Tag: Death and dying

Elite athletes with genetic heart disease can safely return to play with diagnosis and treatment, early study suggests | CNN

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CNN
 — 

In a new study, most elite athletes with a diagnosed genetic heart disease did not experience serious or fatal symptoms of their condition, such as sudden cardiac death. The research suggests it can be “feasible” and “safe” for athletes to continue to participate in their sport.

Among a sample of 76 elite athletes with a genetic heart disease who had competed or are still competing in either Division I university or professional sports, 73 out of the 76 did not experience a cardiac event triggered by their disease during the study period, according to researchers behind a late-breaking clinical trial presented Monday at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session Together With the World Congress of Cardiology.

Among those elite athletes with a genetic heart disease, 40 of them – 52% – were asymptomatic, the study abstract finds.

Over the years, researchers have become more aware of alarming reports about elite athletes experiencing heart problems, or even suddenly collapsing during games.

“For athletes with genetic heart conditions, and I would add non-athletes, the tragedies occur when we don’t know of their condition,” said Dr. Michael Ackerman, a genetic cardiologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who was a senior author of the new research. “When we know of their condition, and we assess the risk carefully and we treat it well, these athletes and non-athletes, they can expect to live and thrive despite their condition.”

The new research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, but the findings suggest that many athletes with a genetic heart disease can decide with their health care professionals on whether to continue competing in their sport and how to do so safely, instead of being automatically disqualified due to their health conditions.

“In sports, historically, we’ve been paternalistic and de-emphasize patient preference and risk tolerance, but we know that athletes come from all walks of life. They are intelligent and when there’s scientific uncertainty, their values should be incorporated in medical decision-making,” Dr. J. Sawalla Guseh, cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in the new study, said during Monday’s scientific session.

“Shared decision-making when done well can have very favorable outcomes,” he said.

Elite basketball, hockey, soccer and football players, were among the 76 athletes included in the new study, conducted by researchers at Mayo Clinic and other institutions in the United States. They wrote in their study abstract that this is the first study to their knowledge describing the experience of athletes competing at the NCAA Division I level or in professional sports with a known genetic heart disease that puts them at risk of sudden cardiac death.

The athletes in the study were cleared for return-to-play at either a NCAA Division I school or at the professional level. They were studied over an average of seven years, and all had been diagnosed with a genetic heart disease in the past 20 years, being treated at either Mayo Clinic, Morristown Medical Center, Massachusetts General Hospital or Atrium Health Sports Cardiology Center.

“Only three of them had a breakthrough cardiac event, which means after they were diagnosed and treated, they were still having an event,” said Katherine Martinez, an undergraduate student at Loyola University in Baltimore, who helped conduct the research as an intern in the Mayo Clinic’s Windland Smith Rice Sudden Death Genomics Laboratory.

Fainting was the most common event, and one athlete received a shock with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, or ICD. None of the athletes died.

“The majority of these athletes went on to continue their career with no events at all,” Martinez said. But most of the athletes in the study – 55 of them, or 72% – were initially disqualified from competing by their primary provider or institution after their diagnosis. Most ultimately opted to return to play with no restrictions after undergoing comprehensive clinical evaluations and talking with their doctors.

While each sports league has its own set of rules, historically, some people diagnosed with a genetic heart disease that puts them at an increased risk for sudden cardiac death have been restricted from competitive sports, the researchers wrote in their study abstract.

“Just because you were given this diagnosis, doesn’t mean that your life, your career, the future that you see for yourself is over, but taking a second opinion from an expert who knows what they’re doing and is comfortable with shared decision-making is the next step,” said Martinez, who worked on the new research alongside her father, Dr. Matthew Martinez, director of Atlantic Health System Sports Cardiology at Morristown Medical Center and an author of the new research.

Regarding the new study, “the take-home message is, if you have one of these findings, seek out an expert who’s going to help you identify a safe exercise plan for you and determine what level you can continue to safely participate in,” he said. “This is the next best step – the next evolution – of how we manage athletes with genetic heart disease.”

Leaving their sport due to a genetic heart disease can be “very destructive” for athletes who have devoted their lives to excelling in competitions, said Dr. Lior Jankelson, director of the Inherited Arrhythmia Program at NYU Langone Heart in New York, who was not involved in the new research.

Yet he added that these athletes still need to consult with their doctors and be watched closely because some genetic diseases could be more likely to cause a serious cardiac event than others.

The new study highlights that “the majority of athletes with genetic heart disease could probably – after careful, meticulous expert risk-stratification and care strategy – participate in sports,” Jankelson said. “But at the same time, this is exactly the reason why these patients should be cared only in high-expertise genetic cardiology clinics, because there are other conditions that are genetic, that could respond very adversely to sports, and have a much higher risk profile of developing an arrhythmia during intense activity.”

Separately, the NCAA Sports Science Institute notes on its website, “Though many student-athletes with heart conditions can live active lives and not experience health-related problems, sudden fatality from a heart condition remains the leading medical cause of death in college athletes.”

For athletes with a genetic heart disease, their symptoms and their family history of cardiac events should be considered when determining their risks, said Dr. Jayne Morgan, a cardiologist with Piedmont Healthcare in Atlanta, who was not involved in the new research.

“Certainly, there is concern with elite athletes competing and whether or not they are being screened appropriately,” Morgan said. But she added that the new research offers “some understanding” to the mental health implications for athletes with a genetic heart disease who may be required to step away from a competitive sport that they love.

“This study, I think, begins to go a long way in identifying that we may not need to pull the trigger so quickly and have athletes step away from something that they love,” Morgan said.

The new study is “timely” given the recent national attention on athletes and their risk of sudden cardiac death, Dr. Deepak Bhatt, director of Mount Sinai Heart in New York City, who was not involved in the research, said in an email.

“These are some of the best data showing that the risk of return to play may not be as high as we fear,” Bhatt said about the new research.

“Some caveats include that the majority of these athletes were not symptomatic and about a third had an implantable defibrillator,” he added. “Any decision to return to the athletic field should be made after a careful discussion of the potential risks, including ones that are hard to quantify. Input from experts in genetic cardiology and sports cardiology can be very helpful in these cases.”

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Bempedoic acid improved heart health in patients who can’t tolerate statins, study finds | CNN

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CNN
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Bempedoic acid may be an alternative for people who need to lower their cholesterol but can’t or won’t take statins, according to a large study published Saturday in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Statins are the most commonly prescribed cholesterol-lowering drugs that help lower what’s known as the “bad” cholesterol, or low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol in the blood; more than 90% of adults who take a cholesterol-lowering medicine use a statin, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Statins are considered safe and effective, but there are millions of people who cannot or will not take them. For some people it causes intense muscle pain. Past research has shown anywhere between 7% and 29% of patients who need to lower cholesterol do not tolerate statins, according Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist and researcher at the Cleveland Clinic and co-author of the new study.

“I see heart patients that come in with terrible histories, multiple myocardial infarction, sometimes bypass surgery, many stents and they say, ‘Doctor, I’ve tried multiple statins, but whenever I take a statin, my muscles hurt, or they’re weak. I can’t walk upstairs. I just can’t tolerate these drugs,’ ” Nissen said. “We do need alternatives for these patients.”

