By 2100, 96% of the global population may not have sufficient access to a naturally occurring essential brain-building omega-3 fatty acid, according to a study in the journal Ambio.

The NHS in England still owes £55bn in PFI repayments for new buildings, experts say.

The UK is the worst of seven high-income countries for key cancers including lung, colon and pancreas.

Whenever a healthy infant dies suddenly, that death should be investigated to determine if abuse or neglect was the cause.

So claims a new report from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and the National Association of Medical Examiners.

Other children at risk

In 2019, infants younger than one year accounted for nearly half of 1 750 child maltreatment deaths in the United States. However, the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System says many child abuse deaths are missed and estimates that the actual number is more than triple is officially reported.

“It is important that we correctly identify deaths that occurred from abuse or neglect, because when they are missed, it leaves other children at risk,” report co-author Dr Erich Batra said in an AAP news release.

“A review team made up of professionals from various related fields – including the medical, child welfare and law enforcement communities – should review all data and prevention strategies with every case,” Batra said.

“When a baby dies of unknown causes, there must be a thorough investigation that includes a comprehensive review of the medical history, a scene investigation and an autopsy with appropriate testing,” report lead author Dr Vincent Palusci said in the release.

Death investigation and review systems

“Investigators should remain sensitive, unbiased and non-judgmental when they talk with parents, who will need additional support for grief and stress,” Palusci added.

A full assessment of a sudden unexpected death of a healthy infant should include: careful history-taking by emergency responders and medical personnel that’s provided to the medical examiner or coroner; prompt investigation with doll re-enactment at the scene where the infant was found; interviews with families and household members by police, death investigators, prosecutors and child protective services; a complete autopsy within 24 hours of death.

The AAP also called for fully funded child death investigation and review systems, and funding for research into the causes, identification and prevention of sudden infant deaths.

The report was published online in Pediatrics.

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HealthDay

Moderate exercise is known to improve blood pressure – and that may include activities that are more exotic than a brisk walk, two preliminary studies suggest.

In one, researchers found that “hot” yoga classes lowered blood pressure in a small group of people with modestly elevated numbers. In the other, hula dancing showed the same benefit for people who had stubbornly high blood pressure, despite medication.

Cleansing ‘toxins’ from the body

Experts said the findings underscore the importance of exercise when it comes to blood pressure – and the value of finding an activity you enjoy.

Hot yoga classes are held in a room that’s heated – usually to about 40 degrees Celsius, though some centres keep the temperature less extreme. The practice is often touted as having health benefits, such as cleansing “toxins” from the body via sweat.

For the study, Stacy Hunter and her team at Texas State University recruited 10 adults, ages 20 to 65. All participants had mildly elevated blood pressure: Their systolic pressure (the “top” number) ranged between 120 and 139 mm Hg, and their diastolic pressure was 89 mm Hg or lower. (Readings below 120/80 are considered normal.)

The researchers randomly assigned five people to take hot yoga classes three times a week, for 12 weeks; the rest served as a comparison group.

Over the 12 weeks, those who did yoga saw their systolic pressure decline from an average of 126 to 121 mm Hg. Their diastolic pressure dipped by three points, on average – from 82 to 79 mm Hg.

The findings are “very preliminary,” said Dr Mary Ann Bauman, a volunteer expert with the American Heart Association (AHA).

Better stress control

A 10-person study is obviously small, she noted, and the comparison group did not exercise.

“It would be interesting to compare hot yoga to other types of yoga,” Bauman said. That, she explained, would help sort out whether there is something special about hot yoga – or if the benefit is the same with yoga in general.

Besides being a physical activity, Bauman said, yoga includes breathing practices and meditation, and may help relieve stress. In fact, Hunter’s team found that people who took hot yoga classes reported improvements in their levels of “perceived stress”.

Hunter agreed that this study is a beginning and that questions remain – including whether non-heated yoga results in similar blood pressure changes.

In theory, Hunter said, the heat itself could be beneficial, since sauna therapy has been shown to improve blood vessel dilation and blood pressure. But in a previous study, she noted, her team found that both hot and non-heated yoga had similar effects on blood vessel function.

There also are safety questions when it comes to exercising in a hot, humid environment, Bauman said. People in this study did not have heart disease, and had only modest elevations in their blood pressure numbers.

Traditional hula dancing

“If you do have significant hypertension,” Bauman said, “you’d need to speak with your doctor before trying hot yoga.”

Hunter agreed. She pointed to a concern that has yet to be studied in relation to hot yoga: For people with high blood pressure, there could be a sudden spike in blood pressure when they go from the hot practice room to a lobby that could be up to 30 degrees cooler.

Hunter was scheduled to present the findings at an AHA meeting this week, in New Orleans. Research presented at meetings is typically considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

In the other study, also presented at the meeting, University of Hawaii researchers led by Joseph Keawe’aimoku Kaholokula tested the effects of traditional hula dancing on high blood pressure.

