Public Health Archives - Page 39 of 52 - Dr Amin Azhari

Social isolation during COVID-19 pandemic linked with high blood pressure

Lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with an increase in high blood pressure among patients admitted to emergency. That’s the finding of a study presented at the 46th Argentine Congress of Cardiology (SAC).

Admission to the emergency department during the mandatory social isolation period was linked with a 37% increase in the odds of having high blood pressure – even after taking into account age, gender, month, day and time of consultation, and whether or not the patient arrived by ambulance

Release date: 19 November 2020
Source: European Society of Cardiology

Web searches for insomnia surged at height of COVID-19 stay-at-home orders

Web searches for insomnia surged at height of COVID-19 - افزایش قابل توجه جستجوی کلمه بی خوابی در زمان خانه نشینی کرونایی

A study found a significant increase in the number of online search queries for “insomnia” between April and May 2020, when governments across the U.S. and around the world implemented stay-at-home orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results show there were 2.77 million Google searches for insomnia in the U.S. for the first five months of 2020, an increase of 58% compared with the same period from the previous three years. While searches for insomnia trended downward from January through March 2020, consistent with prior years, they surged upward in April and May 2020. This increase also was associated with the cumulative number of COVID-19-related deaths in the spring.

The study is published online as an accepted paper in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Release date: 18 November 2020
Source: American Academy of Sleep Medicine

In a Pandemic, Migration Away from Dense Cities More Effective than Closing Borders

Pandemics are fueled, in part, by dense populations in large cities where networks of buildings, crowded sidewalks, and public transportation force people into tighter conditions. This contrasts with conditions in rural areas, where there is more space available per person.

In a paper published in Chaos, by AIP Publishing, two researchers decided to put this hypothesis to the test and discover if confinement and travels bans are really effective ways to limit the spread of a pandemic disease. Specifically, they focused on the movement of people from larger cities to smaller ones and tested the results of this one-way migration.

“Instead of taking mobility, or the lack of mobility, for granted, we decided to explore how an altered mobility would affect the spreading,” author Massimiliano Zanin said. “The real answer lies in the sign of the result. People always assume that closing borders is good. We found that it is almost always bad.”

Release date: 17 November 2020
Source: American Institute of Physics

Common SARS-CoV-2 mutation may make coronavirus more susceptible to a vaccine

A new study published in Science confirms that SARS-CoV-2 has mutated in a way that’s enabled it to spread quickly around the world, but the spike mutation may also make the virus more susceptible to a vaccine.

The new strain of coronavirus, called D614G, emerged in Europe and has become the most common in the world. Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows the D614G strain replicates faster and is more transmissible than the virus, originating in China, that spread in the beginning of the pandemic.

Release date: 12 November 2020
Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

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Smell and taste changes provide early indication of COVID-19 community spread

Self-reports of smell and taste changes provide earlier markers of the spread of infection of COVID-19 than current governmental indicators, according to an international team of researchers. The researchers also observed a decline in self-reports of smell and taste changes as early as five days after lockdown enforcement, with faster declines reported in countries that adopted the most stringent lockdown measures.

Release date: 11 November 2020
Source: Penn State

Neurologic disorders

Link between Alzheimer’s disease and gut microbiota is confirmed

The gut microbiota could play a role in brain diseases including Alzheimer’s disease. Some gut bacteria release lipopolysaccharides and short chain fatty acids that can reach the brain via the blood and might cause amyloid pathology and neurodegeneration.

Alzheimer’s disease is the most common cause of dementia. Still incurable, it directly affects nearly one million people in Europe, and indirectly millions of family members as well as society as a whole. In recent years, the scientific community has suspected that the gut microbiota plays a role in the development of the disease. A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG) in Switzerland, together with Italian colleagues from the National Research and Care Center for Alzheimer’s and Psychiatric Diseases Fatebenefratelli in Brescia, University of Naples and the IRCCS SDN Research Center in Naples, confirm the correlation, in humans, between an imbalance in the gut microbiota and the development of amyloid plaques in the brain, which are at the origin of the neurodegenerative disorders characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. Proteins produced by certain intestinal bacteria, identified in the blood of patients, could indeed modify the interaction between the immune and the nervous systems and trigger the disease. These results, to be discovered in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, make it possible to envisage new preventive strategies based on the modulation of the microbiota of people at risk.

