Keeping up with all the latest health news can be a breeze. Luckily, we’ve got you covered. Here are this week’s most captivating stories from Yahoo News partners.
Crapsules… may offer new hope for patients
A clinical trial funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health and Care Research is testing whether pills made from the freeze-dried poop of healthy people could help people with advanced liver disease, Sky News reported.
Individuals with cirrhosis, a condition involving severe scarring and liver damage, have higher levels of bad gut bacteria making them more susceptible to infections. Researchers hope that pills containing good bacteria stools from healthy individuals will improve the intestinal health of patients with cirrhosis and reduce the need for antibiotics.
Crapsulae, which don’t taste or smell like the name suggests, may offer new hope to patients with cirrhosis who have no treatment options, said Debbie Shawcross, a professor at Kings College London and lead researcher on the trial.
Approximately 300 patients are expected to take part in the study, with participants randomly assigned to either a freeze-dried stool capsule or a placebo tablet every three months for two years.
Even safe levels of pollution can cause changes in a child’s brain development
A study released this week found that exposure to levels of some pollutants considered regulatory safe could contribute to changes in a child’s brain function over time, The Hill reported.
Higher concentrations of ozone correlated with increased connections in the cerebral cortex which is responsible for processes such as thought, memory, consciousness and emotion, but with fewer connections between the cortex and other brain regions such as the amygdala, which is associated with emotion processing and the hippocampus, which plays a role in long-term memory.
The researchers said they hope regulators take these findings into consideration when setting air quality standards in the future.
On average, air pollution levels are quite low in the United States, but significant effects are still occurring on the brain, study author Devyn Cotter, a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, said in a statement. . This is something policymakers should consider when considering whether to strengthen current standards.
The study states that daily use of low-dose aspirin may increase the risk of anemia in healthy older adults
A team of researchers from Australia, New Zealand and the United States has found that healthy adults aged 65 and older who take a low dose of aspirin on a daily basis appear to be at increased risk of anemia, a condition that develops when the body produces too few healthy red blood cells, which can lead to fatigue, shortness of breath, or an irregular heartbeat.
The study released Tuesday looked at a group of 19,114 healthy older adults who were randomly assigned 100 mg of aspirin or a placebo. The researchers concluded that those in the aspirin group appeared to have increased cases of anemia and reduced levels of ferritin (an iron storage protein) and hemoglobin, Fox News reported.
Nearly half of older people in the United States take aspirin for preventative reasons, including thinning the blood to fight cardiovascular disease and prevent strokes, Fox News reported. The study researchers suggested that older patients who take low-dose aspirin on a regular basis be monitored by their doctors for anemia.
All adults under 65 should be screened for anxiety, says the health committee
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force first recommended on Tuesday that all adults under the age of 65 be screened for anxiety even if they don’t have symptoms.
The task force is an independent group of volunteer health experts whose guidance may affect insurance company reimbursements, but doctors are not required to follow the group’s recommendations. This most recent recommendation specifically identified pregnant and postpartum adults as people who should be screened, but noted that there was insufficient evidence to support screening for adults 65 years of age and older.
Anxiety screenings are usually done via questionnaires during an office visit, and doctors want to know how many times in the past two weeks a patient has been easily annoyed or irritable, bothered by uncontrollable worry, or feeling so restless it is difficult to sit still, has reported NBC News.
But experts point out that while the screening tools can help open a conversation about anxiety and anxiety symptoms, the screening tool alone isn’t enough to diagnose a patient with the condition.
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