Doctors have a few options, including ezetimibe and a monoclonal antibody called a proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9, or PCSK9 inhibitors for short.

Bempedoic acid, sold under the name Nexletol, was designed specifically to treat statin-intolerant patients. The FDA approved it for this purpose in 2020, but the effects of the drug on heart health had not been fully assessed until this large trial. The new study was funded in part by Esperion Therapeutics, the maker of Nexletol.

For the study, which was presented Saturday at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session with the World Congress of Cardiology, Nissen and his colleagues enrolled 13,970 patients from 32 countries.

All of the patients were statin intolerant, typically due to musculoskeletal adverse effects. Patients had to sign an agreement that they couldn’t tolerate statins “even though I know they would reduce my risk of a heart attack or stroke or death,” and providers signed a similar statement.

The patients were then randomized into two groups. One was treated with bempedoic acid, the other was given a placebo, which does nothing. Researchers then followed up with those patients for up to nearly five years. The number of men and women in the trial were mostly evenly divided, and most participants, some 91%, were White, and 17% were Hispanic or Latino.

The drug works in a similar way that statins do, by drawing cholesterol out of a waxy substance called plaque that can build up in the walls of the arteries and interfere with the blood flow to the heart. If there is too much plaque buildup, it can lead to a heart attack or stroke.

But bempedoic acid is only activated in the liver, unlike a statin, so it is unlikely to cause muscle aches, Nissen said.

In the trial, investigators found that bempedoic acid was well-tolerated and the percent reduction in the “bad” cholesterol was greater with bempedoic acid than placebo by 21.7%.

The risk of cardiovascular events – including death, stroke, heart attack and coronary revascularization, a procedure or surgery to improve blood flow to the heart – was 13% lower with bempedoic acid than with placebo over a median of 3.4 years.

“The drug worked in primary and secondary prevention patients – that is, patients that had had event and patients who were very high risk for a first event. There were a lot of diabetics. These were very high risk people,” Nissen said. “So the drug met its expectations and probably did a lot better than a lot of people thought it would do.”

In the group that took bempedoic acid, there were a few more cases of gout and gallstones, compared with people who took a placebo.

“The number is small, and weighing that against a heart attack, I think most people would say, ‘OK I’d rather have a little gout attack,’ ” Nissen said.

Bempedoic acid had no observed effect on mortality, but that may be because the observation period was too short to tell if it had that kind of impact. Earlier trials on statins showed the same; it was only after there were multiple studies on statins that scientists were able to show an impact on mortality.

Dr. Howard Weintraub, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Health who did not work on this study, said that while he knows some people will not consider a medication successful unless it reduces mortality, he thinks that is short-sighted.

“I think there’s more to doing medicine then counting body bags,” Weintraub said.”Preventing things that can be life changing, crippling, and certainly change your quality of life forever going forward, and your cost of doing things going forward, I think is a good thing.”

He was pleased to see the results of this trial, especially since the people in this study are often what he called “forgotten individuals” – the millions who could benefit from lowering their cholesterol, but can’t take statins.

“It’s not like their LDL was 180 or 190 or 230, their LDL was 139. This is about average in our country,” Weintraub said. He said often doctors will just tell those patients to watch their diet, but he thinks this suggests they would benefit from medication.

“Both groups primary and secondary prevention got benefit, which I think is impressive with the modest amount of LDL reduction,” Weintraub said.

There are some limitations to this trial. It was narrowly focused on patients with a known statin intolerance. Nissen said the trial was not designed to determine whether bempedoic acid could be an alternative to statins.

“Statins are the gold standard. They are the cornerstone. The purpose of this study was not to replace statins, but to allow an alternative therapy for people who simply cannot take them,” Nissen said.

Bempedoic acid is a much more expensive drug than a statin. There are generic versions of statins and some cost only a few dollars. Bempedoic acid, on the other hand, has no generic alternative and a 30-day supply can cost more than $400, according to GoodRx.

“I think what insurance companies need to recognize that even though this drug is going to cost more than statins, having a heart attack or a stroke or needing a stent is expensive. A 23% reduction in (myocardial infarctions) is a considerable reduction,” Weintraub said.

In an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine that accompanied the study, Dr. John H. Alexander, who works in the division of cardiology at Duke Clinical Research Institute, Duke Health, Durham said that doctors should take these results into consideration when treating patients with high cholesterol who can’t take statins.

“The benefits of bempedoic acid are now clearer, and it is now our responsibility to translate this information into better primary and secondary prevention for more at-risk patients, who will, as a result, benefit from fewer cardiovascular events,” Alexander wrote.

Dr. Manesh Patel, a cardiologist and volunteer with the American Heart Association who was not a part of the study, said that providers are already prescribing bempedoic acid for some patients, but with this new research, he thinks they will quickly be used with more statin-intolerant patients.

“We continue to see that if we can lower your LDL significantly, we improve people’s cardiovascular health. And so we need as many different arrows in our quiver to try to get that done,” Patel said.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer for men and women in the world. One person dies every 34 seconds in the US from cardiovascular disease, according to the CDC. About 697,000 people in the US died from heart disease in 2020 alone – about the same number as the population of Oklahoma City.

“Given the number of people that are eligible for statins, which are tens of millions of patients already, the number of people who cannot tolerate statins is in the millions,” Nissen said. “This is a big public health problem and I think we’ve come up with something that directly addresses this.”

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Report shows ‘troubling’ rise in colorectal cancer among US adults younger than 55 | CNN

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CNN
 — 

Adults across the United States are being diagnosed with colon and rectal cancers at younger ages, and now 1 in 5 new cases are among those in their early 50s or younger, according to the American Cancer Society’s latest colorectal cancer report.

The report says that the proportion of colorectal cancer cases among adults younger than 55 increased from 11% in 1995 to 20% in 2019. There also appears to be an overall shift to more diagnoses of advanced stages of cancer. In 2019, 60% of all new colorectal cases among all ages were advanced.

“Anecdotally, it’s not rare for us now to hear about a young person with advanced colorectal cancer,” said Dr. William Dahut, chief scientific officer for the American Cancer Society. For example, Broadway actor Quentin Oliver Lee died last year at 34 after being diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer, and in 2020, “Black Panther” star Chadwick Boseman died at 43 of colon cancer.

“It used to be something we never heard or saw this, but it is a high percentage now of colorectal cancers under the age of 55,” Dahut said.

Although it’s difficult to pinpoint a cause for the rise in colorectal cancers among younger adults, he said, some factors might be related to changes in the environment or people’s diets.

“We’re not trying to blame anybody for their cancer diagnosis,” Dahut said. “But when you see something occurring in a short period of time, it’s more likely something external to the patient that’s driving that, and it’s hard not to at least think – when you have something like colorectal cancer – that something diet-related is not impossible.”

The new report also says that more people are surviving colorectal cancer, with the relative survival rate at least five years after diagnosis rising from 50% in the mid-1970s to 65% from 2012 through 2018, partly due to advancements in treatment.

That’s good news, said Dr. Paul Oberstein, a medical oncologist at NYU Langone Perlmutter Cancer Center, who was not involved in the new report. The overall trends suggest that colorectal cancer incidence and death rates have been slowly declining.