Release date: 13 November 2020
Source: Université de Genève

Covid-19

Fluvoxamine may prevent serious illness in COVID-19 patients

In a preliminary study of COVID-19 patients with mild-to-moderate disease who were attempting to recover in their homes, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that the drug fluvoxamine seems to prevent some of the most serious complications of the illness and make hospitalization and the need for supplemental oxygen less likely.

The study, a collaboration between the university’s Department of Psychiatry and Division of Infectious Diseases, involved 152 patients infected with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Researchers compared the outcomes of those treated with fluvoxamine to the outcomes of those given an inactive placebo. After 15 days, none of the 80 patients who had received the drug experienced serious clinical deterioration. Meanwhile, six of the 72 patients given placebo (8.3%) became seriously ill, with four requiring hospitalization.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2773108

Release date: 12 November 2020
Source: Washington University School of Medicine

With or without allergies, outcomes similar for hospitalized patients with COVID-19

During the COVID-19 pandemic, attention has been focused on how those with both allergies and asthma might be affected should they become ill. A new study being presented at this year’s virtual American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology (ACAAI) Annual Scientific Meeting examines hospital data to determine if those with allergic conditions had more severe COVID-related disease than those without.

“In looking at the outcomes for patients based on allergic diseases such as allergic rhinitis, asthma, eczema, and food allergy, we didn’t find significant differences in the numbers of interventions needed for those with allergies versus those without when it came to COVID-19,” says allergist Mitchell Grayson, MD, ACAAI member and co-author of the study. “For example, with regard to ICU admission, 43% of those with allergic disease were admitted versus 45% without. And 79% of those with allergy needed supplemental oxygen versus 74% of those without.”

In the study, more patients with allergies had COPD (39% vs. 17%), which is a known risk factor for severe disease with COVID. After statistically controlling for the presence of COPD and its association with more severe COVID-related illness, the researchers found a statistical trend suggesting possible protection in those with pre-existing allergic disease but not asthma.

Release date: 13 November 2020
Source: American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology

Sleep Apnea May Be Risk Factor for COVID-19

The study focused on the register information of COVID-19 patients who were admitted to Turku University Hospital during the first wave of the pandemic in the spring 2020. Southwest Finland, with a population of 480,000, managed the first wave of the pandemic with a relatively small number of infected people. Patients with a positive test result amounted to 278 individuals. From the infected patients, 28 were admitted to hospital care at Turku University Hospital by 3 May 2020. The register information of these patients was studied with the aim to unravel the risks for the severe form of COVID-19 and the need for intensive care.

The comparison of the register information revealed that 29 percent of the patients admitted to hospital care had already been diagnosed with sleep apnea. The number is significant, as only 3.1 percent of the population of Southwest Finland is getting treatment for sleep apnea. Even though the total number of patients in the study was low, the share of sleep apnea patients was high. The extent of sleep apnea among the patients cannot only be explained by the obesity often met in sleep apnea patients, being one of the already known risk factors for severe COVID-19.

The research article has been published in Sleep Medicine and Disorders International Journal (SMDIJ).

Release date: 13 November 2020
Source: University of Turku

Face masks don’t hinder breathing during exercise

Face masks do not hinder breathing during exercise - استفاده از ماسک در هنگام ورزش باعث اختلال در تنفس نمی شود

Exercise performance and blood and muscle oxygen levels are not affected for healthy individuals wearing a face mask during strenuous workouts.

Findings are of importance because they indicate that people can wear face masks during intense exercise with no detrimental effects on performance and minimal impact on blood and muscle oxygenation

Published Nov. 3 in the research journal International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.

Release date: 5 November 2020
Source: University of Saskatchewan