1/5/2016
(CBS) — Superman, Spiderman, Batman are well known superheroes. Now you can add another one to the list: inhaler man. Well, Iggy the Inhaler to be exact.
CBS 2’s Mai Martinez shows us how he’s helping kids breathe easier...
1/5/2016
Nearly 1 million cases of herpes zoster, which is also known as shingles, occur every year in the U.S., with an estimated one-third of all adults affected by age 80. Despite its prevalence, particularly between ages 50 and 59, it is still unclear why some individuals will develop shingles and others will not. In a population-based study published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, Mayo Clinic researchers build on their previous research from 2013, which linked asthma in childhood with an increased risk of shingles.
"Asthma represents one of the five most burdensome chronic diseases in the U.S., affecting up to 17 percent of the population," says lead author Dr. Young Juhn, a general academic pediatrician and asthma epidemiologist at the Mayo Clinic Children's Research Center. "The effect of asthma on the risk of infection or immune dysfunction might very well go beyond the airways."...
12/29/2015
(Reuters Health) - Childhood asthma rates appear to have stopped rising among many U.S. groups, but not among the poorest kids or children aged 10 and older, a study suggests.
Overall, asthma prevalence among kids under 18 had been rising for decades, until it peaked at 9.7% in 2009. Then it held steady until 2013, when it dropped to 8.3% from 9.3% the previous year, researchers reported online December 28 in the journal Pediatrics...
By Jen Christensen
(CNN)The "asthma epidemic" became a serious public health concern as more children were diagnosed with asthma in the last few decades, but those numbers may finally have plateaued for children overall, according to a new study. The news is not so great for children living in the South, for the poor or for preteens and teens.
The understanding of this trend comes from an analysis of National Health Interview Survey data, a government questionnaire that asks a nationally representative sample of parents about their childen's health. Records from over 150,000 children were included in this analysis. The study runs in the January edition of Pediatrics. The authors write that they will need more years' worth of data to see if the trend is truly a reverse in the epidemic or if this is a smaller change...
By Rob Stein
12/28/2015
There's finally some good news about childhood asthma in the United States: After rising for decades, the number of children with the breathing disorder has finally stopped increasing and may have started falling, according to a government analysis.
"That was a big surprise," says Lara Akinbami of the National Center for Health Statistics. "We were expecting the increase to kind of continue. But in fact we saw the opposite."...
