Category: Health

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 24, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Fewer Americans are turning to sleep medications to fight insomnia.

After a dramatic rise in prescriptions for drugs like Ambien, the trend has ebbed, according to a new study, and fewer doctors are prescribing sleep medications. Use of these sleep aids dropped 31% between 2013 and 2018, researchers found.

“There are several possible reasons for this decline; for example, there’s a greater awareness of the potential dangers in the use of these medications,” said lead researcher Christopher Kaufmann. He’s an assistant professor in the Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Florida.

“Also, there’s been a recent upsurge in behavioral treatments for improving sleep that don’t have the potential adverse outcomes that some medications might have,” Kaufmann said.

The biggest drop-off (86%) in use of sleep drugs was seen among those over 80.

Before this new decline, researchers had reported that between 1993 and 2010, prescriptions for benzodiazepines jumped 69%. The drugs, which treat anxiety and insomnia, include diazepam (Valium) and alprazolam (Xanax). Over the same period, prescriptions for zolpidem (Ambien) rose 140%.

The surge was driven by direct-to-consumer marketing, particularly of Ambien in the early 1990s, as well as greater awareness of the benefits of sleep, Kaufmann said.

Since then, use of all types of sleep medications dropped, with the biggest decline (55%) in federally approved sleep aids.

For the study, Kaufmann’s team used data from 29,400 participants in a U.S. government health survey conducted every two years.

Researchers said the decline was driven by data pointing to unwanted side effects of the medications. Among those are daytime drowsiness, as well as higher risk for car crashes, memory loss among older patients and falls that resulted in broken hips.

In 2019, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration required “Black Box” warnings on packaging of the sleep drugs eszopiclone (Lunesta), zolpidem (Ambien) and zaleplon (Sonata). Black Box warnings advise patients that affected drugs pose serious safety risks.

Kaufmann noted that these drugs were originally designed for short-term use to get people through bouts of insomnia as they reprogramed their sleep habits. Instead, many patients became chronic users.

“I think that people are beginning to become aware of the potential pitfalls of the use of these medications,” Kaufmann said.

Dr. Stella Hahn, associate medical director of the Northwell Sleep Disorder Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y., said doctors are prescribing these drugs less and recommending alternatives such as cognitive behavioral therapy more.

“Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is a more durable and safe option to treat insomnia,” said Hahn, who reviewed the study findings.

The therapy helps identify thoughts, feelings and behaviors that contribute to insomnia. In other words, it gets at the underlying causes of sleep problems.

With the heightened awareness of the negative effects of sleep drugs, primary care doctors don’t feel comfortable ordering them for long-term use without investigating other options, Hahn said.

She recommends several steps to help her patients get a good night’s sleep:

• Limit caffeine (including none after 12 noon).
• Remove TV, computers, tablets or phones from the bedroom.
• Keep your bedroom cool and dark.
• Limit your time in bed to sleep.
• Wait until you’re sleepy to go to bed.
• And if you have trouble sleeping, even in the middle of the night, get up and do something, like reading until you’re drowsy.

If you take a supplement like melatonin to help you sleep, be sure to take it hours before bedtime, Hahn said.

“If you’re taking it too close to bedtime, it can actually mess up your circadian rhythm,” she said, adding that while it’s not a great sleep medication, it can help patients with jet lag or shiftwork disorder.

The findings were recently published online in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine .

More information

The Mayo Clinic has more about prescription sleep medications.

WEDNESDAY, Aug. 24, 2022 (HealthDay News) — Health authorities are investigating a parvovirus-like illness that has killed more than 30 dogs in northern Michigan, most within three days.

The dogs died in Otsego County after showing symptoms such as vomiting and bloody stool, signs of canine parvovirus, but tests were negative for the virus, according to a Facebook posting by the Otsego County Animal Shelter. Parvovirus in dogs is highly contagious and attacks the gastrointestinal tract, with unvaccinated dogs and puppies younger than 4 months old at highest risk.

The disease was first seen in Europe around 1976 but became less frequent after a vaccine was developed. It can spread by direct dog-to-dog contact or contact with contaminated feces or environments.

The first cases in the Otsego County Animal Shelter were seen earlier this month. Shelter director Melissa FitzGerald told NBC News that more than 30 dogs have had symptoms and all died from the illness. Most of the dogs died within three days, and most were under the age of 2.

The illness doesn’t affect some breeds over others, and similar cases have also been reported in northern and central Michigan.

