Your odds of surviving a cardiac arrest long enough to be admitted to the hospital are lower on the weekend than on a weekday, researchers say.

For the study, the investigators analysed data from nearly 3 000 patients worldwide who suffered an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest and were treated with a publicly accessible automated external defibrillator (AED).

Worse outcomes for older patients

Overall, 27% of the patients survived to hospital admission, a rate that matches previous studies.

But those whose cardiac arrest occurred between 12 a.m. Saturday and 11:59 p.m. Sunday were about 20% less likely to survive to hospital admission than those who were stricken between Monday and Friday.

The odds were also lower for older patients and those whose cardiac arrest occurred at home, the findings showed.

“It is often said that sudden cardiac arrest can happen to anyone, anytime, anywhere. These results suggest that there is an opportunity to address sudden cardiac arrests that occur during the weekend by improving AED awareness, availability and training, and quick response by rescuers,” lead author Hannah Torney said in an American Heart Association (AHA) news release. Torney is a doctoral student at Ulster University in Northern Ireland.

Weekend survival odds may be lower because people could be less likely to be near a publicly accessible AED, and others may not witness the event, the study authors suggested.

The researchers said their findings could help guide placement of AEDs to improve accessibility.

The preliminary research is to be presented at the American Heart Association annual meeting, in Philadelphia. Research presented at meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

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The first leg of the public hearings on the proposed National Health Insurance (NHI) Bill started on Friday in Vhembe District.

Attendees raised several burning issues, including how government is going to make universal healthcare work with poor infrastructures and the shortage of doctors in public health facilities around Vhembe.

This is the third province the hearings have been held in as the parliamentary committee goes across the country to collect the oral submissions of South Africans.

Mpumalanga and Northern Cape were the first two provinces where the community engagements were held. 

Four locations have been selected in each province and hearings typically take place from Friday afternoons until Monday evenings.

Four or five-hour slots – typically 16:30 to 20:30 on Fridays and Mondays, and 10:00 to 15:00 on weekends – have been planned for every province.

Members of the public present their oral submissions in front of the committee and the public hearings come to an end when the residents indicate that there are no more submissions to be made.

Everything you need to know about the NHI

Lawrence Khethani, from Tshilungoma Village just outside Thohoyandou, suffers from a mental illness and depends on a disability grant to support his children said that if the NHI is properly implemented it can improve the lives of rural people who are often subjected to poor health services.

“I believe that the bill will go a long in ensuring that we receive quality health care for people like me who depend on the government grant for survival and cannot afford to pay for private medical services for my children,” he said.

He added: “My only worry is the high number of illegal foreign nationals who frequent our local clinics and hospitals for free medical services, because if something is not done to stop undocumented foreigners from coming to exhaust our health facilities I do not see the bill helping us in any way”. 

Dangerous message

Khethani was one of a handful of residents who brought up the issue of foreign nationals straining the South African health system – a rhetoric that resembles former health minister Aaron Motsoaledi’s unverified “anecdotal” evidence that foreign nationals “overburden” the country’s health system – which many have deemed xenophobic. 

The NHI bill has also come under fire from concerned health experts who have called the language the policy uses a “slippery slope of xenophobia”.

According to Jo Vearey, the bill implies that individuals who are asylum seekers – even those who have work permits – won’t be eligible for the NHI. Vearey is an Associate Professor with the African Centre for Migration and Society at Wits University.

“Non-nationals are currently facing huge challenges accessing basic healthcare. Not only is it sending a dangerous political message, it potentially has consequences for broader public health concerns,” she told Health-e in April.

Concerns about corruption

Despite the hearings being conducted by the parliament portfolio committee on health, no officials from the provincial department of health attended the hearings at Makwarela Community Hall.Vhutshilo Mandiwana said that he hopes that the committee has a plan in place to prevent corrupt individuals from misusing the public funds for their own benefits.

“I hope that the bill will be implemented during our lifetime and that measures to protect the funds from corrupt people will be put in place. I have gone through the whole NHI document and most of the things it promises are clear and if they manage to implement it properly it can go a long way in improving our health systems,” he explained. 

Residents also questioned the parliamentary committee on how corruption will be prevened because the procurement of health services is done by incapable people. “Some of the problems we continue to face in our public health facilities are the result of tenders which are being given to incapable people by the department of health in the province,” Saddam Masutha said. 

Residents wary

According to a report, local anti-corruption non-profit organisation Corruption Watch has received close to 600 whistleblower reports related to corruption in the public health system since 2012.

In 2018 alone, the organisation received 108 reports on corruption in the healthcare system – including complaints about employment and procurement irregularities, abuse of state resources and abuse of power by officials. The majority of the reports were from Gauteng (40%), Limpopo and Eastern Cape (both 11%) and KwaZulu-Natal (10%). 

