The marketing of alcoholic beverages is one cause of underage drinking, public health experts conclude. Because of this, countries should abandon what are often piecemeal and voluntary codes to restrict alcohol marketing and construct government-enforced laws designed to limit alcohol-marketing exposure and message appeal to youth. These conclusions stem form a series of eight review...
Researchers have known that kids who are at high risk of being mistreated at home – who live in poverty or have parents who use drugs or have mental health problems – are more likely to start smoking. Because abused and neglected children are often unsupervised, these teens have easy access to cigarettes and other...
“For those who have faced exploitation and discrimination at the hands of physicians, the medical profession, and medical institutions, trust is a tall order and, in many cases, would be naïve,” writes Laura Specker Sullivan in “Trust, Risk, and Race in American Medicine.” Specker Sullivan calls on medical providers to take action, writing that caring and competence...
Stress has a justifiably bad reputation for making people feel crummy. But new research suggests that despite its negative side effects, it may also lead to a surprising social benefit. In a study, a team of scientists including Penn State researchers found that experiencing stress made people both more likely to give and receive emotional...
A large proportion of highly active men watch more television than their low-active peers do. In contrast, highly active women watch less television than low-active women do. Previous studies have found prolonged television time to be more harmful to health than other domains of sedentariness. A recent longitudinal study with a ten-year follow-up examined how...
Even just a few days of solitary confinement may significantly increase inmates’ risk of death after serving their sentences. New research from Christopher Wildeman, professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, analyzed the Danish prison system and found that 4.5% of former inmates who had spent time in solitary confinement – most for...
Weightlifters could do less and get stronger by changing the amount they lift each session, according to new research. Sports scientists from the University of Lincoln, UK, compared the average weights lifted by two groups over six weeks: one using a traditional training method of a “one rep max” – the maximum weight an athlete...
Adults living with HIV in Washington, D.C., were more likely to feel higher levels of emotional and physical well-being if they attended religious services regularly, prayed daily, felt “God’s presence,” and self-identified as religious or spiritual, according to research published online January 29, 2020, in Psychology of Religion and Spirituality. By contrast, patients living with...
Among men with prostate cancer who received care from the Veterans Affairs (VA) Health System, an equal-access health care system, African American men did not have more advanced disease at the time of diagnosis or die earlier than white men, unlike trends seen in the greater U.S. population of patients with prostate cancer. The findings...
People with obesity are often treated with less respect than other people, discriminated against, and socially devalued because of their weight. This societal stigma can sometimes be internalized, leading individuals with obesity to blame and devalue themselves because of their weight. While it’s known that weight “self-stigma” is associated with poor mental and physical health,...
