Former elite football players may age faster than their more average peers, a new study suggests.

NFL players, especially former linemen, had fewer disease-free years and earlier high blood pressure and diabetes diagnoses. Two age-related diseases, arthritis and dementia, were also more commonly found in former football players than in other men of the same age.

This research was part of the ongoing Football Players Health Study at Harvard University.

We wanted to know: Are professional football players being robbed of their middle age? Our findings suggest that football prematurely weathers them and puts them on an alternate aging trajectory, increasing the prevalence of a variety of diseases of old age," said senior investigator Rachel Grashow, director of epidemiological research initiatives for the Football Players Health Study.

"We need to look not just at the length of life but the quality of life," she said in a university news release. "Professional football players might live as long as men in the general population, but those years could be filled with disability and infirmity."

https://www.newsmax.com/health/health-news/athletes-football-nfl/2022/12/09/id/1099912/

The research, published in The Lancet Psychiatry, was conducted as part of a study to establish a more accurate prevalence of mental disorders within the NHS workforce. The study also found that 1-in-5 HCWs met the threshold for diagnosable illnesses like depression and anxiety.

Researchers recruited participants from the NHS CHECK study, the UK's largest survey of the mental health and wellbeing of all NHS staff during COVID-19. Over 23,000 participants completed commonly used self-report measures which look for symptoms of common mental disorders (CMDs) like depression and anxiety as well as PTSD. This particular study reported on diagnostic interviews with two smaller groups of HCWs, which were broadly representative of NHS staff overall in terms of ethnicity, age, sex and clinical role. 243 participants were surveyed to establish the prevalence of CMDs, while a further 94 helped to establish PTSD prevalence.

While there have been many studies of the mental health of HCWs, especially since the pandemic, the vast majority of these have relied on self-reported screening tools that often over-estimate prevalence of mental disorder. Most of these studies have reported highly elevated, and highly varied, rates of CMD and PTSD. In this study, trained professionals carried out interviews and assessed participants against diagnostic criteria which are considered the gold standard for accurately diagnosing mental disorders.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(22)00375-3/fulltext

Penn State researchers co-led a large genetic study that identified more than 2,300 genes predicting alcohol and tobacco use after analyzing data from more than 3.4 million people. They said a majority of these genes were similar among people with European, African, American and Asian ancestries.

Alcohol and tobacco use are associated with approximately 15% and 5% of deaths worldwide, respectively, and are linked with chronic conditions like cancer and heart disease. Although the environment and culture can affect a person’s use and the likelihood of becoming addicted to these substances, genetics is also a contributing factor, according to Penn State College of Medicine researchers. They helped identify around 400 genes that are associated with certain alcohol and tobacco use behaviors in people in a prior research study.

“We’ve now identified more than 1,900 additional genes that are associated with alcohol and tobacco use behaviors,” said Dajiang Liu, professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Public Health Sciences. “A fifth of the samples used in our analysis were from non-European ancestries, which increases the relevance of these findings to a diverse population.”

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05477-4

Adopting and maintaining a healthy lifestyle might prevent up to 60% of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) cases, making it a feasible option for future preventive strategies, according to US researchers.

The findings, published in the journal Gut, are based on analysis of two large studies looking at the health of thousands of nurses and other healthcare professionals.

Diagnoses of IBD – comprising Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis – have been increasing globally, the study authors noted, with the condition currently affecting around 1.3 million adults in Europe.

Previous research has linked IBD risk with several lifestyle factors, they said, but it was not clear if adopting and maintaining a healthy lifestyle might lower the risk of developing it in the first place.

To investigate further, they looked at data on on participants from the Nurses’ Health Study, Nurses’ Health Study II, and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study.

https://gut.bmj.com/content/early/2022/11/28/gutjnl-2022-328174

Hearing aids might be an important tool in the effort to prevent cognitive decline and dementia, according to a new study.

Research has established that hearing loss in an important risk factor in developing dementia, but whether intervening with the hearing loss will also treat the progression of cognitive decline has been less clear, said senior study author Woei Shyang Loh, Head of Otolaryngology at the National University Hospital and National University of Singapore.

The new study published Monday in JAMA Neurology offers evidence that managing hearing loss may potentially help reduce or delay cognitive decline, Loh said.

A metanalysis of 3,243 studies, both observational and trials, the research looked at the association between hearing loss and cognitive decline over a range of durations, from two to 25 years. The review found that people with hearing loss who wore devices to help performed 3% better on cognitive scores in the short term, according to the study.

https://us.cnn.com/2022/12/05/health/hearing-loss-dementia-study-wellness

The Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine limits transmission, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19 even among patients infected by variants of the virus, but the effectiveness of antibodies it generates diminishes as patients get older, according to a study by UT Southwestern researchers.

“The fact that these antibody functions decrease with age is one reason why the elderly are still more susceptible to severe illness with COVID-19 and highlights the need to develop different approaches for older, vulnerable individuals,” said Lenette Lu, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Immunology in the Division of Infectious Diseases and Geographic Medicine, and lead author of the paper published in Cell Reports.

The vaccine, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in August 2021, contains a piece of mRNA encoding the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which the virus uses to infect human cells. Initial studies of the vaccine focused on how it led to the generation of antibodies that could prevent SARS-CoV-2 from entering cells, neutralizing the virus before it could cause disease.

The emergence of new variants, including Delta and Omicron, left the vaccine less effective at neutralizing SARS-CoV-2 and resulted in increased rates of infection. However, vaccinated individuals, even when infected with COVID-19, continued to be protected against severe disease and death.

