If you or your partner are living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, you may be wondering what effect COPD will have on your sexuality. Will sex be possible? Will it be safe? Satisfying? COPD symptoms like coughing, wheezing, and shortness of breath will almost certainly change the way you and your partner express yourselves sexually. But that doesn’t mean you must bid adieu to sex or other forms of physical intimacy. Of course, good sex isn’t automatic when COPD is in the picture. To get things right, it’s essential to talk about sex with your partner (or, if you’re single, with prospective partners). “I tell my patients to approach the…

When you have diabetes, you may use a blood glucose test to check the level of your blood glucose, or blood sugar. If you take insulin, you may use a blood glucose tester, or glucometer, a few times a day. If you take non-insulin medication, you may only need an A1c test, which is done at your doctor’s office, every 3-6 months. An A1c test is a blood test that shows your doctor the average of your blood glucose levels over 3 months. Blood Glucose Tests as You Age As you get older, your doctor may change how you monitor your blood sugar. “The…

The suicide of Kent Taylor, the founder and chief executive of the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain, has drawn attention to a possible link between Covid-19 and tinnitus, the medical term for a constant ringing in the ears. Mr. Taylor suffered from a variety of symptoms following his illness, including severe tinnitus, his family said in a statement, adding that his suffering had become “unbearable.” Whether tinnitus is linked to Covid-19 — and if so, how often it occurs — is an unanswered question. Neither the World Health Organization nor the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes tinnitus as a symptom, although auditory problems are common in other viral infections.…

Like many adults with ADHD, Justine Ruotolo took a stimulant (in her case Adderall XR) for her symptoms. Then, about 11 years ago, she started meditating. Shortly after that, she began to shake after taking her pill. Ruotolo’s doctor lowered the dose, but 6 months later it started happening again. She decided to go off the medication and hasn’t looked back since. Ruotolo largely credits meditation for calming and focusing her brain enough that she no longer warranted a boost from medication. She also did a lot of reading about her condition and received training from an ADHD coach. There are many reasons why someone with ADHD might stop taking…

LONDON — The announcement this week that the AstraZeneca shot, the workhorse of global vaccine rollouts, had achieved nearly 80 percent efficacy in a gold-standard American trial was met with relief by the many countries relying on it. “When you get the call, get the jab,” the British health secretary, Matt Hancock, urged, part of a campaign by European lawmakers to calm people’s nerves after a recent safety scare with the shot. But by Tuesday, that campaign had, once again, been thrown off course, at least for the moment. For AstraZeneca, it was seemingly another episode of public relations whiplash, part of a series of recent miscues and communication blunders…

More than two months after he was fully vaccinated against Covid, a doctor in New York woke up with a headache and a dull, heavy feeling of fatigue. A fever and chills soon followed, and his senses of taste and smell began to fade. This, he thought, could not be happening. But it was: He tested positive for the coronavirus. “It was a huge shock,” he said. He knew that no vaccine was perfect and that the Pfizer-BioNTech shots he received had been found 95 percent effective in a large clinical trial. “But somehow in my mind, it was 100 percent,” he said. The doctor, who requested anonymity to protect…

SOURCES: Christine E. Kistler, MD, MASc, associate professor, Department of Family Medicine, associate professor, Division of Geriatric Medicine, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kathleen Dooling, MD, MPH, shingles disease expert, CDC, Atlanta. CDC: “Shingrix: About the Vaccine,” “About Shingles: Clinical Overview,” “About Shingles: Signs and Symptoms,” “About Shingles: Complications of Shingles,” “Frequently Asked Questions About Shingles,” “Shingles Vaccination,” “Shingrix Recommendations.”  Mayo Clinic: “Shingles: Overview,” “Shingles vaccine: Should I get it?”  Harvard Health Publishing: “Shingles can strike twice. Will the shingles vaccine help?” “Should I get the new shingles vaccine?” Sean Clements, head of Vaccines Communications, US, for GSK. Duncan Isley, 53, Durham, NC. Martha Howard, 70, Strawberry Plains,…

By Robert PreidtHealthDay Reporter TUESDAY, March 23, 2021 (HealthDay News) — Despite the fact that Americans have been driving less during the pandemic, pedestrian deaths per mile in the United States spiked 20% in the first half of 2020, new research shows. The culprits? Increases in speeding, distracted and impaired driving, and other dangerous driving behaviors, researchers said. Factoring in a 16.5% reduction in vehicle miles traveled nationwide, the rate of pedestrian deaths rose from 1.8 deaths per billion miles traveled in 2019 to 2.2 in 2020, according to the report from the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). It also said that pedestrians accounted for 17% of all traffic deaths…

Federal health officials said early Tuesday that results from a U.S. trial of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine may have relied on “outdated information” that “may have provided an incomplete view of the efficacy data,” casting doubt on an announcement on Monday that had been seen as good news for the British-Swedish company as well as the global vaccination drive. In a highly unusual statement released after midnight, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said that the data and safety monitoring board, an independent panel of medical experts under the National Institutes of Health that has been helping to oversee AstraZeneca’s U.S. trial, had notified government agencies and AstraZeneca late…

Positive trends in pandemic statistics in the United States are easy to distrust. After all, the country went through two false dawns last year, in the late spring and then again in the late summer, when declines in case reports prefaced even darker days. Each time, the apparent good news prompted relaxations and reopenings that helped bring on the next wave. So it is no surprise that public health experts are wary about the latest flattening in the curve of the pandemic, from the steep decline in cases seen in late January and February to something like a plateau or slight decline more recently. With more contagious virus variants becoming…