“If you look at the overall trends, the incidence of colon cancer in this report has decreased from 66 per 100,000 in 1985 to 35 per 100,000 in 2019 – so almost half,” Oberstein said.

“Changes in the mortality rate are even more impressive,” he said. “In 1970, which was a long time ago, the rate of colorectal cancer death was 29.2 per 100,000 people, and in 2020, it was 12.6 per 100,000. So a dramatic, over 55% decline in deaths per 100,000 people.”

Colorectal cancer is the second most common cause of cancer death in the United States, and it is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in men younger than 50.

Dahut said the best way to reduce your risk of colorectal cancer is to follow screening guidelines and get a stool-based test or a visual exam such as a colonoscopy when it’s recommended. Any suspicious polyps can be removed during a visual exam, reducing your risk of cancer.

“At the ACS, we recommend if you’re at average risk, you start screening at age 45,” Dahut said. “Usually, then your subsequent screening is based on the results of that screening test.”

For the new report, researchers at the American Cancer Society analyzed data from the National Cancer Institute and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on cancer screenings, cases and deaths.

The researchers found that from 2011 through 2019, colorectal cancer rates increased 1.9% each year in people younger than 55. And while overall colorectal cancer death rates fell 57% between 1970 and 2020, among people younger than 50, death rates continued to climb 1% annually since 2004.

“We know rates are increasing in young people, but it’s alarming to see how rapidly the whole patient population is shifting younger, despite shrinking numbers in the overall population,” Rebecca Siegel, senior scientific director of surveillance research at the American Cancer Society and lead author of the report, said in a news release. “The trend toward more advanced disease in people of all ages is also surprising and should motivate everyone 45 and older to get screened.”

Some regions of the United States appeared to have higher rates of colorectal cancers and deaths than others. These rates were lowest in the West and highest in Appalachia and parts of the South and the Midwest, the data showed. The incidence of colorectal cancer ranged from 27 cases per 100,000 people in Utah to 46.5 per 100,000 in Mississippi. Colorectal cancer death rates ranged from about 10 per 100,000 people in Connecticut to 17.6 per 100,000 in Mississippi.

There were some significant racial disparities, as well. The researchers found that colorectal cancer cases and deaths were highest in the American Indian/Alaska Native and Black communities. Among men specifically, the data showed that colorectal cancer death rates were 46% higher in American Indian/Alaska Native men and 44% higher in Black men compared with White men.

The report also says that more left-sided tumors have been diagnosed, meaning an increasing percentage of tumors are happening closer to the rectum. The proportion of colorectal cancers in that location has steadily climbed from 27% in 1995 to 31% in 2019.

“Historically, we’ve been worried more about the tumors on what we call the right side,” said NYU Langone’s Oberstein.

“But the incidence increasing, especially among young people, seems to be happening not only in those worse tumors but the ones that we think are not as bad,” he said, referring to left-sided tumors. “It’s raising questions about whether something is changing about the risks and the future people who are going to get colon cancer.”

Looking forward, the researchers estimate that there will be 153,020 colorectal cancer cases diagnosed in the US this year and an estimated 52,550 colorectal cancer deaths, with 3,750 of them – or 7% – among people younger than 50.

“These highly concerning data illustrate the urgent need to invest in targeted cancer research studies dedicated to understanding and preventing early-onset colorectal cancer,” Dr. Karen Knudsen, CEO of the American Cancer Society, said in the news release. “The shift to diagnosis of more advanced disease also underscores the importance of screening and early detection, which saves lives.”

The report’s findings, including the rise in colorectal cancer in younger adults, are “troubling,” Dr. Joel Gabre, an expert in gastrointestinal cancers at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, said in an email.

“It reflects other recent published findings demonstrating a rising incidence of colorectal cancer in young people. Most concerning to me, however, is a lack of clear cause and patients being diagnosed late. I think this is an area where more funding for research is needed to understand this really concerning rise,” wrote Gabre, who was not involved in the report.

Gabre says he knows what it’s like to look into his young patients’ eyes and tell them they have colorectal cancer, and “it’s devastating.”

“They have young families and so much of their life ahead of them. That’s why I encourage my patients who are age 45 years and older to get screened,” Gabre said. “I also encourage people to let their doctor know if they have a family history of colon cancer. There is genetic testing we can do to identify some at-risk patients early before they develop cancer.”

The findings highlight the importance of colorectal cancer screening, Dr. Robin Mendelsohn, gastroenterologist and co-director of the Center for Young Onset Colorectal and Gastrointestinal Cancers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, said in an email.

“The age to start screening was recently decreased to 45, which will help in an effort to screen more people, but we still need to understand more why we are seeing this increase which is something we are actively looking into,” wrote Mendelsohn, was not involved in the new report.

Mendelsohn says she has seen an increase in advanced colorectal cancers and diagnoses among her younger patients, and she says to watch for symptoms such as rectal bleeding, abdominal pain and changes in bowel habits.

“Until we understand more, it is important that patients and providers recognize these symptoms so they can be evaluated promptly,” she said. “And, if you are at an age to get screened, please get screened.”

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Among seniors, Black men more likely to die after surgery than their peers, new study suggests | CNN

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CNN
 — 

Among older patients, Black men may have a higher chance of dying within 30 days following surgery than their peers, according to a new study.

The study, published Wednesday in the medical journal BMJ, suggests that this inequity could be driven by outcomes following elective surgery, for which death was 50% higher for Black men than for White men – information that can be helpful for physicians as they plan procedures for patients.

Previously, separate research published in 2020 came to similar findings among children, showing that, within 30 days from their surgeries, Black children were more likely to die than White children.

“While a fair bit is known about such inequities, we find in our analyses that it’s specifically Black men who are dying more, and they are dying more after elective surgeries, not urgent and emergent surgeries,” study lead Dr. Dan Ly, assistant professor of medicine in the division of general internal medicine and health services research at the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, said in a news release.

“Our findings point to possibilities such as poorer pre-optimization of co-morbidities prior to surgery, delays of care due to structural racism and physician bias, and worse stress and its associated physical burden on Black men in the United States,” Ly said in the news release.

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles analyzed Medicare data on more than 1.8 million beneficiaries, ages 65 to 99, who underwent one of eight common surgical procedures. The data came from 2016 to 2018, and the researchers examined how many patients died during their hospital stay or within 30 days after surgery.

The researchers found that dying after surgery overall was higher in Black men compared with White men, White women, and Black women. Dying after surgery was 50% higher for Black men than for White men after elective surgeries, the data suggest, but for non-elective surgeries, there was no difference between Black and White men, although mortality was lower for women of both races.

Among the Black men in the study, about 3% of them died following surgery overall compared with 2.7% of White men, 2.4% of White women and 2.2% of Black women. These differences were relatively larger for elective surgeries, and appeared within a week after surgery and persisted for up to 60 days after surgery, the researchers found. In a separate analysis, the researchers found that Hispanic men and Hispanic women showed a lower overall mortality than Black men.

“Our study has shed light on the fact that Black men experience a higher death rate after elective surgery than other subgroups of race and sex. Further research is needed to understand better the factors contributing to this observation, and to inform efforts to develop interventions that could effectively eliminate such disparity,” Dr. Yusuke Tsugawa, the senior author of the study and associate professor of medicine at UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, said in an email.