Social support

They recruited 263 Native Hawaiians whose blood pressure had remained high despite medication. All received information on diet, exercise and managing medications. After that, they were randomly assigned to either take hula dance classes – twice a week for three months, then once a month for three months – or go on a waitlist.

In the end, the hula dancers curbed their blood pressure to a greater degree – by about three points more, on average. They were also more likely to cut 10 points or more from their systolic pressure: 60% did, compared to 48% of others.

Again, Bauman said, there’s the question of what exactly brought the extra benefit. “Is it the hula dancing, or the social support that came from taking classes?” she noted.

The bottom line, according to Bauman, is that people should find physical activities they enjoy and can sustain for the long haul.

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HealthDay

Nabela Noor just did something gutsy: she posted her very first bikini photo on Instagram last month. What might seem like no big deal to some was a major step for this body-positive influencer. 

Noor, who made her name on YouTube and Instagram by posting makeup tutorials, is the founder and CEO of Zeba, a plus-size women’s clothing company. Despite her 1.2 million followers and impressive social media empire, she still had to work up the courage to share that image.

RELATED: Sisters Celebrate Being Able to Wear the Same Clothes in Different Sizes With a Body Positive Photo Shoot

“Instagram aesthetics can make us feel like we aren’t good enough as we are or that we need some skinny detox tea or waist trainer or to hit some weight-loss milestone to finally feel beautiful in our own skin,” she wrote in the photo caption.⁣ 

RELATED: This 31-Year-Old's Emotional Post About 'Living in a World That Celebrates Weight Loss at Any Cost' Has Gone Viral

“Your body deserves your love and I hope you don’t wait another second to love yourself fully and unconditionally,” she continued. “Whatever that may look like for you, I encourage you to do it.”

And she has. In addition to her bikini photo, Noor was a featured speaker at the 2019 CurvyCon event in New York City last weekend, which brought together fashion-loving women, brands, and influencers for three days of celebrating size diversity and body positivity.

During a panel discussion, she spoke to the audience about how crucial it is to share her message with women who look like she does. “Its tough enough being plus size, but when you’re a woman of color and plus size on top of that, there’s so many things all of us deal with being marginalized. So it’s been important to me to share my experiences,” she told the CurvyCon crowd. 

Like many women who take a stand on social media, Noor has dealt with her fair share of trolls. But she uses their negative words as an opportunity for growth.

“If someone sends me a hate comment telling me to go die, I say, ‘Why? I’m thriving, I’m living,’” she said at CurvyCon. "I encourage people to flip the script, and I want people to take whatever is going to drag them down and use that to lift them up. If someone says I look like a fat cow, I say ‘I love cows!’”

RELATED: Justina Blakeney Posts Bikini Photo to Get Real About Loving Herself: “I Do Not Think I Am Brave"

Despite the vicious messages she receives, Noor is using her platform as a public figure to support other women in similar situations. 

"When you are a plus size women existing on the internet, people think that you are a property that they can discuss and talk about at their free will," she told the audience. "I get so many messages on a daily basis completely degrading me. And I thought ‘Well maybe this is just the price I have to pay, and I’ll just deal with it in silence.’ But I finally realized, I am not going to do this anymore. I am going to advocate for plus size women as a plus size women and the dangers and aggressions you have to deal with as a plus size women."

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To the many ways in which coffee seems to confer unexpected health benefits, add a lowered risk of painful gallstones.

After tracking nearly 105 000 Danes for an average of eight years, researchers found that those who downed more than six cups per day of the world’s most popular beverage saw their gallstone risk drop by 23%.

“High coffee intake is associated with a lower risk of gallstone disease,” said study author Dr A. Tybjaerg-Hansen. She’s chief physician of Rigshospitalet’s department of clinical biochemistry at Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark.

That’s good news for Danes, 6% of whom drink six or more cups of coffee every day, she said.

But what about the average Dane, who knocks back just two cups a day? Or the average American or Brit who consumes between one to two cups daily? The study has good news for them, too. It turns out that even small amounts of coffee appeared to lower gallstone risk.

Compared to those who abstained from coffee, participants who drank just one cup of Joe a day saw the risk of gallstones dip by about 3%. Meanwhile, those who consumed three to six cups per day saw their risk slide by 17%.

The findings were published September 5 in the Journal of Internal Medicine.

Gallstones are hard pebble-like pieces that can accumulate in the gallbladder, where they can sometimes block bile ducts. When that extremely painful condition develops, surgery to remove them is often the treatment of choice.

‘Not a big fan’

So what is it about coffee that seems to diminish risk? Tybjaerg-Hansen said that, for now, “we can only speculate on that”.

But she noted that because caffeine is excreted via the bile, it’s possible that it reduces the amount of cholesterol found in the bile. That could reduce gallstone risk, given that “the development of gallstones depends on a balance largely between cholesterol and bile acids,” Tybjaerg-Hansen explained.