In October, President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the Health Sector Anti-Corruption Forum, a partnership between government, law enforcement agencies, civil society and health oversight bodies.

The main objective of the forum is to uproot fraud and corruption and is as a way of cleaning up the healthcare system, Ramaphosa said. 

Although most people who attended the hearing in Vhembe believe implementing the NHI will improve health services within the country, many are concerned about the problems they currently face at the hands of the public health system. Residents fear that if this is not dealt with, the bill will not succeed in improving their lives. 

The committee will be moving to the other three districts which are Mopani, Sekhukhune and Capricorn.

– Health-e News.

Ndivhuwo Mukwevho

Your great granddaddy may have been right about the weather worsening his arthritis.

People with chronic pain conditions are more likely to suffer pain on humid and windy days, according to a study that used smartphones to assess pain-weather connections.

A pain forecast

“The results of this study could be important for patients in the future for two reasons,” said study leader Will Dixon, from the Center for Epidemiology Versus Arthritis, University of Manchester, in England.

“Given we can forecast the weather, it may be possible to develop a pain forecast knowing the relationship between weather and pain. This would allow people who suffer from chronic pain to plan their activities, completing harder tasks on days predicted to have lower levels of pain,” Dixon said in a university news release. 

“The dataset will also provide information to scientists interested in understanding the mechanisms of pain, which could ultimately open the door to new treatments,” Dixon added.

The study included more than 2 600 people across the United Kingdom with conditions such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, migraine and neuropathic pain.

The investigators used a smartphone app to record daily pain symptoms and their local weather was determined using location information from their smartphone’s GPS. Data was collected for about six months.

The participants were more likely to have pain on humid days than on dry days. Low pressure and higher wind speed were also associated with painful days, but to a lesser degree than humidity, the findings showed. However, the researchers could not prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

No specific consensus

Overall, temperature did not appear to affect pain, but cold days that were also damp and windy could be more painful. There was no link between rain and pain.

The findings were published online in the journal NPJ Digital Medicine.

“The analysis showed that on damp and windy days with low pressure the chances of experiencing more pain, compared to an average day, was around 20%. This would mean that, if your chances of a painful day on an average weather day were 5 in 100, they would increase to 6 in 100 on a damp and windy day,” Dixon explained.

“Weather has been thought to affect symptoms in patients with arthritis since Hippocrates. Around three-quarters of people living with arthritis believe their pain is affected by the weather,” he said.

“Yet despite much research examining the existence and nature of this relationship, there remains no scientific consensus,” Dixon noted. “We hoped that smartphones would allow us to make greater progress by recruiting many more people, and tracking daily symptoms across seasons.”

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A month-long study on smokers suggests vaping could reduce the risk of heart attacks and stroke.

An international team of scientists, including three researchers from New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), has shed new light on one of the central mysteries of solar physics: how energy from the Sun is transferred to the star’s upper atmosphere, heating it to 1 million degrees Fahrenheit and higher in some regions, temperatures that are vastly hotter than the Sun’s surface.

The major parties in England have pledged billions more for the NHS over the next five years.

Between climate change and the partisan politics, there’s a lot to be stressed about these days. Author Cleo Wade knows this, which is why she writes books to help inspire people stay positive through any crisis. Wade spoke to Health (check out the video above!) and revealed the personal mantra that keeps her going when the going gets tough. 

RELATED: Busy Philipps Shares the One Mantra That Gets Her Through It All

"My personal mantra right now is this: The world will say to you, ‘What are you going to do?’ Do not be afraid to say, ‘I know I can’t do everything, but I can do something,'" she shares, adding that it's in her book, Where to Begin. 

“I came up with my mantra because with the times we’re living in, I think we can feel really overwhelming or produce a lot of anxiety or depression within us, and I wanted to create a gentle reminder that told me that how you participate in the world can look different every single day,” she says. 

“Sometimes you might be at a march or a protest, and sometimes you might just be able to smile at your neighbor and ask how they’re doing," she continues. "All of the work is important, no matter how it looks.”

Wade's mantra is one she repeats all the time, she says, especially after reading upsetting or sad news. Remembering it helps her believe she can make a change in the world, even if it’s a small one. 

RELATED: 5 Fitness Influencers Share the Words They Live By

“I feel so overwhelmed by the constant commentary and what’s happening in the world around us and I feel like I kind of want to just turn away from the world and quit, but when I say this mantra, I am able to rest instead and get back in the world and do at least one thing in one way.”

Check out Wade’s full interview in the video above—and consider making hers your mantra, too.

