Latest news with #healthproblems
Yahoo
a day ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Do you struggle to lift five kilograms? Your health could be at risk, study finds
Scientists at the University of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates have devised a simple test that they can say can predict an increased risk of developing a host of health problems in older adults. All you have to do is try to pick up a five-kilogram weight. Struggle with that, they say, and you have a significantly higher risk of experiencing a lower quality of life, higher rates of depression, chronic lung diseases, hip fractures, joint disorders, high cholesterol, Alzheimer's disease, stroke, osteoarthritis and more. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports under a no-nonsense title: 'The simple task of lifting five kilograms serves as a predictor of age-related disorders in old adults.' The large-scale study involved 51,536 'geriatric adults' — that is to say 50 and older, a definition that may annoy some — from 14 European countries as well as Israel. It was a roughly even split between men and women, with about a third of the group aged between 60 and 69, another third between 70 and 79, and the rest younger or older. (About 4 per cent were 90 and above.) Participants were asked to report if they had difficulty lifting five kilograms in 2013 — 80.5 per cent said they did not — and were then followed for several years to see which diseases developed among each group. For a given disease, participants were excluded if they already had it in the baseline year. Take high blood pressure. In 2013, just under 60 per cent of the group were free of a diagnosis of high blood pressure. Of those, 21.5 per cent went on to develop it. But among the participants who had trouble lifting the weight when the study began, that number amounted to 26.2 per cent. For hip fractures, the overwhelming majority (97 per cent) did not have one when the study started. But in the years that followed, 3.5 per cent of those who had trouble lifting the weight experienced a hip fracture, versus just 1.5 per cent of those who did not struggle with the weight. Parsing the data between younger and older ages, the researchers found that men and women under 65 who had trouble lifting five kilograms were most at risk of developing depression, low quality of life, low hand-grip strength (which can also indicate risks of other diseases) and Alzheimer's. For older men and women who struggled with the weight, risk of Alzheimer's dropped somewhat while the other three conditions remained top of list. But for almost every condition the researchers tracked, struggling to lift five kilograms at the start of the study was a clear indicator of greater risk at the end. The only diseases that didn't fit the pattern were cancer and diabetes, where risk did not change. The reason for the design of the study was simple. 'Muscle weakness is a risk factor for multiple diseases,' the researchers wrote in their report. 'However, most protocols to assess muscle weakness require clinical settings. A difficulty lifting 5 kg may be a simple measure of muscle weakness in domestic settings. However, no relevant study on assessing muscle weakness has been reported.' They aimed to fill that gap. 'We suggest that difficulty lifting 5 kg may be a valuable indicator of muscle weakness and poor health in domestic settings. Our findings strongly suggest that this simple, everyday test could be a valuable early indicator of overall health and potential future health challenges.' If you're looking to try this test at home and don't have a five-kilogram weight handy, there are a number of household objects that come in at about the same mass, including a metal folding chair, a gallon of paint, two reams of printer paper or two bags of flour (conveniently marked 2.5 kg each).The average house cat also tips the scales at about five kilograms, if you can get your hands on one. Multivitamins are mostly useless, finds study of nearly 400,000 participants More than 46,000 people observed in a coffee study. Here's what happened to the ones who took theirs black Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark and sign up for our newsletters here.