“No one has an answer. The best ‘guess’ is that this is a strain of parvo,” FitzGerald wrote on the shelter’s Facebook page.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development, animal control agencies, the Michigan Association of Animal Control Officers, veterinarians and the U.S. Department of Agriculture all have begun investigations into these animal deaths, NBC News reported.

More information

Visit American Kennel Club for more on parvovirus in dogs.

Aug. 24, 2022 – Children are being plucked off floodwater-lapped rooftops and placed into open metal baskets that twirl in the wind as they are hoisted up to thumping Coast Guard helicopters. Their faces are marked by a combination of weariness and fear. Similar rescues are repeated several times, and then a lone chopper veers off over a massive body of water.

The searing video – shown without words – serves as the opening of a new documentary, Katrina Babies, premiering today on HBO and HBO Max.

The scenes are as chilling now as they were 17 years ago, when, on Aug. 29, 2005, a category 3 hurricane slammed into New Orleans. The subsequent failure of levees across the city led to immediate and catastrophic flooding, especially in the low-income and majority-Black Lower 9^th Ward, where many residents had been unwilling or unable to get out before the storm hit.

Those days in August 2005 were just the beginning of a tough journey for hundreds of thousands, but in particular, perhaps, for those who were too young to comprehend the catastrophe that had inundated 80% of the city.

The documentary tells the tale of some of the children who survived, from their point of view.

Almost 1,000 people, and possibly many more, lost their lives – there’s never been a full accounting of how many deaths Katrina caused.. More than 1 million people were displaced at first, and, a month later, at least 600,000 households were still displaced, according to the Data Center, a New Orleans-based nonprofit.

The New Orleans-born-and-raised creator of Katrina Babies, Edward Buckles Jr., suggests in the movie that Katrina was especially cruel to his community. “In America, especially during disasters, Black children are not even a thought. Hurricane Katrina was no different,” he says in a voiceover. “After losing so much, why wouldn’t anyone ask if we were OK? Nobody ever asked the children how they were doing,” he says.

Buckles was 13 when Katrina hit. He and his family evacuated, enduring a 13-hour car ride to a shelter in a town west of New Orleans. The journey normally would take 2 hours.

Eventually, they returned to the city and got on with their lives. He had left his brush with Katrina behind, or so he thought.

A Shared Silence

Buckles said he began Katrina Babies to tell the story of his cousins – his closest childhood friends – who had stayed put during the storm.

He toiled for years, interviewing those cousins and others who had been children in 2005. But it wasn’t until he interviewed Miesha Williams – some 6 years into the project – that it hit him that, like her, he had never talked to anyone about the trauma he felt because of Katrina, Buckles says.

In the film, Williams, who was 12 and living in the Lafitte housing project during Katrina, describes her family having to evacuate to the un-air-conditioned, unsanitary, and overcrowded Morial Convention Center with tens of thousands of others. She saw a dead man on the street, and everything smelled like “feces,” she says. “It was scary, and I was like ‘am I going to die,’” she says. “I’m not supposed to be here … this is not real,” she says.

Buckles asks if she’s ever talked about the experience. Williams tears up and says “no.” He asks why. “I don’t know, nobody ever really asked me,” says Williams.

Williams’s admission cemented his resolve to tell the children’s stories, Buckles says.

Disruption and Confusion

Many of the children said Katrina had been more like an earthquake, putting fault lines through communities.

Chase N. Cashe, who was 17 when the storm hit, says his family lived in a hotel for a month, and “next thing you know, I’m living in Mississippi.”

Other children describe the shame and humiliation they felt at being called “refugees” by schoolmates in their new towns. One, who was 16 during the storm, said a principal at her new school asked if she thought she would fit in. “What kind of question is that to ask a girl who just came from her house being under 8 feet of water,” she says in the film. “Hell the [expletive] no I don’t want to fit in here, I don’t want to be here,” was her thought.

Cierra Chenier, who was 9 during the storm, describes the devastation she felt after her family was only able to retrieve a single garbage bag of belongings from their flooded house. “That was the first time I think it actually hit – like what we knew to be true is gone,” she says. Her family’s house and the whole neighborhood were gone.

“When so much of your identity is where you’re from, specifically what neighborhood you’re from, and that neighborhood isn’t the same anymore, that house isn’t there anymore, what does that do to your identity?” she says.