The study did not explore what could be driving the disparity but Tsugawa said that “several factors” could potentially play a role.

“The structural racism may at least partially explain our findings. For example, Black patients living in neighborhoods with predominantly Black residents tend to live close to hospitals that lack resources to provide high quality healthcare,” Tsugawa said in the email. “It is possible that Black men in particular face especially high cumulative amounts of stress and allostatic load, which refers to the cumulative burden of chronic stress and life events, potentially leading to a higher death rate after surgery among this population.”

The new study “validates” that racial inequities exist in health care, said Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, who was not involved in the study.

“Obviously it’s concerning when you see such a large disparity,” Benjamin said, referring to the differences in how many patients died after surgery in the study findings.

“Here’s another example that these disparities are real, and I think it helps inform people – physicians, health systems, providers of care – that the disparity is already there,” he said. “So, when they’re looking at providing surgical care to their patients, they should be informed that, statistically, some of their patients may not do well 30 days out after surgery, and so they need to put extra care in both providing care and understanding the health status of those patients when they go to surgery.”

The new study findings also raise many questions about health systems and what happens when a patient is discharged home after surgery and their ability to safely recover from a procedure, said Dr. Utibe Essien, assistant professor of medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, who was not involved in the study.

“As a generalist, I’m really thinking about that part as well and how we can engage with our surgical colleagues to make sure our patients who are from underrepresented groups are leading healthy lives after they’ve gone under the knife so to speak,” Essien said, adding that more research could help determine which types of elective surgeries may have seen more significant disparities than other types – and what would be needed to reduce the disparities.

“Would we find something different with more rare, complicated surgeries? It’s possible and that goes back to the type of hospitals where patients are getting their care,” Essien said.

“How close is a hospital really connected to an academic medical center that knows the latest and greatest surgical procedures? Do they have the technology to be able to do some really innovative and safe work?” he said. “Looking into ways at the hospital level that we can address these disparities, I think, is going to be important.”

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11 minutes of daily exercise could have a positive impact on your health, large study shows | CNN

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CNN
 — 

When you can’t fit your entire workout into a busy day, do you think there’s no point in doing anything at all? You should rethink that mindset. Just 11 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity aerobic activity per day could lower your risk of cancer, cardiovascular disease or premature death, a large new study has found.

Aerobic activities include walking, dancing, running, jogging, cycling and swimming. You can gauge the intensity level of an activity by your heart rate and how hard you’re breathing as you move. Generally, being able to talk but not sing during an activity would make it moderate intensity. Vigorous intensity is marked by the inability to carry on a conversation.

Higher levels of physical activity have been associated with lower rates of premature death and chronic disease, according to past research. But how the risk levels for these outcomes are affected by the amount of exercise someone gets has been more difficult to determine. To explore this impact, scientists largely from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom looked at data from 196 studies, amounting to more than 30 million adult participants who were followed for 10 years on average. The results of this latest study were published Tuesday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The study mainly focused on participants who had done the minimum recommended amount of 150 minutes of exercise per week, or 22 minutes per day. Compared with inactive participants, adults who had done 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous aerobic physical activity per week had a 31% lower risk of dying from any cause, a 29% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a 15% lower risk of dying from cancer.

The same amount of exercise was linked with a 27% lower risk of developing cardiovascular disease and 12% lower risk when it came to cancer.

“This is a compelling systematic review of existing research,” said CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University, who wasn’t involved in the research. “We already knew that there was a strong correlation between increased physical activity and reduced risk for cardiovascular disease, cancer and premature death. This research confirms it, and furthermore states that a smaller amount than the 150 minutes of recommended exercise a week can help.”

Even people who got just half the minimum recommended amount of physical activity benefited. Accumulating 75 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week — about 11 minutes of activity per day — was associated with a 23% lower risk of early death. Getting active for 75 minutes on a weekly basis was also enough to reduce the risk of developing cardiovascular disease by 17% and cancer by 7%.

Beyond 150 minutes per week, any additional benefits were smaller.

“If you are someone who finds the idea of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week a bit daunting, then our findings should be good news,” said study author Dr. Soren Brage, group leader of the Physical Activity Epidemiology group in the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, in a news release. “This is also a good starting position — if you find that 75 minutes a week is manageable, then you could try stepping it up gradually to the full recommended amount.”

The authors’ findings affirm the World Health Organization’s position that doing some physical activity is better than doing none, even if you don’t get the recommended amounts of exercise.

“One in 10 premature deaths could have been prevented if everyone achieved even half the recommended level of physical activity,” the authors wrote in the study. Additionally, “10.9% and 5.2% of all incident cases of CVD (cardiovascular disease) and cancer would have been prevented.”

Important note: If you experience pain while exercising, stop immediately. Check with your doctor before beginning any new exercise program.

The authors didn’t have details on the specific types of physical activity the participants did. But some experts do have thoughts on how physical activity could reduce risk for chronic diseases and premature death.

“There are many potential mechanisms including the improvement and maintenance of body composition, insulin resistance and physical function because of a wide variety of favorable influences of aerobic activity,” said Haruki Momma, an associate professor of medicine and science in sports and exercise at Tohoku University in Japan. Momma wasn’t involved in the research.

Benefits could also include improvement to immune function, lung and heart health, inflammation levels, hypertension, cholesterol, and amount of body fat, said Eleanor Watts, a postdoctoral fellow in the division of cancer epidemiology and genetics at the National Cancer Institute. Watts wasn’t involved in the research.

“These translate into lower risk of getting chronic diseases,” said Peter Katzmarzyk, associate executive director for population and public health sciences at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Katzmarzyk wasn’t involved in the research.

The fact that participants who did only half the minimum recommended amount of exercise still experienced benefits doesn’t mean people shouldn’t aim for more exercise, but rather that “perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good,” Wen said. “Some is better than none.”

To get up to 150 minutes of physical activity per week, find activities you enjoy, Wen said. “You are far more likely to engage in something you love doing than something you have to make yourself do.”

And when it comes to how you fit in your exercise, you can think outside the box.

“Moderate activity doesn’t have to involve what we normally think of (as) exercise, such as sports or running,” said study coauthor Leandro Garcia, a lecturer in the school of medicine, dentistry and biomedical sciences at Queen’s University Belfast, in a news release. “Sometimes, replacing some habits is all that is needed.

“For example, try to walk or cycle to your work or study place instead of using a car, or engage in active play with your kids or grand kids. Doing activities that you enjoy and that are easy to include in your weekly routine is an excellent way to become more active.”

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Zero-calorie sweetener linked to heart attack and stroke, study finds | CNN

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CNN
 — 

A sugar replacement called erythritol – used to add bulk or sweeten stevia, monkfruit and keto reduced-sugar products – has been linked to blood clotting, stroke, heart attack and death, according to a new study.

“The degree of risk was not modest,” said lead study author Dr. Stanley Hazen, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Diagnostics and Prevention at the Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute.

People with existing risk factors for heart disease, such as diabetes, were twice as likely to experience a heart attack or stroke if they had the highest levels of erythritol in their blood, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine.

“If your blood level of erythritol was in the top 25% compared to the bottom 25%, there was about a two-fold higher risk for heart attack and stroke. It’s on par with the strongest of cardiac risk factors, like diabetes,” Hazen said.