News.com.au
5 days ago
- Health
- News.com.au
Forced adoption drug scandal haunts generations
A group of Australian women who became mothers out of wedlock in the 1950s to 70s have told 60 Minutes of having suffered long-term health problems after being given a drug to dry up their breast milk. More than 150,000 Australian women were coerced into giving up their newborn babies during that period due to being unmarried at the time. After the delivery of their babies, the teenage mums were left alone, out of it on sedatives and given Stilboestrol, to stop them producing breast milk. The drug has since been linked to serious diseases including cancer. One of the mothers who took Stilboestrol, Lily Arthur, told 60 Minutes she harboured 58 years of pain caused by giving up her child. Ms Arthur said she had a hysterectomy at 43, while other women interviewed by 60 Minutes said they had endured long-term health problems. She said it was 'far easier just to let us all die' than look into the consequences of what was done. Ms Arthur said like many of the mothers she wanted to keep her child, but he was taken away. 'They hadn't even asked me if I was adopting him or anything,' she said. 'So, you know, that decision was totally taken out of my hands right from the word go.' She was 16 and six weeks pregnant when she was arrested and placed in the South Brisbane watch house. Ms Arthur was later declared a ward of the state and detained in an unmarried mother's home. Wendy Pankhurst told the program that she was 17 when she was forced to give up her eldest child and later given Stilboestrol. She said at the time she was not worried about the medication. 'If a doctor said you need to take this medication, you took it,' she said. In the years since, Ms Pankhurst said she had been diagnosed with lung issues. At the time Stilboestrol, also known as DES was marketed as the 'miracle drug of modern medicine'. The medication was also used to stop miscarriage, treat prostate cancer and mitigate menopause symptoms. The second child of Wendy Pankhurst, Cathryn Buckerfield, said after her mother took the pills, she has been plagued with bad health. 'I suffer from fibromyalgia. I developed puberty very, very late,' she told 60 Minutes. 'I've also got chronic migraines. It took six years and then a round of IVF to fall pregnant 'I have stage four endometriosis, which just meant I had a hysterectomy. 'And asthma, I really struggle to breathe.'
Al Jazeera
29-05-2025
- Health
- Al Jazeera
How the Afghan village hit by a 10,000kg bomb is coping now
In 2017, the US dropped the 'mother of all bombs' in a remote village in Afghanistan's Achin district. Al Jazeera made the journey to see what's left: homes destroyed, health problems mounting, and no accountability in sight.
Reuters
08-05-2025
- Health
- Reuters
US ordered to pay $600K to families sickened in Pearl Harbor fuel spill
May 8 (Reuters) - A federal judge in Hawaii ordered the U.S. government on Wednesday to pay about $600,000 to six families impacted by a 2021 fuel spill that tainted drinking water at the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam near Honolulu after finding that the tainted water was the cause of their health problems. U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi's order came after she heard evidence during a 10-day bench trial that began in April 2024 over the families' claims they suffered from nausea, rashes, emotional trauma and in some cases seizures and tremors after they showered in and drank the tainted water. The trial, which involved claims of 17 people from six different families, was the first trial in the Red Hill litigation. The government and attorneys for the victims have agreed to use the judge's order to help determine the future of the more than 7,000 remaining claims. Attorneys for the six families had sought a little more than $6.5 million in damages in total for their pain and suffering, mental anguish and other harms, according to court records. Thousands of people, including active duty members of the military, their families and their civilian neighbors, have brought claims against the U.S. government under the Federal Tort Claims Act over the November 2021 spill, which released 19,000 gallons of jet fuel from Pearl Harbor's Red Hill Bulk Fuel Storage Facility into a water system serving both the base and neighboring homes. Those claims total about $156 billion, according to a Navy spokesperson. Kobayashi said the plaintiffs' experts had proved that the chemicals in the water after the spill had the capacity to cause the families' injuries. She also found that the chemicals had reached all parts of the Navy's water system. Kristina Baehr, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said the case "sets the precedent that there's no institution that is immune from accountability for poisoning people." Baehr said she did not know of any other successful environmental contamination cases brought under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which governs lawsuits against the government over injuries caused by negligent or wrongful actions of federal employees. Representatives for the U.S. Navy directed a request for comment to the U.S. Department of Justice, which did not immediately respond. Before the trial, the government acknowledged that the incident at Red Hill, which has been in the process of shutting down, occurred when thousands of gallons of jet fuel were incorrectly shunted to a pipe and then released after a vehicle hit the pipe in November 2021. Although the government admitted that the fuel had reached parts of the water system, it disputed that the entire water system was affected or that the injuries the plaintiffs claimed were caused by the water.
