitha and Bryan Balcitis chalked it up to a growth spurt and advice from his health class. But unusual crankiness and lethargy raised their concern, and tests showed his blood sugar levels were off the charts. Just six months after a mild case of COVID-19, the Crown Point, Indiana, boy was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. His parents were floored — it didn’t run in the family, but autoimmune illness did and doctors said that could be a factor. Could his diabetes also be linked with the coronavirus, wondered Nolan’s mom, a respiratory therapist. Turns out scientists in the U.S. and elsewhere are asking the same question and investigating whether any connection is more than a coincidence....

Have you ever woken up to excruciating pain in the shoulders and neck? How often do you experience this? Have you ever thought of consulting a doctor? Or do you ignore it assuming it would wane away soon? Many of us associate shoulder pain to bad sitting posture or sleeping position and ignore it assuming that it will go away when it has to. Leaving pain unattended is as harmful as the pain itself. We at ETimes spoke to experts on why one experiences neck and shoulder pain and what could be the medical conditions which trigger pain in these areas. The experts also suggested what lifestyle changes one must adopt in order to alleviate such pain. Read: Doctors explain how a high-salt and a high-protein diet harm your kidneys Common causes of neck and shoulder pain "Sprains and strains...

High cholesterol could be secretly hurting you. Dr Nick Fuller from the University of Sydney and the founder of the Interval Weight Loss program tells Eat This, Not That! Health, "It is the number one contributor to heart disease and heart attacks. Someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds, which leads to death in many cases," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Nearly 94 million U.S. adults age 20 or older have total cholesterol levels higher than 200 mg/dL. Twenty-eight million adults in the United States have total cholesterol levels higher than 240 mg/dL" That's a staggering number of Americans who are living with high cholesterol, a condition that can be inherited, but is mostly caused by poor lifestyle choices, the Mayo Clinic...

A homeopathic treatment being sold in Germany.Photo: Oskar Poss/ullstein bild (Getty Images) Research on homeopathy, a 200-year-old form of alternative medicine, is often biased to make it look more effective than it really is, according to a new study out this week. Homeopathy researchers routinely neglect to register the details of their clinical trials before they publish their results, and unregistered trials usually provide rosier results than registered ones, the study found. Over a third of registered homeopathy trials in the past two decades have also never been published, which can be a sign of burying unflattering findings. Homeopathy was invented by German physician Samuel Hahnemann just around the turn of the 19th century. It’s claimed to work on a principle of “like treat...

For more than half a century, the kinds of antisocial personality traits we think of as psychopathic – such as a lack of remorse, aggression, and disregard for the wellbeing of others – have been associated with mental illness.   The line between broken and useful traits can be hazy in biology, leaving open the possibility that what is now considered a malfunction might once have been promoted by natural selection. We might find it tricky to think of evolution benefiting antisocial people, but nature has no problem leaving room for the occasional freeloader within otherwise cooperative species like our own. Those alternative traits that make psychopaths so despised could feasibly give them an edge in a world where competition for resources is intense. A team of Canadian researchers e...

Mild cognitive impairment is an early stage of subtle memory loss or other cognitive ability loss, such as language or visual/spatial perception, according to research published Tuesday in the Alzheimer's Association's 2022 Alzheimer's Disease Facts and Figures report. The signs can be serious enough to be noticed by the affected person and loved ones, yet mild enough that the affected person can maintain their ability to do most activities of daily living. Many people confuse this impairment, often called MCI, with normal aging, but it is different -- around one-third of people with mild cognitive impairment develop dementia due to Alzheimer's disease within five years, according to the research. Depending on the type of MCI people have, they might have trouble remembering convers...

But in most African countries there is far too little of everything — vaccines, and all of the equipment and trained people it takes to administer them — to envision a significant booster campaign now. At the vaccine headquarters in Kamakwie, the health workers are just trying to figure out how to use the supplies they’ve been given as efficiently as possible. The health ministry, for instance, never instructed health workers to give Pfizer to teens and Johnson & Johnson to teachers, Dr. Demby, the health minister, said. Instead, the community came up with that patchwork rubric on its own. Many local officials have been hesitant to try to stimulate demand in the public, he said, not knowing what shots they will get and when. On a recent Tuesday, the vaccination team headed out with a ...

Roughly 17 million Americans received the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine, only to be told later that it was the least protective of the options available in the United States. But new data suggest that the vaccine is now preventing infections, hospitalizations and deaths at least as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The reasons aren’t clear, and not all experts are convinced that the vaccine has vindicated itself. But the accumulating data nonetheless offer considerable reassurance to recipients of the vaccine and, if confirmed, have broad implications for its deployment in parts of the world. In Africa, for example, distribution of a single-dose vaccine that can be refrigerated for months is by far the most practical option. Johnson & Johnson has at least tempor...

Roughly 17 million Americans received the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine, only to be told later that it was the least protective of the options available in the United States. But new data suggest that the vaccine is now preventing infections, hospitalizations and deaths at least as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The reasons aren’t clear, and not all experts are convinced that the vaccine has vindicated itself. But the accumulating data nonetheless offer considerable reassurance to recipients of the vaccine and, if confirmed, have broad implications for its deployment in parts of the world. In Africa, for example, distribution of a single-dose vaccine that can be refrigerated for months is by far the most practical option. Johnson & Johnson has at least tempor...

Roughly 17 million Americans received the Johnson & Johnson Covid vaccine, only to be told later that it was the least protective of the options available in the United States. But new data suggest that the vaccine is now preventing infections, hospitalizations and deaths at least as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines. The reasons aren’t clear, and not all experts are convinced that the vaccine has vindicated itself. But the accumulating data nonetheless offer considerable reassurance to recipients of the vaccine and, if confirmed, have broad implications for its deployment in parts of the world. In Africa, for example, distribution of a single-dose vaccine that can be refrigerated for months is by far the most practical option. Johnson & Johnson has at least tempor...