HealthDay (7/10, Preidt) reports investigators “surveyed more than 12,000 teens in Germany, Poland and Romania and found those who used social network sites for more than two hours a day were at increased risk for cyberbullying.” The findings were published online July 10 in BMC Public Health. MedPage Today also covers the story.

Related Links:

— “Teens Focused on Social Media May Be at Cyberbullying Risk ,”Robert Preidt , HealthDay, July 10, 2018.

Reuters (7/10, Carroll) reports that research published online July 10 in Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes suggests that “more than 16 years after cleanup was completed at the site of the September 11, 2001 attack on New York City’s World Trade Center complex, many who worked at the disaster site still struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and may also have an elevated risk of heart attack and stroke as a result.”

HealthDay (7/10, Gordon) reports that approximately “20 percent of men and 26 percent of women who responded when the twin towers were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001 developed PTSD, which is at least twice the rate expected in the general population, the researchers said.” The investigators found that “those who developed” PTSD “faced more than double the risk of a heart attack and stroke compared to those who worked on New York City’s World Trade Center site but didn’t develop PTSD.”

Related Links:

— “PTSD raises heart and stroke risk in World Trade Center cleanup crews,”Linda Carroll, Reuters, July 10, 2018.

HealthDay (7/9, Preidt) reports, “Children whose parents spend time in prison are more likely to lead risky lifestyles as young adults,” researchers found after analyzing “data from more than 13,000 young adults, aged 24 to 32,” about 10 percent of whom “had a parent incarcerated during their childhood.” The study revealed that “young adults who had a parent incarcerated during their childhood were more likely to skip needed health care, smoke cigarettes, engage in risky sex, and abuse alcohol, prescription and illicit drugs.” The findings were published online in the journal Pediatrics.

Related Links:

— “When Parents Do Time, Kids Pay the Price,” Robert Preidt, HealthDay, July 9, 2018.

Healio (7/9, Demko) reports that a 24-study “integrative review published” online May 20 in the journal Birth “revealed that anger coexists with postpartum mood disturbances in women.” The review also demonstrated that “anger occurs when women’s expectations about motherhood are different from reality, and when they feel trapped in situations such as poverty and intimate partner violence.”

Related Links:

— “Anger coexists with postnatal depression,”Savannah Demko, Healio, July 9, 2018.

The ABC News (7/9, Powell) website reports research published online July 9 in Pediatrics “finds that traumatic events in childhood increase the risk of mental health and behavioral problems not just for that person but also for their children.” For the study, researchers “used a national sample of families from previous research – parents who had participated in a 2014 Child Development Supplement and 2,529 of their children who had complete data in the 2014 Childhood Retrospective Circumstances Study.” The study revealed an association “between children with a high rate of behavioral problems and parents who had experienced a greater number of adverse childhood events.”

HealthDay (7/9, Norton) reports children of parents who had experienced “abuse or other adversities” as children were themselves “twice as likely to have been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder” and “four times as likely to have been diagnosed with any mental health disorder.” Medical Daily (7/9) also covers the study.

Related Links:

— “Trauma suffered in childhood echoes across generations, study finds,”Denise Powell, The ABC News, July 9, 2018.

The New York Times (3/16, Span, Subscription Publication) reports that “for years, geriatricians and researchers have sounded the alarm about the use of benzodiazepines among older adults,” including Valium (diazepam), Klonopin (clonazepam), Xanax (alprazolam) and Ativan (lorazepam), but “the cautions have had scant effect” while the opioid epidemic has compounded the problem. According to Michael Schoenbaum, an epidemiologist at the National Institutes for Health, “Way too many older Americans are getting benzos. And of those, many — more than half — are getting them for prolonged periods. That’s just bad practice. They have serious consequences.” The Times notes that in 2016 “the Food and Drug Administration issued a black-box warning about co-prescribing benzodiazepines and opioids, including those in cough products.”

Related Links:

— “A Quiet Drug Problem Among the Elderly,” Paula Span, New York Times, March 16, 2018.

Medscape (3/14, Brauser) reports, “Sustaining a traumatic brain injury (TBI) may be a risk factor for violent behavior and subsequent incarceration,” researchers concluded in “a large review of birth cohort, data linkage, and population studies.” The findings were published online Feb. 26 in The Lancet Psychiatry.

Related Links:

— Medscape (requires login and subscription)

MedPage Today (3/14, Walsh) reports, “Patients with axial spondyloarthritis have high rates of depression, with almost one-third experiencing moderate-to-severe symptoms,” researchers found among “a cohort of 1,736 patients.” The findings were published online March 9 in the Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases.

Related Links:

— “Depression Common with Spine Disease,” Nancy Walsh, MedPage Today, March 14, 2018.

The CBS Evening News (3/14, story 10, 1:35, Glor) reported, “A new study out today finds women who are physically fit may be 90 percent less likely to develop dementia.” According to medical contributor Dr. Tara Narula explained that researchers following women in their 40s found that, after testing for fitness levels and the rates of dementia over a period of nearly 40 years, women with the highest levels of fitness “on average developed dementia at a rate of about five percent.”

USA Today (3/14, Weintraub) reports that the study published online March 14 in Neurology revealed that “the few highly fit women who did develop dementia became symptomatic at age 90 on average, 11 years later than the moderately fit,” the study found.

TIME (3/14, Park) reports that in contrast, “women with lower fitness had a 41% higher risk of developing dementia than women with average fitness.” The study “involved nearly 1,500 women in Sweden who provided information on their physical activity levels and took cognitive tests for up to 44 years.”

Also covering the study are HealthDay (3/14, Gordon) and Healio (3/14, Demko).

Related Links:

— “‘Highly fit’ middle-age women nearly 90% less likely to develop dementia decades later, study finds,” Karen Weintraub, USA Today, March 14, 2018.

CNN (3/13, Christensen) reports on its website that from 1980 to 2014, “2.84 million Americans died of alcohol, drugs, suicide, domestic violence or abuse, according to a study published Tuesday in the medical journal JAMA,” indicating a more than six-fold increase. More than half a million people died from “drug use disorders” and while “the rates of death varied widely, with increases between 8.2% and 8,369.7%, drug deaths were up in nearly every single county in the United States,” CNN reports.

Related Links:

— “Drug deaths rose 8,370% in some US counties over 34 years,” Jen Christensen, CNN, March 13, 2018.