Fox News (4/7) reports that over “100 medical groups sent a joint letter to Congress Wednesday urging lawmakers to fund research on gun violence at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” The letter requests Congress to “end the dramatic and chilling effect of the current rider language restricting gun violence research and to fund this critical work.” The 141 organizations that signed the petition “represent more than 1 million health professionals in the U.S., according to” The Guardian. The groups “demand that the funding for the research should be included in funding for the next fiscal year.” The Trace (4/7) also covers the story.

Related Links:

— “Medical groups urge Congress to fund CDC research on gun violence,” Fox News, April 7, 2016.

HealthDay (4/7, Salamon) reports, “Spacing pregnancies in close succession may increase the risk of autism in children,” the findings of a seven-study review published online April 7 in the journal of Pediatrics suggest. After looking at “existing research involving more than 1.1 million children,” investigators also discovered that “longer pregnancy spacing – in excess of five years – may be linked to raised odds of” autism.

Related Links:

— “Short Gap Between Pregnancies Tied to Higher Autism Risk?,” Maureen Salamon, HealthDay, April 7, 2016.

The New York Times (4/7, Reynolds) “Well” blog reports that “regular walking, cycling, swimming, dancing and even gardening may substantially reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s,” the findings of a 10-year, 900-participant study published online March 11 in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease suggest.

Related Links:

— “Walk, Jog or Dance: It’s All Good for the Aging Brain,” Gretchen Reynolds, New York Times, April 7, 2016.

According to the Los Angeles Times (4/4, Healy), “New statistics on death rates in the United States appear to confirm a grim prediction – that obesity is reversing decades of steady expansion in Americans’ life spans.” CDC data show that “in the first nine months of 2015, more Americans of all ages died of obesity-related diseases compared with the same period in 2014,” as “deaths from stroke ticked up 4%, chronic liver disease deaths jumped 3% and deaths attributed to heart disease and to diabetes rose by 1% each.”

Meanwhile, deaths linked to “Alzheimer’s disease, which has been linked to midlife obesity, rose 19% over the year before.” The Times says Dr. David S. Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School is “calling for…the urgent adoption of policies that could improve Americans’ food and drink choices.

Related Links:

— “Will obesity reverse the life-span gains made over decades of health triumphs?,” Melissa Healy, Los Angeles Times, April 4, 2016.

HealthDay (4/6, Preidt) reports that use of the epilepsy and off-label depression medication lamotrigine “during pregnancy may not raise the risk for certain birth defects,” the findings of a study published online April 6 in Neurology suggest. After analyzing “data on more than 10 million births over 16 years, including almost 227,000 babies with birth defects,” researchers found that infants “born with cleft lip, cleft palate or clubfoot were not significantly more likely than those with other birth defects to have been born to mothers who took lamotrigine in the first trimester of pregnancy.”

Related Links:

— “Study Sees No Link Between Common Epilepsy Drug, Certain Birth Defects,” Robert Preidt, HealthDay, April 6, 2016.