Tag Archives: Health
Health: “How the Body Clears Covid-19” (Video)
Understanding how the body clears the new coronavirus is becoming more important as the U.S. begins to reopen. WSJ’s Daniela Hernandez explains how the body fights infection and why feeling better doesn’t equal being virus-free.
Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann
International Podcasts: Switzerland Eases Its Lockdown Restrictions
Monocle 24 checks in on Switzerland’s plans to further ease coronavirus restrictions and ask whether the country is setting an example that others should follow.
Plus: the weekend’s newspapers and top stories. From Milan: Salone highlights, interviews and a daily running guide.
INFOGRAPHIC: “Diabetes In The United States” (CDC)
Covid-19: “Who’s Really Immune?” (Prognosis)
As states grapple with the question of when it will be safe to reopen businesses and relax social distancing, there’s increasing urgency to better understand who’s immune to Covid-19. Does having the virus and recovering mean you can’t get it again, or at least that you can’t be reinfected for some time?
No one yet has good answers to these questions. Kristen V. Brown looked into what we do, and don’t, know about the science of coronavirus immunity.
Health: “Chasing The Sun – How Light And Dark Shape Our Bodies And Minds”
Human biology is tuned to a 24-hour light-dark cycle but modern lifestyles are disrupting it with unhealthy consequences, says Linda Geddes
Infographic: “Don’t Ignore Heart Symptoms During Coronavirus”
Hospitals across the U.S. are experiencing an influx of COVID-19 patients, but clinicians are reportedly seeing fewer patients going to the emergency room for heart attack or stroke.
Experts worry that patients who need critical care are delaying their treatment over COVID-19 concerns.
To encourage patients to pay close attention to their symptoms and call 9-1-1 immediately if they believe they are having a heart attack or stroke, ACC’s CardioSmart team developed the Coronavirus and Your Heart Infographic.
The infographic urges patients not to ignore symptoms, especially if they have a heart condition, and reassures them that hospitals have safety measures to protect patients from infection with the novel coronavirus.
Podcast Interviews: “Exercise Is Medicine” Author Judy Foreman
Health journalist Judy Foreman talks about her new book Exercise Is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging
This is Scientific American’s Science Talk, posted on April 24th, 2020. I’m Steve Mirsky. And under our current, often locked-down situation, it’s still really important to try to get some exercise. Judy Foreman is the author of the new book Exercise is Medicine: How Physical Activity Boosts Health and Slows Aging. She’s a former nationally syndicated health columnist for the Boston Globe, LA times, Baltimore Sun and other places, and an author for the Oxford University Press.
Judy Foreman is the author of “A Nation in Pain” (2014), “The Global Pain Crisis” (2017), and “Exercise is Medicine,” (2020), all published by Oxford University Press, and was a staff writer at The Boston Globe for 22 years and the health columnist for many of these years. Her column was syndicated in national and international outlets including the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Baltimore Sun and others.
She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College and has a Master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She was a Lecturer on Medicine at Harvard Medical School, a Fellow in Medical Ethics at Harvard Medical School and a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She spent six months as a guest reporter for The Times of London. She was also a Senior Fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University. She was also host of a live, weekly call-in radio show on Healthtalk.com.
Judy has won more than 50 journalism awards, including a 1998 George Foster Peabody award for co-writing a video documentary about a young woman dying of breast cancer and the 2015 Science in Society award from the National Association of Science Writers.
Coronavirus: Dire Health Consequences Of Using Ventilators (Prognosis)
Ventilators have become prized in hospitals across the U.S. and beyond because they are desperately needed to treat very ill Covid-19 patients. But they are also feared for the damage they can inflict, and for the slim odds of survival they offer.
Michelle Fay Cortez and Olivia Carville report that it’s not yet clear what the long-term consequences ventilators have for those lucky enough to recover after having been on one.
Diet Infographic: Most “Macronutrient Diets” Reduce Weight & Blood Pressure In 6 Months (BMJ)
From a BMJ Study article (April, 2020):
Compared with usual diet, moderate certainty evidence supports modest weight loss and substantial reductions in systolic and diastolic blood pressure for low carbohydrate (eg, Atkins, Zone), low fat (eg, Ornish), and moderate macronutrient (eg, DASH, Mediterranean) diets at six but not 12 months. Differences between diets are, however, generally trivial to small, implying that people can choose the diet they prefer from among many of the available diets (fig 6) without concern about the magnitude of benefits.
Introduction
The worldwide prevalence of obesity nearly tripled between 1975 and 2018.1 In response, authorities have made dietary recommendations for weight management and cardiovascular risk reduction.23 Diet programmes—some focusing on carbohydrate reduction and others on fat reduction—have been promoted widely by the media and have generated intense debates about their relative merit. Millions of people are trying to lose weight by changing their diet. Thus establishing the effect of dietary macronutrient patterns (carbohydrate reduction v fat reduction v moderate macronutrients) and popular named dietary programmes is important.
Biological and physiological mechanisms have been proposed to explain why some dietary macronutrient patterns and popular dietary programmes should be better than others. A previous network meta-analysis, however, suggested that differences in weight loss between dietary patterns and individual popular named dietary programmes are small and unlikely to be important.4 No systematic review and network meta-analysis has examined the comparative effectiveness of popular dietary programmes for reducing risk factors for cardiovascular disease, an area of continuing controversy.