Additional lab and animal research presented in the paper revealed that erythritol appeared to be causing blood platelets to clot more readily. Clots can break off and travel to the heart, triggering a heart attack, or to the brain, triggering a stroke.

“This certainly sounds an alarm,” said Dr. Andrew Freeman, director of cardiovascular prevention and wellness at National Jewish Health, a hospital in Denver, who was not involved in the research.

“There appears to be a clotting risk from using erythritol,” Freeman said. “Obviously, more research is needed, but in an abundance of caution, it might make sense to limit erythritol in your diet for now.”

In response to the study, the Calorie Control Council, an industry association, told CNN that “the results of this study are contrary to decades of scientific research showing reduced-calorie sweeteners like erythritol are safe, as evidenced by global regulatory permissions for their use in foods and beverages,” said Robert Rankin, the council’s executive director, in an email.

The results “should not be extrapolated to the general population, as the participants in the intervention were already at increased risk for cardiovascular events,” Rankin said.

The European Association of Polyol Producers declined to comment, saying it had not reviewed the study.

Like sorbitol and xylitol, erythritol is a sugar alcohol, a carb found naturally in many fruits and vegetables. It has about 70% of the sweetness of sugar and is considered zero-calorie, according to experts.

Artificially manufactured in massive quantities, erythritol has no lingering aftertaste, doesn’t spike blood sugar and has less of a laxative effect than some other sugar alcohols.

“Erythritol looks like sugar, it tastes like sugar, and you can bake with it,” said Hazen, who also directs the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Microbiome and Human Health.

“It’s become the sweetheart of the food industry, an extremely popular additive to keto and other low-carb products and foods marketed to people with diabetes,” he added. “Some of the diabetes-labeled foods we looked at had more erythritol than any other item by weight.”

Erythritol is also the largest ingredient by weight in many “natural” stevia and monkfruit products, Hazen said. Because stevia and monkfruit are about 200 to 400 times sweeter than sugar, just a small amount is needed in any product. The bulk of the product is erythritol, which adds the sugar-like crystalline appearance and texture consumers expect.

The discovery of the connection between erythritol and cardiovascular issues was purely accidental, Hazen said: “We never expected this. We weren’t even looking for it.”

Hazen’s research had a simple goal: find unknown chemicals or compounds in a person’s blood that might predict their risk for a heart attack, stroke or death in the next three years. To do so, the team began analyzing 1,157 blood samples in people at risk for heart disease collected between 2004 and 2011.

“We found this substance that seemed to play a big role, but we didn’t know what it was,” Hazen said. “Then we discovered it was erythritol, a sweetener.”

The human body naturally creates erythritol but in very low amounts that would not account for the levels they measured, he said.

To confirm the findings, Hazen’s team tested another batch of blood samples from over 2,100 people in the United States and an additional 833 samples gathered by colleagues in Europe through 2018. About three-quarters of the participants in all three populations had coronary disease or high blood pressure, and about a fifth had diabetes, Hazen said. Over half were male and in their 60s and 70s.

In all three populations, researchers found that higher levels of erythritol were connected to a greater risk of heart attack, stroke or death within three years.

But why? To find out, researchers did further animal and lab tests and discovered that erythritol was “provoking enhanced thrombosis,” or clotting in the blood, Hazen said.

Clotting is necessary in the human body, or we would bleed to death from cuts and injuries. The same process is constantly happening internally, as well.

“Our blood vessels are always under pressure, and we spring leaks, and blood platelets are constantly plugging these holes all the time,” Hazen said.

However, the size of the clot made by platelets depends on the size of the trigger that stimulates the cells, he explained. For example, if the trigger is only 10%, then you only get 10% of a clot.

“But what we’re seeing with erythritol is the platelets become super responsive: A mere 10% stimulant produces 90% to 100% of a clot formation,” Hazen said.

“For people who are at risk for clotting, heart attack and stroke – like people with existing cardiac disease or people with diabetes – I think that there’s sufficient data here to say stay away from erythritol until more studies are done,” Hazen said.

Oliver Jones, a professor of chemistry at RMIT University in Victoria, Australia, noted that the study had revealed only a correlation, not causation.

“As the authors themselves note, they found an association between erythritol and clotting risk, not definitive proof such a link exists,” Jones, who was not involved in the research, said in a statement.

“Any possible (and, as yet unproven) risks of excess erythritol would also need to be balanced against the very real health risks of excess glucose consumption,” Jones said.

In a final part of the study, eight healthy volunteers drank a beverage that contained 30 grams of erythritol, the amount many people in the US consume, Hazen said, according to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which examines American nutrition each year.

Blood tests over the next three days tracked erythritol levels and clotting risk.

“Thirty grams was enough to make blood levels of erythritol go up a thousandfold,” Hazen said. “It remained elevated above the threshold necessary to trigger and heighten clotting risk for the following two to three days.”

Just how much is 30 grams of erythritol? The equivalent of eating a pint of keto ice cream, Hazen said.

“If you look at nutrition labels on many keto ice creams, you’ll see ‘reducing sugar’ or ‘sugar alcohol,’ which are terms for erythritol. You’ll find a typical pint has somewhere between 26 and 45 grams in it,” he said.

“My co-author and I have been going to grocery stores and looking at labels,” Hazen said. “He found a ‘confectionery’ marketed to people with diabetes that had about 75 grams of erythritol.”

There is no firm “accepted daily intake,” or ADI, set by the European Food Safety Authority or the US Food and Drug Administration, which considers erythritol generally recognized as safe (GRAS).

“Science needs to take a deeper dive into erythritol and in a hurry, because this substance is widely available right now. If it’s harmful, we should know about it,” National Jewish Health’s Freeman said.

Hazen agreed: “I normally don’t get up on a pedestal and sound the alarm,” he said. “But this is something that I think we need to be looking at carefully.”

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Beware the budget butt lift, regulators warn amid social media-inspired boom | CNN

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In hindsight, Nikki Ruston said, she should have recognized the red flags.

The office in Miami where she scheduled what’s known as a Brazilian butt lift had closed and transferred her records to a different facility, she said. The price she was quoted – and paid upfront – increased the day of the procedure, and she said she did not meet her surgeon until she was about to be placed under general anesthesia.

“I was ready to walk out,” said Ruston, 44, of Lake Alfred in Central Florida. “But I had paid everything.”

A few days after the July procedure, Ruston was hospitalized due to infection, blood loss, and nausea, her medical records show.

“I went cheap. That’s what I did,” Ruston recalled recently. “I looked for the lowest price, and I found him on Instagram.”

People like Ruston are commonly lured to office-based surgery centers in South Florida through social media marketing that makes Brazilian butt lifts and other cosmetic surgery look deceptively painless, safe, and affordable, say researchers, patient advocates, and surgeon groups.

Unlike ambulatory surgery centers and hospitals, where a patient might stay overnight for observation after treatment, office-based surgery centers offer procedures that don’t typically require an inpatient stay and are regulated as an extension of a doctor’s private practice.

But such surgical offices are often owned by corporations that can offer discount prices by contracting with surgeons who are incentivized to work on as many patients per day as possible, in as little time as possible, according to state regulators and physicians critical of the facilities.

