How many steps a day can lengthen your life? Plus, a quick way to get baby to stop crying, and more health news
How many steps a day to lengthen your life?
There’s an easy way to reduce your risk for dementia, heart disease and cancer: Start walking.
Getting in those recommended 10,000 steps a day makes a real difference, new research affirms, but even fewer will pay big dividends. No matter how many you log, however, step up your pace for the biggest benefit.
For every 2,000 steps you log, up to about 10,000 a day, your risk of early death drops by between 8% and 11%, researchers found.
Read more here:
‘Slugging’ trend has people coating their faces with grease
To slug or not to slug? That’s the question for millions of TikTok users, who turn to the social media giant for tips and information on what amounts to a DIY skin care phenomenon.
Slugging involves slathering some sort of sealing agent — like Vaseline or another petroleum-based ointment — onto the skin.
What’s the problem with that? New research warns that the majority of TikTok posts focused on the wrinkle-reducing practice are medically unreliable, hyping the benefits while downplaying the risks.
Read more here:
Breathing dirty air can cause teens’ hearts to skip a beat
Air pollution may cause irregular heart rhythms in otherwise healthy teens within two hours of exposure, a new study shows.
Irregular heart rhythms, or arrhythmias, occur when the heart’s electrical impulses don’t work properly. Symptoms may include heart flutters, chest pain, fainting or dizziness. Some arrhythmias increase a teen’s chances of sudden cardiac death or developing heart disease later on, researchers said.
“The main take-home message for the teenagers is that air pollution may trigger severe cardiac outcomes, even contribute to death, [even if] they are normally very healthy,” said study author Fan He, an instructor in public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine.
Read more here:
What position works best to help baby stop crying?
A new study hands parents what seems like a miraculous gift: A simple, free technique that takes just 13 minutes to put wailing infants to sleep.
Researchers in Japan found that walking around while carrying infants for five minutes calmed the newborns, while another eight minutes of sitting while holding the sleeping babies quietly made the transfer to a crib a smooth one.
The team studied the calming process using a baby ECG machine and video cameras to compare changes in heart rate and behavior as 21 mothers performed some activities that are common for calming infants
Read more here:
WHO says end of the pandemic may be near
The end of the COVID-19 pandemic is in sight, the leader of the World Health Organization declared Wednesday, with deaths at their lowest level worldwide since the new coronavirus first began to spread in March 2020.
However, the death rate is relatively flat and not yet at their lowest level in the United States, experts note.
About 11,000 people around the world died from COVID during the week of Sept. 5 through Sept. 11. That was a drop of 22% from the previous week, the WHO reported.
Read more here:
