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Christian Gooden/St. Louis Post-Dispatch/TNS

In St. Louis, unions join forces to tackle 'shocking' rates of suicide for workers

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

ST. LOUIS — Among the 16 building trades in the St. Louis area, a network is forming to focus on the mental health of workers.

The increasingly critical effort aims to draw out a group with a reputation for being tough as nails — and tight-lipped about personal problems.

The motivation to join forces can be found in statistics. ...Read more

Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America/TNS

Conflicting advice on COVID shots likely to ding already low vaccine rates, experts warn

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

More than three-quarters of American adults didn’t get a COVID shot last season, a figure that health care experts warn could rise this year amid new U.S. government recommendations.

The COVID vaccine was initially popular. About 75% of Americans had received at least one dose of the first versions of the vaccine by early 2022, Centers for ...Read more

Jessica Griffin/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS

Home visits are helping new moms get health care, support, and diapers in the weeks after they give birth

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

PHILADELPHIA — When Jefferson Einstein Philadelphia Hospital began offering new mothers who gave birth there a follow-up visit with a nurse at home, Ebony Durant worried that the idea would be a hard sell for patients.

“I thought that families would not be receptive — they wouldn’t want us in their homes,” said Durant, a city health ...Read more

Dreamstime/Dreamstime/TNS

Mayo Clinic scientists create tool to predict Alzheimer's risk years before symptoms begin

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a new tool that can estimate a person's risk of developing memory and thinking problems associated with Alzheimer's disease years before symptoms appear. The research, published in The Lancet Neurology, builds on decades of data from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging— one of the world's ...Read more

Surprising ways to ease constipation

If your guts are sluggish and you have a bowel movement three times or less per week, you're battling chronic constipation. And you're not alone. Between 12% and 19% of folks deal with it -- and among those ages 65 and older, 24% of males and 34% of females are slow to go.

Chances are you've been told you need to adopt a "high-fiber diet" or ...Read more

Evenity Not Advised For Patients With A High Heart Attack Risk

Health Advice / Keith Roach /

DEAR DR. ROACH: My primary care doctor has prescribed the medication Evenity for my osteoporosis. I have been on Fosamax for about three years, but my recent bone density scan went down slightly in the osteoporosis area. I am very concerned about the black-box warning of heart attacks and strokes since this is a very new drug with very little ...Read more

Dominic Di Palermo/Chicago Tribune/Dominic Di Palermo

Bird flu cases are on the rise again, including 2 million turkeys. Will that affect your Thanksgiving dinner?

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

CHICAGO — Out on his farm in Dundee Township, Cliff McConville sees geese landing in the fields where his turkeys and chickens graze. It’s a sight that often unnerves poultry producers, as migratory waterfowl carry and spread a highly infectious strain of bird flu that has been resurging in the United States for the last three years.

So far...Read more

Dominic Di Palermo/Chicago Tribune/TNS

Bird flu cases are on the rise again, including 2 million turkeys. Will that affect your Thanksgiving dinner?

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

CHICAGO — Out on his farm in Dundee Township, Cliff McConville sees geese landing in the fields where his turkeys and chickens graze. It’s a sight that often unnerves poultry producers, as migratory waterfowl carry and spread a highly infectious strain of bird flu that has been resurging in the United States for the last three years.

So far...Read more

Dreamstime/TCA

Understanding and preventing antimicrobial resistance

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

Antimicrobial Awareness Week, Nov. 18–24, serves as a global call to action to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR) — a growing public health concern that occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites stop responding to the drugs designed to be effective against them.

This resistance makes infections harder to treat and increases ...Read more

Alex Wong/Getty Images North America/TNS

Menopause hormone therapy no longer has the FDA's most-dire warning. Now what?

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

Removing the most dire warning from hormonal therapies to treat menopause is likely the right call, women’s health experts say, but exuberance for the treatments could be getting ahead of the evidence.