Ruston said she now lives with constant pain, but for other patients a Brazilian butt lift cost them their lives. After a rash of deaths, and in the absence of national standards, Florida regulators were the first in the nation to enact rules in 2019 meant to make the procedures safer. More than three years later, data shows deaths still occur.

Patient advocates and some surgeons – including those who perform the procedure themselves – anticipate the problem will only get worse. Emergency restrictions imposed by the state’s medical board in June expired in September, and the corporate business model popularized in Miami is spreading to other cities.

“We’re seeing entities that have a strong footprint in low-cost, high-volume cosmetic surgery, based in South Florida, manifesting in other parts of the country,” said Dr. Bob Basu, a vice president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and a practicing physician in Houston.

During a Brazilian butt lift, fat is taken via liposuction from other areas of the body – such as the torso, back, or thighs – and injected into the buttocks. More than 61,000 buttock augmentation procedures, both butt lifts and implants, were performed nationwide in 2021, a 37% increase from the previous year, according to data from the Aesthetic Society, a trade group of plastic surgeons.

As with all surgery, complications can occur. Miami-Dade County’s medical examiner has documented nearly three dozen cosmetic surgery patient deaths since 2009, of which 26 resulted from a Brazilian butt lift. In each case, the person died from a pulmonary fat embolism, when fat entered the bloodstream through veins in the gluteal muscles and stopped blood from flowing to the lungs.

No national reporting system nor insurance code tracks outcomes and patient demographics for a Brazilian butt lift. About 3% of surgeons worldwide had a patient die as a result of the procedure, according to a 2017 report from an Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation task force.

Medical experts said the problem is driven, in part, by having medical professionals like physician assistants and nurse practitioners perform key parts of the butt lift instead of doctors. It’s also driven by a business model that is motivated by profit, not safety, and incentivizes surgeons to exceed the number of surgeries outlined in their contracts.

In May, after a fifth patient in as many months died of complications in Miami-Dade County, Dr. Kevin Cairns proposed the state’s emergency rule to limit the number of butt lifts a surgeon could perform each day.

“I was getting sick of reading about women dying and seeing cases come before the board,” said Cairns, a physician and former member of the Florida Board of Medicine.

Some doctors performed as many as seven, according to disciplinary cases against surgeons prosecuted by the Florida Department of Health. The emergency rule limited them to no more than three, and required the use of an ultrasound to help surgeons lower the risk of a pulmonary fat clot.

But a group of physicians who perform Brazilian butt lifts in South Florida clapped back and formed Surgeons for Safety. They argued the new requirements would make the situation worse. Qualified doctors would have to do fewer procedures, they said, thus driving patients to dangerous medical professionals who don’t follow rules.

The group has since donated more than $350,000 to the state’s Republican Party, Republican candidates, and Republican political action committees, according to campaign contribution data from the Florida Department of State.

Surgeons for Safety declined KHN’s repeated interview requests. Although the group’s president, Dr. Constantino Mendieta, wrote in an August editorial that he agreed not all surgeons have followed the standard of care, he called the limits put on surgeons “arbitrary.” The rule sets “a historic precedent of controlling surgeons,” he said during a meeting with Florida’s medical board.

In January, Florida state Sen. Ileana Garcia, a Republican, filed a draft bill with the state legislature that proposes no limit on the number of Brazilian butt lifts a surgeon can perform in a day. Instead, it requires office surgery centers where the procedures are performed to staff one physician per patient and prohibits surgeons from working on more than one person at a time.

The bill would also allow surgeons to delegate some parts of the procedure to other clinicians under their direct supervision, and the surgeon must use an ultrasound.

Florida’s legislature convenes on March 7.

Consumers considering cosmetic procedures are urged to be cautious. Like Ruston, many people base their expectations on before-and-after photos and marketing videos posted on social media platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram.

“That’s very dangerous,” said Basu, of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. “They’re excited about a low price and they forget about doing their homework,” he said.

The average price of a buttocks augmentation in 2021 was $4,000, according to data from the Aesthetic Society. But that’s only for the physician’s fee and does not cover anesthesia, operating room fees, prescriptions, or other expenses. A “safe” Brazilian butt lift, performed in an accredited facility and with proper aftercare, costs between $12,000 and $18,000, according to a recent article on the American Society of Plastic Surgeons’ website.

Although Florida requires a physician’s license to perform liposuction on patients who are under general anesthesia, it’s common in the medical field for midlevel medical practitioners, such as physician assistants and nurse practitioners, to do the procedure in office settings, according to Dr. Mark Mofid, who co-authored the 2017 Aesthetic Surgery Education and Research Foundation task force study.

By relying on staffers who don’t have the same specialty training and get paid less, office-based surgeons can complete more butt lifts per day and charge a lower price.

“They’re doing all of them simultaneously in three or four different rooms, and it’s being staffed by one surgeon,” said Mofid, a plastic surgeon in San Diego, who added that he does not perform more than one Brazilian butt lift in a day. “The surgeon isn’t doing the actual case. It’s assistants.”

Basu said patients should ask whether their doctor holds privileges to perform the same procedure at a hospital or ambulatory surgery center, which have stricter rules than office surgery centers in terms of who can perform butt lifts and how they should be done.

People in search of bargains are reminded that cosmetic surgery can have other serious risks beyond the deadly fat clots, such as infection and organ puncture, plus problems with the kidneys, heart, and lungs.

Ruston’s surgery was performed by a board-certified plastic surgeon she said she found on Instagram. She was originally quoted $4,995, which she said she paid in full before surgery. But when she arrived in Miami, she said, the clinic tacked on fees for liposuction and for post-surgical garments and devices.

“I ended up having to pay, like, $8,000,” Ruston said. A few days after Ruston returned home to Lake Alfred, she said, she started to feel dizzy and weak and called 911.

Paramedics took her to an emergency room, where doctors diagnosed her with anemia due to blood loss, and blood and abdominal infections, her medical records show.

“If I could go back in time,” she said, “I wouldn’t have had it done.”

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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President Carter is on hospice care, but what is it? Our medical analyst explains | CNN

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CNN
 — 

On Saturday, the Carter Center announced that former US President Jimmy Carter will be receiving hospice care at his home in Georgia.

“After a series of short hospital stays, former US President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention,” according to the statement. “He has the full support of his family and his medical team.”

The 98-year-old Carter is the oldest living US president in history. He has survived metastatic brain cancer and faced a number of health scares, including brain surgery following a fall in 2019.

As Carter opted for hospice care, CNN Medical Analyst Dr. Leana Wen and I thought that many people might be unfamiliar with hospice care beyond a vague understanding that some people receive it toward the end of life. There can be benefits and blessings for the person receiving the care and their loved ones, but there are also some common misconceptions about what it involves.

I asked Dr. Wen, an emergency physician and professor of health policy and management at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, to guide us through some questions.

CNN: What is hospice care and who qualifies for it?

Dr. Leana Wen: Hospice care is a type of specialty medical care for people near the end of their lives that focuses on maximizing comfort for the patient and support for the patient and their family. That includes reducing physical pain and tending to the psychological, emotional and spiritual needs of the patient and the family.