To understand how vaccines protect people without completely neutralizing the virus, blood samples were analyzed from 51 adults, ranging in age from 21 to 82, who had not been infected previously with COVID-19 and who each received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine between December 2020 and February 2021. From the samples, the researchers isolated antibodies specific to the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.

The team showed that the antibodies generated in response to the vaccine were effective at neutralizing the original version of SARS-CoV-2 that emerged in 2019 but, as expected, were not as effective against the Delta and Omicron variants. In addition, the researchers found that these antibodies led to the activation of immune cells that can carry out a variety of antiviral effector functions after infection.

“In other words, even if an antibody is less able to prevent variants of a virus from infection, it can still block the development of symptoms, disease severity, and spread from one person to another,” said Dr. Lu.

These antibody activities and functions differed by age, with people under 65 carrying significantly more of the activities and functions compared to those over 65. Dr. Lu’s team discovered these observations could be attributed to different sugars attached to the antibodies. With age, these sugars change and antibody functions diminish.

The data suggests that boosters and updated vaccines are more important for older adults. In addition, as new variants of SARS-CoV-2 emerge, a better understanding of how to make vaccines that are effective at preventing disease in addition to infection is important.

“Beyond COVID-19, all viruses and bacteria that infect us change over time,” said Dr. Lu. “If we understand how antibodies protect us despite these changes, then we can enhance the durability of preventive clinical tools such as vaccines.”

https://www.newswise.com/coronavirus/covid-19-vaccine-s-effectiveness-diminishes-with-age-research-shows/?article_id=783185

In all, 35% of firearm-injured kids received a new mental health diagnosis in the year after the incident, compared with 26% of those hurt in crashes.

Most of these new diagnoses were related to substance misuse problems with drugs or alcohol, or stress-related conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder—both of which were twice as likely to be diagnosed in young firearm injury survivors than in their peers who had been in vehicles that crashed.

The new data were presented at the National Research Conference on Firearm Injury Prevention, and published recently in the Annals of Surgery, by a team led by Peter Ehrlich, M.D., M.Sc., director of pediatric trauma care at the University of Michigan's C.S. Mott Children's Hospital and a professor of pediatric surgery at Michigan Medicine.

Ehrlich and his colleagues studied data from nearly 1,500 firearm-injured children ages 3 to 17 and nearly 3,700 similar children injured in crashes, who sought emergency care between 2010 and 2016. The injured children all had insurance through Medicaid or the CHIP program, which together cover about 40% of all American children.

Boys accounted for more than 80% of both populations of injured children, and the average age was 15. But 65% of the children hurt by firearms were Black, while 52% of those injured in crashes were non-Hispanic white children.

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-12-firearm-injuries-kids-mental-scars.html

Researchers analysed data from UK Biobank – a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing anonymised genetic, lifestyle and health information from half a million UK participants aged between 40 and 69 years. Participants were assessed for 36 physical and five mental health chronic conditions. Multimorbidity was defined as having two or more of these conditions.

Physical and mental health data from UK Biobank in 2010 were linked with the estimated concentration of air pollution at the residential address of the participants.

The study found that those participants exposed to higher concentrations (above 10µg/m3) of fine particulate matter had a 21 per cent increased risk of two or more co-occurring conditions compared to those exposed to concentrations below 10µg/m3.

For participants exposed to above 30µg/m3 of NO2, the research showed a 20 per cent increased risk of having two or more co-occurring conditions compared to those participants that were exposed to concentrations of NO2 below 20µg/m3.

Amongst those with multiple conditions, increased exposure to both PM2.5 and NO2 was linked to a greater severity of the co-occurring conditions.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.1035415/full

Tobacco smoking is projected to cause one billion deaths worldwide this century, mainly in low and middle income countries (LMICs) such as China. Two thirds of adult men in China smoke; the study, led by researchers from Oxford Population Health, UK, Peking University and the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences shows that around half of those who start smoking cigarettes as young men (before the age of 18) will eventually be killed by tobacco, unless they give up permanently. Smoking also increases the risks of developing a wide range of conditions that do not generally cause deaths, such as asthma, peptic ulcer, cataract, diabetes, and other metabolic diseases.

The adverse effects of smoking have been known for many years, but very few studies, even those in high-income Western countries, have systematically assessed the impact of smoking on an extensive range of diseases within the same population. The researchers used data from the China Kadoorie Biobank to comprehensively assess the health effects of tobacco smoking on death and hospitalisation from a range of diseases and to examine the benefit of smoking cessation.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpub/article/PIIS2468-2667(22)00227-4/fulltext

Walking can boost not only your own energy but also, potentially, the energy of your wearable electronic devices. Osaka Metropolitan University scientists made a significant advance toward self-charging wearable devices with their invention of a dynamic magnifier-enhanced piezoelectric vibration energy harvester that can amplify power generated from impulsive vibrations, such as from human walking, by about 90 times, while remaining as small as currently developed energy harvesters. The results were published in Applied Physics Letters.

These days, people carry multiple electronic devices such as smartphones, and wearable devices are expected to become increasingly widespread in the near future. The resulting demand for more efficient recharging of these devices has increased the attention paid to energy harvesting, a technology that converts energy such as heat and light into electricity that can power small devices. One form of energy harvesting called vibration energy harvesting is deemed highly practical given that it can transform the kinetic energy from vibration into electricity and is not affected by weather or climate.

https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0116838