Category: 4. Health

Over the past decade, health insurance companies have increasingly embraced the use of artificial intelligence algorithms. Unlike doctors and hospitals, which use AI to help diagnose and treat patients, health insurers use these algorithms to decide whether to pay for health care treatments and services that are recommended by a given patient’s physicians.

One of the most common examples is prior authorization, which is when your doctor needs to
receive payment approval from your…

For decades, women seeking long-acting birth control have endured a painful and outdated process: IUD insertion. Despite growing demand for non-hormonal birth control, the devices available today—primarily T-shaped, plastic-framed IUDs—haven’t evolved much in over 30 years. Insertion pain is so common that it’s often dismissed as…

Researchers at the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona have discovered the cold sore virus reshapes the human genome’s architecture, rearranging its shape in three-dimensional space so…

For many, fitness trackers have become indispensable tools for monitoring how many calories they’ve burned in a day. But for those living with obesity, who are known to exhibit differences in…

Researchers from Geisinger Medical Center found that after bariatric surgery self-esteem scores rose to 77.5 from 33.6 – a more than 40-point increase. The higher the score on a scale from 0 to 100, the higher the level of self-esteem and quality of life. The amount of weight…

In Sierra Leone, there was a time when “people were so happy to pay” local taxes, says Joanna Favour Tom-Kargbo, an economic justice manager for the NGO Christian Aid. For instance, her council would make a documentary to show where the money was being spent, such as road or market construction. In that kind of situation, “you don’t need to coerce people to pay. Citizens were…

A new study published in The Journal of Nutrition has shown that drinking coffee lowers the risk of death, especially due to cardiovascular disease, but that these benefits are diminished if too much sugar and cream are added.

The prospective cohort study used data from over 46,000 adults collected between 1999 and 2018. Every participant completed a 24-hour dietary recall survey, which included the amount of coffee they drank per day and what they…

A recent study published in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes has shown that after having a cardiac event such as a heart attack, people who are more sedentary are at greater risk of having a second cardiac event.

The study included 609 participants who visited an emergency department for acute coronary syndrome symptoms between 2016 and 2020. After being discharged from the hospital, the percipients wore wrist accelerometers…

New research reports that cannabis use may double the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and significantly elevate risk of stroke and acute coronary syndrome. The findings were published in Heart. 

Previous research has highlighted risks between cannabis use and cardiovascular health, including a higher risk of heart attack, cardiogenic shock, and arrhythmias. Despite this, however, knowledge gaps exist on the magnitude of the associated risk…

How can cannabidiol (CBD) help reduce alcohol use disorder (AUD) without side effects that are commonly associated with traditional medications? This is what a recent study published in the British Journal of Pharmacology hopes to address as a team of researchers from the University of Sydney investigated the benefits of using CBD for treating AUD and whether there were side effects associated with this treatment. This study has the potential to help…