Waves of Violence

Chenier and others talked about the breakdown of their communities as being a potential cause of the continued high level of violence in New Orleans.

Halfway through 2022, New Orleans had the highest per-capita murder rate in America. It is familiar territory for the city, which,according to The New York Times, has had the nation’s highest murder rate a dozen times since 1993.

Buckles says Black families have been torn apart before – by slavery and by the crack cocaine epidemic. But those were gradual events, whereas Katrina happened all at once, he says.

“After Katrina, I saw more kids with guns than I ever saw,” he says. “If you think about what kids are dealing with from a trauma perspective – if you think about PTSD, if you think about anxiety, if you think about fight or flight, if you think about anger and a kid being sad,” and combine that with the fact that no one asked how they felt, it makes for a potent brew.

It “makes you look at life like no one cares about me, so I don’t care about myself,” he says.

Mid City AB, who was 13 during Katrina, says in the film that “the children aren’t as rooted as they used to be before the storm.”

Even the youngest felt the effects. Shantrell Parker, who was 5 during Katrina, was interviewed as a 16-year-old student in Buckles’ high school media class. She said she yearned to be a counselor. “I want to help people ’cause I have been through a lot in my life and I know what it feels like … to feel that no one is here for you,” she said.

Sadly, Parker was murdered some 5 years after that interview, when she was 21. Buckles included her story to remind people that “we have to pay attention to the young people in New Orleans,” he says.

“These children are carrying this trauma, and no one’s addressing it, and they don’t know how to address it themselves,” he says.

Healing Through Telling

Cierra Chenier says it had been a long road to start to understand her trauma.

“It’s hard to talk about Katrina because it takes having some form of vulnerability, you know, acknowledging that something happened to you and that it wasn’t OK,” she says in the movie. “Being able to tell my Katrina story has helped my healing process”; it was “healing something you didn’t know needed to be healed to begin with.”

Buckles says Katrina Babies brought a revelation to him. “When I first started making this project, I wasn’t seeking healing,” he says. “I didn’t even realize that simply talking about Hurricane Katrina offered healing.”

The telling is especially important in disenfranchised Black communities, he says. “We don’t understand the power of just talking about something. We’re trying to focus on so many things at one time that we’re not stopping to think about how we feel, nor are we thinking about, ‘let me talk this out,’ let alone going to see a therapist,” he says.

The film taught him there is power in telling your story. “Because when you talk about it, you address it.”

Aug. 24, 2022 — Cooling a recent injury with ice can be one of the most effective ways to ease pain without medication. But ice is bulky and imprecise, and, it melts. But what if you could shrink an ice pack that never melts and place it directly on the nerves causing pain? That’s what a group of scientists at Northwestern University have aimed to do by developing a tiny, flexible implant that delivers pain relief on demand.

The researchers tested the device on rats and published their findings in the journal Science. They hope it will provide a future alternative to opioids and other prescription painkillers that can have serious side effects, including the risk of addiction.

The implant is a paper-thin, 5mm-wide strip of water-soluble material that contains a pair of parallel wave-shaped channels, one filled with a liquid coolant and the other with dry nitrogen. There is a pump on the outside that releases the liquid and gas that move into a shared pocket where a chemical reaction causes the liquid to evaporate, ultimately creating a cooling sensation that numbs the nerve. As the nerve becomes cooler, the pain signals it sends to the brain gradually slow down until they stop entirely, preventing those signals from ever reaching the brain.

Since the thin strip is designed to be wrapped around the actual nerve causing pain, the device delivers precise, targeted relief that doesn’t affect surrounding tissue, including nerves controlling motor function. That means you get the advantage of the numbness you feel when using ice, but more precision targeting a single nerve versus the entire area an ice pack might cover.

“We are specifically targeting peripheral nerves, which connect your brain and your spinal cord to the rest of your body. These are the nerves that communicate sensory stimuli, including pain,” co-author Matthew MacEwan, PhD, an assistant professor of neurological surgery at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, explained in an article at Northwestern. “By delivering a cooling effect to just one or two targeted nerves, we can effectively modulate pain signals in one specific region of the body.”

Since too much cooling can damage tissue around the nerve, the device includes a tiny sensor that monitors the temperature of the nerve and can adjust the flow rates of the liquid and gas to increase or decrease the amount. The device also never needs to be removed once it’s implanted: All the material can be naturally absorbed into the body, and it dissolves within a few days or weeks of being placed, the researchers said.