‘Whether you are being prescribed painkillers like ibuprofen or buying them over the counter, people must be made aware of the risk,’ said one doctor.
Credit: Lauren Hurley/PA
Commonly prescribed painkillers including ibuprofen increase the likelihood of having a heart attack within the first month of taking them if consumed in high doses, a study suggests.
All five nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) examined could raise the risk as early as the first week of use, an international team of researchers found.
They concluded that there was a greater than 90% probability that all the NSAIDs they studied were associated with a heightened risk of heart attack.
The overall odds of having a heart attack were about 20% to 50% greater if using NSAIDs compared with not using the drugs, although it varied for the individual drugs assessed, which also included naproxen, diclofenac, celecoxib and rofecoxib.
As it was an observational study, cause and effect could […]
The Los Angeles River in Long Beach, CA
Credit: Getty Images
The polyphagous shot hole borer, a brown-black beetle from southeast Asia, never gets bigger than a tenth of an inch. It breeds inside trees; pregnant females drill into trunks to create networks of tunnels where they lay their eggs. The beetles also carry a fungus called Fusarium; it infects the tunnels, and when the eggs hatch, the borer larvae eat the fungus.
Unfortunately Fusarium also disrupts the trees’ ability to transport nutrients and water. Holes where the beetle bored into the tree get infected and form oily lesions. Sometimes sugars from the tree’s sap accumulate in a ring around the hole—that’s called a “sugar volcano.” The tree dies, and the wee baby beetles fly off to continue the circle of disgusting life.
This would just be a scary story for arborists and tree-huggers, except: Fusarium dieback is on track to kill 26.8 million trees across Southern California in the next few years, almost 40 percent of the […]
Former President Obama
Credit: Shutterstock
Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday repeated calls for increased engagement in the democratic process during an appearance in Italy, saying that “you get the politicians you deserve.”
“People have a tendency to blame politicians when things don’t work,” Obama said during a Q-and-A session at the Global Food Innovation Summit in Milan.
“But as I always tell people, you get the politicians you deserve. And if you don’t vote and if you don’t participate and if you don’t pay attention, then you’ll get policies that don’t reflect your interests.”
The comment echoes Obama’s calls in several post-White House appearances for renewed civic engagement in the U.S. and abroad.
Last month, in his first public speech since leaving office in January, Obama said he wanted to help develop the next generation of leaders and encouraged active participation in politics.
“The one thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is that, yes we confront a whole range of challenges,” he said to a crowd of students at the University of Chicago.
“All those issues […]
Southern woman
Credit: UPI
There’s more grim news about inequality in America.
New research documents significant disparities in the life spans of Americans depending on where they live. And those gaps appear to be widening, according to the research.
“It’s dramatic,” says Christopher Murray, who heads the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. He helped conduct the analysis, published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine.
Health experts have long known that Americans living in different parts of the country tend to have different life spans. But Murray’s team decided to take a closer look, analyzing records from every U.S. county between 1980 and 2014.
“What we found is that the gap is enormous,” Murray says. In 2014, there was a spread of 20.1 years between the counties with the longest and shortest typical life spans based on life expectancy at birth.
In counties with the longest life spans, people tended to live about 87 years, while people in places with the shortest life spans typically made it to only about 67, the researchers […]