Coffee also stimulates the muscle contractions that move contents though the gastrointestinal tract.

As to whether it’s the caffeine content that serves as coffee’s silver bullet, Tybjaerg-Hansen said, “yes, that is a possibility”. That raises the prospect that tea or chocolate might also lower gallstone risk.

But whatever’s behind coffee’s power, she believes that the team’s subsequent genetic analyses indicate that it’s coffee itself – rather than lifestyle factors common to coffee drinkers – that is at play.

Another expert is not so sure.

Dr Anthony Bleyer is a professor of nephrology at Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He was not involved in the Danish study, and was not previously aware of any link between coffee and gallstone risk.

“[But] it seems every week there is a new story about how coffee may or may not be associated with some benefit,” he cautioned. “Information on coffee is collected in many big databases. It is easy to do a comparison with just about any factor: osteoporosis, weight gain, weight loss, sleep, ulcers, cancer, mortality. You get the picture.”

And Bleyer acknowledged that many people will find studies like this interesting, given that coffee drinking is such a common habit. “But from a scientific standpoint, I am not a big fan,” he added.

“For one thing, consuming six cups of coffee is quite a lot,” he said, “and the [high level of] caffeine could have big effects on sleep, gastric reflux and on arrhythmias.”

But most importantly, said Bleyer, the things that drive people to drink a lot of coffee in the first place “may also cause other changes in diet”. And it could very well be those dietary changes, rather than coffee itself, that end up affecting gallstone risk.

His bottom line: don’t place too much stock in the power of coffee to reduce gallstone risk. For now, he said, “these studies show only an association, that is not causative”.

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HealthDay

Could grabbing a nap once or twice a week help you live longer?

A new study reports the occasional nap appears to cut in half people’s risk of heart attack, strokes and heart disease, compared with folks who never nap.

But more frequent napping provided no benefit, researchers found.

“In fact, we found that frequent nappers had initially a higher risk for incident cardiovascular disease,” said lead author Nadine Hausler, a postdoctoral researcher at University Hospital of Lausanne in Switzerland. “However, when we took sociodemographic, lifestyle and cardiovascular risk factors into account, this increased risk disappeared.”

The findings left experts scratching their heads.

“I don’t think it’s anything definitive, in terms of whether napping is actually helpful or not helpful,” said Marie-Pierre St-Onge, director of the sleep programme at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York City.

She noted that the health benefits of napping are a source of intense debate among researchers, with many arguing that naps are a sign of lousy nighttime sleep and, therefore, not a good thing.

“This throws a little bit of a curveball, because they found one to two naps per week might be beneficial,” St-Onge said.

Five-year study

For this study, researchers looked at napping patterns of nearly 3 500 randomly selected people in Switzerland, and then tracked their heart health for more than five years.

About three in five said they don’t nap. One in five said they nap once or twice a week – the same number who reported napping three or more days a week.

Frequent nappers tended to be older men with excess weight and a tobacco habit. Though they reported sleeping longer at night than those who don’t nap, they also reported more daytime sleepiness and were more likely to have sleep apnea, a condition that wakes a person repeatedly in the night when their breathing stops.

During the five-year follow-up, participants had 155 fatal and non-fatal heart events, the findings showed. These could include heart attacks, strokes and heart disease caused by clogged arteries that required surgical reopening.

Napping once or twice a week cut a person’s risk of heart attack, stroke and heart failure by 48%, compared with people who don’t nap at all, the researchers found.

Frequent naps initially appeared to increase a person’s heart risk by 67%, but that disappeared after accounting for other risk factors, the study authors noted.

Not straightforward

Dr Martha Gulati, a cardiologist who is editor-in-chief of CardioSmart.org, the American College of Cardiology’s patient website, said it makes sense that frequent napping could be a red flag for health problems.

“I worry that somebody that naps every day isn’t getting good sleep,” she said. “Somebody who takes six or seven naps a week, I ask, are you not sleeping well at night? Is that how you’re catching up with your sleep?”

Gulati added, “But I am still going to enjoy my Sunday naps, and now say I am working on lowering my risk for heart disease when my husband asks.”

Researcher Hausler couldn’t say exactly why a couple of naps each week might do a body good.

“The mechanisms are not straightforward,” she said. “We assume that occasional napping might be a result of a physiological compensation allowing to decrease the stress due to insufficient nocturnal sleep and, thus, could have a beneficial effect on cardiovascular disease events.”

Though she said the results should first be confirmed by other studies, Hausler added: “We can say that an occasional nap can potentially decrease cardiovascular disease risk for healthy adults.”

The study was published online September 9 in the journal Heart.

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Doctors believe some women with repeat infections could benefit from the procedure.

The highly contagious bacterium causes a range of infections, from a sore throat to scarlet fever.