Psychology

No one likes to talk to elder family members about money, it can come across as greedy, but a sign of cognitive impairment that isn't obvious, like drastic memory loss, is 'wealth shock' - a sudden loss of savings. Wealth shock does not cause dementia or Alzheimer's, sorry IARC epidemiologists, it does not cause cancer either, but it is a symptom of a decline.  An analysis of 8,082 participants enrolled in the Health and Retirement Study found that  accelerated cognitive decline and elevated risks of dementia among middle-aged and older U.S. adults was associated with negative…

Common sense says that if you have a lot more people walking, often in dark costumes, and just as many people driving, plus more people drinking alcohol than would otherwise occur on a Tuesday, pedestrian fatalities will go up.  Common sense is right. They will. But from a relative risk point of view, Halloween is a really safe evening. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data of Halloween during a 42-year period (1975 through 2016 inclusive) showed that between the hours of 5 p.m. and 11:59 p.m., pedestrian fatalities on Halloween were higher than during the same hours one…

A new analysis found an increasing trend in psychotropic medication dispensation for Swedish children and adolescents with type 1 diabetes. The results from from 2006 to 2019 showed consistent higher use than kids without type 1 diabetes.  Epidemiologists will say it makes sense because young people with type 1 diabetes are at higher "risk" of psychiatric disorders, which may be getting correlation arrows wrong. The reason may be as simple as over-medication of people young and old in all wealthier nations. Psychotropic medications have become widespread among all ages; they are cheap,…

Spending on mental health for teens and younger rose by 26 percent from March 2020 to August 2022 - but it may be even higher because the analysis only saw families with employer-provided insurance from one group, Castlight Health, which managers employer-sponsored health insurance plans for about 200 companies.  During the period, use of mental health services increased by 22 percent, finds the analysis. Some of that me be to more availability, thanks to tele-health providing far better access than in-person care in the strained health care environment of the last decade. The use…

In the past, you may have seen various 'we detected X in urine' papers endorsed by suspect names like homeopathy believer Phil Landrigan and endorsed by organic industry apologist Chuck Benbrook. What do such claims even mean? In science, nothing. We can detect anything in anything now, but groups like Heartland Health Research Alliance Ltd are prized by litigators who sue "at the drop of a rat" and need any detection in humans - bonus points if they can claim pregnant women - of any chemical that can kill a mouse at 10,000 times a real-world dose. Any reason to send a teary press release…

Most opioid addicts are recreational users, not those who started on prescription pain medication and continued to have pain and migrated to illegal routes when doctors behaved ethically and shut them off. It just makes people feel good. It is no surprise that opioids are involved in far more deaths each year than guns. If opiods were legally available without a prescription, they'd be in the same category as alcohol when it comes to lifestyle killers. That is what addiction does. The top recreational drug is fentanyl. There are treatments that can combat it, but people must want to use them…

Prior to 2021 and the COVID-19 pandemic, American Democrats led the anti-vaccine movement. They couched it in anti-corporate terminology and that let politically allied academics and journalists turn a blind eye to the harm their thinking caused. In 2015, after a decade of effort by Science 2.0 and many others, California passed a law banning 'philosophical' objections, a haven that had only been used by fringe religious groups before the 1990s, but in California had led to more un-vaccinated children on the coasts, in places like Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Marin County, than the entire rest…

Losing weight is challenging. But as anyone who has ever successfully lost weight knows, it’s avoiding weight re-gain that’s the real challenge. This is true no matter what method you follow to lose weight. For example, studies show that people who follow very low calorie diets (between 800-1,200 calories per day) regain between 26% and 121% of their lost weight five years after treatment. People who follow behavioural weight management programs (such as WW, formerly Weight Watchers) regain between 30-35% of their lost weight after one year. Even people who use weight loss medications, such…

A survey of over one thousand Tinder users found that were not interested in meeting anyone, and nearly two-thirds were already married or "in a relationship." Instead of being used to find dates, people instead it has a similar appeal as social media - a source of entertainment, distraction and self-esteem. The data were 1,387 English-speaking Tinder users, ages 17 to 84, asking about their motivations for using the app; the number of matches and offline dates they had; their relationship status; their selectiveness in choosing partners; and, among other factors, psychological measures like…

Epidemiologists looked at data from from 1999 to 2020 and noted that death rates due to poisonings, firearms, and all other injuries increased substantially in the U.S., many of them due to suicide attempts. The demography analysis of 3,813,894 deaths collated by the National Center for Health Statistics due to non-natural causes was simplistic - age, sex, race, ethnicity, and belief about intent, then separating out criminal acts for things like gun deaths and if there was no clear intent of suicide, listing drug overdoses as accidental, while parsing motor vehicle injuries and falls as well…