Since 2003, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required a “black box” warning — reserved for the most-serious side effects — on ...Read more

Neck and neck with heart disease

A healthy blue whale can have a neck with a circumference of 540 inches (45 feet). Humans need a much smaller neck size to be able to swim around diseases such as Type 2 diabetes, sleep apnea, atrial fibrillation, high blood pressure and heart failure.

That's because a thick neck indicates excess fat in the upper body and that's known to ...Read more

Pulmonary Nodules Appear, Leading To A Concern About Cancer

Health Advice / Keith Roach /

DEAR DR. ROACH: I am a 76-year-old woman in what I thought was excellent health. On a recent coronary calcium CT scan that was ordered because of my age and slightly elevated cholesterol, an incidental finding was described in the report as "innumerable, tiny noncalcified pulmonary nodules bilaterally." The largest of these is in the "left ...Read more

JOE LAMBERTI/AFP/Getty Images North America/TNS

What the air you breathe may be doing to your brain

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

For years, the two patients had come to the Penn Memory Center at the University of Pennsylvania, where doctors and researchers follow people with cognitive impairment as they age, as well as a group with normal cognition.

Both patients, a man and a woman, had agreed to donate their brains after they died for further research. “An amazing ...Read more

Jose F. Moreno/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS

New Jersey man is first documented death from tick-related red meat allergy

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

A 47-year-old man from New Jersey died within hours of eating a hamburger at a barbecue in the summer of 2024.

He had no major medical problems before, nor did his autopsy find a cause of death.

But several months later, researchers at the University of Virginia pieced together a diagnosis: severe anaphylaxis linked to alpha-gal syndrome. It ...Read more

FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images North America/TNS

Ethiopia confirms first outbreak of Marburg virus after testing

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

Ethiopia confirmed its first outbreak of Marburg virus disease after sending samples from a cluster of suspected cases of viral hemorrhagic fever for testing earlier this week.

The virus is the same strain reported in previous outbreaks in other East African nations, the World Health Organization said late Friday. Nine cases, including health ...Read more

Shawn Inglima for New York/New York Daily News/TNS

Ahead of Mamdani taking office, Mayor Adams makes changes in NYC response to mental health calls

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

NEW YORK — The Adams administration is planning to resign the city’s non-police mental health response team program, or B-HEARD, shifting it from the purview of the FDNY.

Under the changes announced by City Hall, NYC Health + Hospitals, which currently operates the program with FDNY, would entirely run the program.

“This new model for B-...Read more

Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images North America/TNS

Sen. John Fetterman's health issues, explained

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

Sen. John Fetterman was hospitalized Thursday after suffering injuries to his face in a fall due to a serious heart condition, ventricular fibrillation. This life-threatening condition is the 56-year-old’s latest health issue in recent years, following a 2022 stroke on the campaign trail that nearly killed him.

Like atrial fibrillation, which...Read more

Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images North America/TNS

Another person in US is hospitalized with bird flu. Officials don't know how they got it

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

Health officials say a person in the state of Washington has a presumed case of bird flu virus and they do not know how the person was infected.

Epidemiologists and virologists worry that avian flu could become a pandemic if allowed to spread and mutate. The virus circulating in dairy cattle in North America is one mutation away from being able...Read more

Eric Lee/Getty Images North America/TNS

Commentary: When health insurance tax credits disappear, so does my family's peace of mind

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

I remember the knot in my stomach when I had to tell one of my best workers at Miramar Group that we might not be able to keep offering affordable health coverage. He’s been with me for years — reliable, hardworking, with two kids. The look on his face said everything: Without decent health insurance, his family is one accident away from ...Read more

Alejandro A Alvarez/The Philadelphia Inquirer/TNS

At some doctors' offices, AI is listening in the exam room

Health Advice / Health & Fitness /

PHILADELPHIA -- Bracken Babula starts patient visits these days by closing the exam room door, and asking if they mind him recording their conversation. He hits a button on his mobile phone, checks that it is recording, and sits back in his seat to listen.

In the past, the Jefferson Health primary care doctor would have spent the visit ...Read more