Generally, to qualify for hospice care, the patient must have an incurable medical condition with an anticipated life expectancy of less than six months. The types of medical conditions that patients have include end-stage cancer, advanced dementia, heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

CNN: Where do patients receive hospice care and who provides it?

Wen: Hospice care is an approach to medical care, not a specific place, so it can be provided in a number of different settings. The choice of settings is up to the patient and family. Providers are an interdisciplinary team of physicians, nurses, home health aides, pharmacists and others who will tend to the patient no matter what setting they choose.

Many patients opt to receive hospice care in their homes, where they can be in familiar surroundings. The hospice team helps to provide equipment, supplies and staff to assist the family to care for their loved one. They provide regular home visits and are generally available around the clock for concerns as they come up.

Hospice can also be delivered in a nursing home or at the hospital. In addition, there are specialized hospice centers.

CNN: What are some common misconceptions of hospice care?

Wen: There is a misconception that hospice care is “giving up” on medical care. Actually, hospice care is a specific type of compassionate medical care for patients in the last stages of incurable disease to live as fully and comfortably as they can. A primary aim of hospice care is to manage the patient’s symptoms so that the patient’s last days can be spent with their loved ones, with dignity and the highest quality possible.

A second misconception is that once a patient enters hospice care, they can no longer receive any medical treatment. This is not true. Patients receive medicines to help their symptoms and alleviate their pain. They and their families can also choose to leave hospice at any point and resume, say, active treatment for their cancer.

I’ve also heard people say that hospice care is only for people with a few days to live. This is also not the case. Often, patients don’t begin hospice care soon enough to take full advantage of the help it offers. Beginning it earlier may help provide months — rather than days — of quality time with loved ones.

CNN: What are the benefits and blessings of this type of care?

Wen: In modern medicine, the tendency is to approach diseases as something to be cured. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. The patient may choose not to continue certain treatments that cause severe pain when there is slim chance for a cure. When there is limited time left to live, that patient may wish to minimize suffering and to prioritize spending the remaining time with their loved ones.

I know the benefits and blessings of hospice care firsthand. My mother was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in her 40s. She fought her cancer valiantly, undergoing multiple rounds of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy for eight years. Unfortunately, she had multiple recurrences.

During the final recurrence, it became clear that a cure was not possible and that she had limited time — as it turns out, weeks — to live. She opted to enter hospice care, with the aim to spend her final days at home, rather than in the hospital, and with the aim of alleviating her pain and suffering rather going through yet another round of chemotherapy. I understood and supported her decision, and it was important to me and my family to give her what she wanted, which was the highest quality of life with the least amount of suffering.

CNN: Does insurance cover hospice care?

Wen: Most hospice patients are eligible for Medicare, which provides for hospice care through Medicare Hospital Benefit. Medicaid also pays for hospice care in many states, and many private insurers will cover it. For patients who don’t have insurance, there are some community programs that offer sliding scale coverage or free care.

CNN: What’s the difference between hospice and palliative care?

Wen: There are physicians, nurses and other medical professionals who specialize in hospice and palliative medicine; these are very much complementary and related fields of medicine that share a similar philosophy.

Palliative care, like hospice care, also prioritizes easing suffering, improving the quality for the patient, and delivering that care in a way that centers the patient and family. But differently from hospice care, the patient doesn’t have to forgo curative treatment – palliative care can be provided together with curative treatment. Over time, if it becomes apparent that the patient is likely to die within six months, palliative care can transition over to hospice care.

Both hospice and palliative care are important specialty medical services that are underutilized, and can offer much support and comfort to many more patients and families.

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A childbirth myth is spreading on TikTok. Doctors say the truth is different | CNN

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CNN
 — 

Ashley Martinez has four sons and is pregnant with the daughter she’s wanted for years.

Last month, she posted a video online imploring doctors to prioritize her life, not the life of her unborn baby, if complications arise when she is in labor and it comes down to that choice.

The San Antonio, Texas, resident is due in May and is one of a number of pregnant people who have recently posted “living will” videos on TikTok.

Martinez had an emergency C-section during her last pregnancy after her umbilical cord came out before her baby, a rare but dangerous condition known as an umbilical cord prolapse that can deprive a baby of vital blood flow and oxygen.

Martinez described her last delivery as terrifying. Eight months after the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, ending a constitutional right to abortion, she said she worries about what would happen if she faced similar challenges again.

Since the ruling in June, a number of US states have criminalized abortions, leading to some fears that doctors would prioritize the life of the unborn child during a medical emergency.

Martinez lost her mother to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at a young age, and the thought of her children going through a similar tragedy terrifies her.

“Having to go into another delivery where I’m going to have a C-section, it’s scary for me,” said the 29-year-old. “My fourth pregnancy was my only C-section. I’ve always thought about not being here for my kids just because of what I went through growing up without my mom.”

More than a dozen US states have banned or severely restricted access to abortions following the Supreme Court’s decision eight months ago. The abortion bans have led to legal chaos as advocates take the fight to courtrooms.

Even so, several ob/gyns told CNN that a hard choice between saving a mother and baby’s lives at childbirth, like the one outlined in the TikTok videos, is highly unlikely.

This trend on TikTok has sparked a flurry of dueling videos among pregnant women and other people. Some have posted videos telling doctors in such situations to prioritize their unborn babies first, and criticizing those who expressed a different view.

Martinez concedes that her mother, who died at 25, would likely have chosen to save her child first if she could.

“My mother, she didn’t have a choice, you know?” Martinez said. “The message that I want to send is just basically nobody is wrong or right in this situation. In both situations, it is a hard decision to pick your children over your unborn baby.”

In Texas, where Martinez lives, abortions are banned at all stages of pregnancy – unless there’s a life-threatening medical emergency.

Dr. Franziska Haydanek, an ob/gyn in Rochester, New York, who shares medical advice on TikTok, said she’s noticed many “living will” videos in recent months.

In most of the videos, a woman appears alongside a written message saying something like, “If there are complications during childbirth, save me before the baby.” Some people, including Martinez, reference their children in their decision and even show them in the video.

One was posted by Tuscany Gunter, 22, a woman whose baby is due in April. Abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy is illegal in her home state of North Carolina, and Gunter told CNN she filmed her message in solidarity with others who said they would choose themselves first.

“I wanted to make it known where I stand and to stand up with other women who are getting bashed online for saying they would rather be saved first over their baby,” said Gunter, who lives in Fayetteville.

“As a mother to three young children, I cannot dump the emotional trauma of losing their mother on them as children and expect them to cope. While I would be crushed to lose a baby, I need to think of my other living children as well … And I know the baby that passed would be safe without ever having to experience any pain or sadness.”

Another woman, Leslie Tovar of Portland, Oregon, said that even though her state has no legal restrictions on abortion, she posted her video because she feared doctors would prioritize saving her unborn child to avoid legal ramifications in the post-Roe v. Wade era.

“I have two other kids at home who need mom. I can’t bear the thought of my two young boys ages 6 and 4 without their mom,” she said.

All three women said they’ve had these conversations with their partners, who agreed they should be saved first.

Of her husband, Tovar said, “His exact words were, ‘We could always have another baby later in life but there is never replacing the mother of my boys, I couldn’t do this without you.’”

It’s true that complications occasionally come up during a pregnancy that lead doctors to recommend delivery to save the mother’s life, medical experts said.

