WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

​Highlighting the importance of stronger warnings on medications, tracking the way misinformation spreads online, treating brain conditions through art and music, and more.

Veteran and YouTube vlogger Dustin Waggoner wasn’t feeling well. The symptoms came out of nowhere: swollen glands and thyroid, fatigue, joint pain. He went to an urgent care and was diagnosed with a viral infection—and prescribed antibiotics. When he continued to get worse, he was tested for everything else, but no one could figure out what was wrong with him. Then he realized the only thing that had changed in his life was he had started taking a medication called Lamictal to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), around the time his new symptoms set in.

Researching the drug online, he came across the story of police detective Norman Bujanos, who died in 2018 from a Lamictal-induced condition called hemaphagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH), which presents with flu-like symptoms. In Bujanos’ case, only a few doses caused a rapid progression of illness and death. Waggoner had been taking it for 24 days.

Fortunately, he caught it early enough and a course of steroids had him feeling better in eight weeks. But this highlights the need for stronger warnings and conversations about side effects with patients when prescribing Lamictal, which has been connected to eight deaths. It also demonstrates that sharing stories about medication errors and misdiagnoses can truly save lives.

Source: KXAN

 

Social media is a major vector for misinformation, allowing it to spread widely and quickly. Bad science about health issues can lead to bad outcomes for people when they accept it as fact and act accordingly, so how do you better protect and inform patients?

Some organizations, like the Center for Countering Digital Hate, support deleting potentially harmful posts, while the Institute for Strategic Dialogue draws an even harder line, suggesting that “influencer” accounts with a large reach should be removed from social media platforms entirely.

However, taking strong action to control access to information can be construed as censorship of free speech and erode the public trust even more. So some organizations, like the Royal Society (the United Kingdom’s national academy of science), recommend attempting to slow the spread instead by placing the onus on social media companies to adjust their algorithms to prevent “legal but harmful” content from going viral. Making these posts harder to discover and share makes it less likely that they will appear in people’s feeds. Combined with more robust fact- checking of incorrect or willfully misinterpreted data, these approaches can help contain science misinformation and limit the damage it can cause.

Source: BBC News

We know that art and music are good for patients, but we don’t know why—at least, not scientifically. A new initiative called the NeuroArts Blueprint aims to pull back the curtain on this mystery by studying how art changes the brain and benefits people struggling with neurologic disorders such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, post- traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and depression.

The leadership of this innovative collaboration between Johns Hopkins and the Aspen Institute includes soprano Renée Fleming, who once suffered physical pain from stage fright and has seen firsthand the medical impact of music. “I saw a music therapist working with a gentleman who’d had a stroke and couldn’t speak,” she told NPR. “And within one session of singing he could communicate.”

Establishing “neuroarts” as a field of study on par with neuroscience needs more than anecdotal evidence of the link between mind and body, so researchers are turning to imaging technology like MRI to show what happens in the brain while someone experiences or makes art. But even when they can provide scientific evidence explaining why playing the ukulele helps someone with PTSD reduce seizures, the next challenge will be changing people’s minds about creative arts therapy as a legitimate course of treatment.

Source: NPR

People may assume that eating disorders like bulimia and anorexia only affect girls and women, but boys and men are just as susceptible to body image problems. According to the National Eating Disorders Association, 10 million males will be affected by eating disorders sometime in their life. However, the lack of awareness of this issue also leads to a lack of acceptance—and that stigma consequently makes it more difficult for them to get help, or even may result in a misdiagnosis.

Stuart Murray, director of the Translational Research in Eating Disorders Laboratory, told CNN that the question to ask to distinguish between interest in maintaining a certain physique and an eating disorder is, “Does it impact people’s ability to have a normal and a functioning life?”

Don’t miss the signs of an eating disorder in boys or men because you think they aren’t concerned with meeting societal expectations of masculinity, whether they want to be more muscular or lose weight. If you notice a sudden change in their eating patterns, activities, or relationships, it could be a warning that something else is going on. Although traditionally research on eating disorders in males has been limited, including diagnosing them, boys and men often respond well to treatment.

Source: CNN

 

The physical and mental burden of working in long-term care (LTC) facilities, combined with low pay, was creating staffing shortages even before the pandemic, but the greater challenges of the last two years have only made a bad problem worse. Burned-out frontline staff across the United States are leaving their jobs in droves. And many others are missing work because of illness—and dying from COVID-19 in record numbers—putting added pressure on the co-workers who are still standing.

All this is, of course, forcing LTC facilities to limit admissions or shut down entirely— which in turn adds strain to hospitals that have nowhere to send patients who need long-term care. Hiring temporary workers from around the country, often at higher pay, is only a Band-Aid on this bleeding wound. And while staff are risking their own health for patients, they also can’t provide them with the level of attention they normally would, lowering both morale and standards of care. NPR spoke to nurses, nursing aides, support staff, and administrators at some of the hardest-hit facilities around the nation, like Patricia Johnson, who shared, “We’re just trying to work and keep everything together, basically.”

It will take a long time for facilities to recover from these setbacks, and to do it they will need to both improve the conditions under which staff work and offer better wages. 

Source: NPR

How does a fit 53-year-old with no obvious health problems end up having emergency quintuple heart bypass surgery? It’s all in the genes.

Don Kosec of Akron, Ohio, went to his doctor complaining about shoulder pain, but also mentioned that he’d been feeling shortness of breath when going through the airport. After testing, doctors at Cleveland Clinic diagnosed him with five blocked arteries, one of which was completely blocked. To understand why and prevent it from happening again, they looked for some genetic markers and found he had high levels of Lipoprotein(a), a genetic cholesterol issue. Dr. Leslie Cho, section head of Preventive Cardiology, told Fox8, “It makes cholesterol stickier, it makes your blood thicker, and it causes inflammation”—the perfect recipe for heart attack and stroke.

The good news, for Kosec and others, is anyone can be tested for Lp(a) to prevent problems down the line, especially if they or their family have a history of heart disease. 

Source: Fox8

 

Drug overdose deaths have doubled in the last six years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics, to more than 100,000 in 2021. Drug deaths among children ages 10–14 have also tripled from 2019 to 2020.

This drug epidemic has only gotten worse during the pandemic, but there’s another factor affecting kids in particular: it’s easier than ever for them to get access to drugs through social media apps, like Snapchat. The worst killer is fentanyl, a synthetic opioid so potent that even a few milligrams can be deadly, which is often used as a hidden ingredient in counterfeit prescription pills like oxycodone. Fentanyl has become such a widespread problem in school-age children, some schools even have naloxone on hand to counteract its effects.

Just as knowing what’s in those pills can save someone’s life, parents paying attention to their kids can save theirs. The best way to help a child addicted to opioids is to watch for the warning signs: behavioral changes or new friends, mood swings or sleeping more. If you suspect there’s something wrong, talk to them, no matter how young they are, and get them professional help to kick their addiction and address the reasons behind it. Reach out for more information and resources from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and Poison Control (800-222-1222).

Source: CNN​​