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Forget going without food for 16 hours. The latest fasting fad, on the face of it, involves depriving yourself of all the stuff that gives you pleasure—like Netflix, online shopping sprees, and even gossiping with your friends.

It’s called dopamine fasting, and as far as wellness trends go, it’s a pretty controversial one.

It’s not clear who came up with the idea, but a life coach named Richard deserves credit for making it go viral; he posted an instructional video to his YouTube channel, Improvement Pill, in November 2018 that boasts more than 1.7 million views.

Basically, a dopamine fast is a period of abstention from sex, drugs, alcohol, gambling, social media, and, in some extreme cases, talking to other people, for at least 24 hours. The goal is to emerge from the fast with a clearer mind and a sharper focus. Many experts are skeptical.

RELATED: Here's How the Brain Makes Memories—and What You Can Do to Keep Your Mind Sharp

“As an attempt to alter dopamine levels or sensitivity by changing behaviors without the benefit of scientific support, this is unlikely to have the claimed effects,” Nicole Prause, PhD, neuroscientist and CEO of brain research company Liberos, tells Health. She points out a potential downside to dopamine fasting: Take it too far, and you may be “less happy and engaged and experience less pleasure during the period of the fast, plus you may ‘fail’ the fast and experience feelings of failure or shame."

Also, pleasure isn’t the only sensation dopamine is involved with, which raises concerns about the supposed benefits of a dopamine fast. “It’s a neurotransmitter that is stimulated when a biologically relevant cue, such as something sexually arousing or aggressive, is observed,” says Prause. “Dopamine is important to learning as a reinforcement, but also to smooth movement, motivation, and other functions.”

Jumping to the defense of dopamine fasting is Cameron Sepah, PhD, a clinical professor of psychiatry at UC San Francisco, who published “The Definitive Guide to Dopamine Fasting 2.0—The Hot Silicon Valley Trend” on LinkedIn in August to try to clear up “public misunderstanding due to media misportrayals. [sic]”

RELATED: 16 Reasons You Have Serious Brain Fog

Sepah claims that dopamine fasting isn’t actually about reducing dopamine. He describes it in his guide as “a CBT-based technique that helps people cut down on the amount of time they spend on impulsive behaviors and regain behavioral flexibility over when they do them, by restricting their use within specific periods of time.” (CBT stands for cognitive behavioral therapy, a form of psychotherapy.)

Instead of avoiding all stimulation, Sepah’s model recommends focusing only on specific behaviors that are problematic for you, whether that’s spending too much time on Facebook, or buying too much stuff on the internet, or whatever. “To be clear, we ARE NOT fasting from dopamine itself, but from impulsive behaviors reinforced by it,” he writes.

He wants people to see dopamine fasting as a way of restricting external stimuli (like phones and TV), and he likens it to a CBT-based technique called "stimulus control."

“Because it makes us feel good, working to increase dopamine—particularly when we feel down—through things like gratitude, exercising, doing things you enjoy, etc. is a good thing,” Catherine Jackson, PhD, licensed clinical psychologist and founder of Dr. J’s Holistic Health and Wellness, tells Health. “However, too much of anything can turn to bad. For example, when you get a notification on your phone, you get instant gratification and it feels good, increasing dopamine in your brain."

"That feeling can result in impulsively reaching for and checking your phone," she continues. "This habit is not exclusive to online activities and impulsive behaviors that give you a dopamine rush can occur with anything, like eating, or even a positive behavior like exercising.”

RELATED: Eat These Foods Now for a Sharper Brain Later

Because dopamine is involved in reward and learning, we learn behaviors over time and engage more and more in certain actions that reinforce the reward we are looking for, explains Jackson. She believes that CBT can certainly help reduce impulsive behaviors.

“Impulsivity is reacting to stimuli quickly without thought,” she says. “CBT can help individuals think before automatically responding. Doing things like reducing and eliminating stimuli and thinking before acting are just some things that an individual can learn. However, the thought behind CBT is to change how you think and to change how you behave.”

Sepah offers two schedules in his guide: the “exclusive schedule,” for those who “want to still do the behavior during the day, but just want to cut back a bit and regain some behavioral flexibility.” There's also the “inclusive schedule,” for people who would “really like to minimize a behavior, but still want or need to do it rarely.”

While not all experts see the point of dopamine therapy or believe it works, Jackson is on board. “Most people are not able to go cold turkey and stop any given behavior,” she explains. “The slow or step down schedule delineated will be more helpful to more people, and lead to more success over time.”

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Offenders convicted of occupational crime and corruption are having their rehabilitation negatively affected by long term ‘labels’ attached to them on digital media, according to new research by the University of Portsmouth.

Matthew Griffin, 21, thought he would be able to sleep off his symptoms after feeling unwell.