The Washington Post (2/29, Pannett ) reports, “A review of research involving almost 10 million people has found a direct association between eating too many ultra-processed foods…and more than 30 health conditions, including heart disease, anxiety and early death.” For the research published in the BMJ, investigators examined “45 ‘pooled meta-analyses’ from 14 review articles involving nearly 10 million people” and “found ‘convincing evidence’ that higher ultra-processed food intake was associated with about a 50 percent increased risk of cardiovascular disease-related death, a 48 to 53 percent higher risk of anxiety and common mental disorders, and a 12 percent greater risk of Type 2 diabetes.” Also, “highly suggestive evidence…indicated that diets high in ultra-processed foods were associated with a 21 percent greater risk of death from any cause.”

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— “The Washington Post (requires login and subscription)

(2/29, Garzella) reports, “A USA TODAY analysis of Medicaid data for the 60 most used psychiatric drugs showed a growing number of people sought mental health treatment and medication during the pandemic as it pushed people into isolation and dismantled support systems.” Additionally, “the analysis also revealed a lingering effect of the pandemic: Mental health-related prescriptions rose further in 2022, up 12% from 2019, outpacing the less than 1% growth in overall prescriptions.” Dr. Smita Das, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s addiction council, said, “This is just coming to a point where for many people, it’s been unmanageable.” But “one silver lining of the pandemic…said” Dr. Das, is, “We all started to talk about mental health more and bring it to the forefront.”

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— “Mental health crisis fuels the post-pandemic rise in medication use,”Cecilia Garzella, USA Today , February 29, 2024

The New York Times (2/29, Jewett , Hoffman ) reports, “Alcohol-related deaths surged in the United States by nearly 30 percent in recent years…according to a new studypublished by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”

CNN (2/29, Christensen ) reports, “In 2020-21, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were an average of about 488 deaths per day from excessive alcohol drinking, according to” the report. The data indicated that “the average number of deaths related to excessive alcohol use increased more than 29% from 2016-17 to 2020-21.” The report found that “during 2016-2017 there were 137,927 alcohol-related deaths, but for 2020-2021, there were 178,307.” This “increase in deaths related to excessive alcohol seemed to hit all ages.”

HealthDay (2/29, Mundell ) reports that the study found that “men continue to lose their lives to alcohol in greater numbers than women,” but “the rate at which women are dying from excessive drinking is rising faster than that of men.”

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HealthDay (2/28, Mundell ) reports Kundalini yoga “appears to have bolstered the brain health of older women who had risk factors for Alzheimer’s disease,” researchers concluded in a study of “more than 60 women” who practiced either Kundalini yoga or “memory enhancement training.” The benefits of yoga “included significant improvement in subjective memory complaints, prevention in brain matter declines, increased connectivity in the hippocampus which manages stress-related memories, and improvement in the peripheral cytokines and gene expression of anti-inflammatory and anti-aging molecules,” researchers said. The study was published in Translational Psychiatry.

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— “Yoga Brings Brain Benefits to Women at Risk for Alzheimer’s,”Ernie Mundell, HealthDay, February 28, 2024

The New York Times (2/28, Belluck ) reports patients with long COVID may experience “measurable cognitive decline, especially in the ability to remember, reason and plan, a large new study suggests.” Cognitive tests of nearly 113,000 UK patients “found that those with persistent post-COVID symptoms scored the equivalent of 6 I.Q. points lower than people who had never been infected with the coronavirus, according to the study, published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.” In addition, people “who had been infected and no longer had symptoms also scored slightly lower than people who had never been infected, by the equivalent of 3 I.Q. points, even if they were ill for only a short time.”

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— “The New York Times (requires login and subscription)