If this is done before a fetus is viable – under 24 weeks – the chances of the baby’s survival are low, said Dr. Elizabeth Langen, a maternal-fetal medicine physician at the University of Michigan Von Voigtlander Women’s Hospital.

Roe v. Wade’s reversal did make terminating such pregnancies more complicated, Langen and Haydanek say.

In cases involving a baby that’s not viable, it could mean that even when the baby is unlikely to survive and the mom’s health is at risk, the priority will be on saving the baby due to fear of legal ramifications, Langen said.

But both doctors say these scenarios don’t occur during the birth of a viable baby. In that instance, Roe v. Wade is “less involved,” Haydanek said.

“We do everything in our efforts to save both (mother and baby),” she said. “I can’t think of a time where the medical team has had to make a decision about who to save in a viable laboring patient. It’s just not a real scenario in modern medicine – just one we are seeing played out on TV.”

Hospitals have enough resources – obstetrics and neonatal intensive care unit teams, for example – to meet the needs of both the mother and the baby, Haydanek and Langen said.

“We’re usually doing our best to take care of both the mom and the baby. And there’s very rarely a circumstance where we will do something to harm the mom in order to have the benefit of the baby,” added Langen.

“If mom’s health is deteriorating, ultimately, she’s not going to be able to support baby’s wellbeing,” Langen said. “And so generally, what we encourage folks to do is really support mom’s health, because that’s in the best interest of both mother and baby.”

Abortion rights demonstrators hold signs outside the US Supreme Court in Washington after the court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

Both doctors said it’s important for patients to talk to their health care providers about their medical concerns and share their “living will” wishes with loved ones in case there are complications during labor that require partners to make medical decisions.

However, those decisions will not involve doctors asking your partner whose life should come first, they said.

“Before getting in a fight with your partner about who they choose to save, know that there isn’t a situation where we will ask them that,” said Haydanek, who has called the TikTok trend “horribly anxiety inducing.”

She said it’s come up so many times in recent months that she made her own TikTok video to reassure expectant parents.

“Please don’t feel like you have to make this choice,” she says in the video. “I know firsthand how much anxiety there can be in pregnancy … but it’s just not a situation that you’re gonna find yourself in.”

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Children’s mental health tops list of parent worries, survey finds | CNN

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CNN
 — 

Forty percent of US parents are “extremely” or “very” worried that their children will struggle with anxiety or depression at some point, a new survey finds.

The Pew Research Center report said mental health was the greatest concern among parents, followed by bullying, which worries 35% of parents. These concerns trumped fears of kidnapping, dangers of drugs and alcohol, teen pregnancy and getting into trouble with the police.

Concerns varied by race, ethnicity and income level, with roughly 4 in 10 Latino and low-income parents and 3 in 10 Black parents saying they are extremely or very worried that their children could be shot, compared with about 1 in 10 high-income or White parents.

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents said that being a parent has been at least somewhat harder than they expected, about 41% say that being a parent is tiring, and 29% say it is stressful all or most of the time.

The report captured the perceptions of a nationally representative sample of 3,757 US parents whose children were younger than 18 in 2022.

Experts say mental health issues among children and adolescents have skyrocketed in recent years.

“I would say over the last 10 years, since I’ve been practicing as a general pediatrician, I have seen a shift both in the amount of patients and of all ages dealing with anxiety and depression. And their parents being concerned about this is a key issue,” said Dr. Katherine Williamson, a pediatrician and spokesperson for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Even before the pandemic, we were seeing skyrocketing numbers of kids and adolescents dealing with mental health issues, and that has increased exponentially since the pandemic.”

Suicide became the second leading cause of death among children 10 to 14 during the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mental health-related emergency room visits among adolescents 5 to 11 and 12 to 17 also jumped 24% and 31%, respectively.

Many parents feel helpless when their children have mental health issues because they don’t feel equipped to offer support in this area.

“They are unable to relieve [mental health issues] and address that as they could if they were struggling with their grades or other things that seem more traditional to for kids to struggle with,” said Allen Sabey, a family therapist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University.

Parents trying to “work out and look at and connect with their own feelings will give them important information about what feels off or OK for their kid,” he said.

When it comes to anxiety and depression in children, pediatricians say, parents can watch for signs like decreased interest or pleasure in things they previously enjoyed, poor self-esteem and changes in mood, appetite or sleep.

Experts also say parents should consider the amount and content of social media their child consumes, as research has found that it can have negative effects on their mental health.

But, they say, having more parents recognize the importance of mental health in children is a step in the right direction.

“I have always felt there’s been so much resistance to seeking care for mental health among the population that I serve. And I am actually happy that since the Covid pandemic, at least people now are recognizing this as a very key and important health need,” said Dr. Maggi Smeal, a pediatrician at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health.

Smeal hopes that “all people that are interacting with children can be aware of these issues and feel empowered to identify and advocate for these children, to tell them to go to their primary care provider and have an assessment just like you do if your kid has a cough or a fever or ear infection.”

The number of parents concerned about gun violence reflects the fact that guns are the leading cause of death among children in the US, research has showed. From 2019 to 2020, the rate of firearm-related deaths increased 29.5% – more than twice the increase as in the general population.

“Gun violence is a real risk to our kids today. And that is both being killed by somebody else as well as suicide in the face of the mental health issues that we’re seeing today,” Williamson said.

The survey found that Black, Hispanic and lower-income parents were most likely to be concerned about gun violence, a finding that’s consistent with the communities most affected. Research has shown that from 2018 to 2021, the rate of firearm-related deaths doubled among Black youth and increased 50% among Hispanic youth. Another study found that children living in low-income areas are at higher risk of firearm-related death.

Direct and indirect exposure to gun violence can contribute to mental health problems.

“Even if they hear gunshots in their community, they hear adults talking, there’s all different ways that children are traumatized and victimized by gun violence. And what we see is all the symptoms of anxiety in even the youngest of children. We see children with somatic complaints – stomachaches, headaches. They have post-traumatic stress disorder,” Smeal said.

Most of the parents in the survey said parenting is harder than they expected, and that they feel judgment from various sources.

“The findings of this of this report were, as a pediatrician and a parent, just exactly what you would expect. Parenting is the hardest thing you’ll ever do, and there are very high levels of stress and fatigue, especially in the parents of young children,” Smeal said.

One of the best things parents can do is lean on fellow parents, experts say.

“The main challenge for parents is our siloed independent nature sometimes, and so we want to find people who we trust and kind of work towards being more vulnerable and open with,” Sabey said. “To where it’s like not just you and your kid, but it’s a kind of a group of people caring and working together.”

Pediatricians emphasize that no parent is perfect and that the most important thing you can do is to just be there for your child.

“We know that the best chance for a child to be successful and happy is for them to have at least one person in their life who believes in them and advocates for them. So I think it’s important for parents to know that there’s no such thing as a perfect parent, because we are all human, and humans are imperfect by nature, but that is OK,” Williamson said.

A parent’s job is to “really make sure that they know how important they are and they have a voice in this world,” she said. “Every child will have their own unique struggles, whether it is academically, emotionally, physically. Our job is to help them with the areas [where] they struggle, but even more, help them recognize their strengths.”

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