(HealthDay News) – – Teenage girls who use over-the-counter diet pills and laxatives to lose weight run a very high risk of developing eating disorders, researchers say. In a new U.S. study, girls who used diet pills had a 258% greater risk of being diagnosed with an eating disorder like anorexia or bulimia within five…  read on >  read on >

Low testosterone levels may increase men’s risk of severe COVID-19, according to a new study. On average, men fare worse with COVID-19 than women. “During the pandemic, there has been a prevailing notion that testosterone is bad. But we found the opposite in men,” said senior study author Dr. Abhinav Diwan. He’s professor of medicine,…  read on >  read on >

Newfangled marijuana products — edibles, concentrates, vapes — are driving an overall increase in pot-related calls to U.S. poison control centers, a new study shows. There were more than 11,100 calls related to marijuana use in 2019, up from about 8,200 in 2017, researchers said. More and more of those calls are related to manufactured…  read on >  read on >

Comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently made news of his own when he contracted COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated. But such breakthrough COVID-19 cases among the vaccinated are rare, according to new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 Vaccine Breakthrough Case Investigations Team. Nearly 10,300 SARS-CoV-2 infections have occurred in…  read on >  read on >

Although older adults are among the most vulnerable to the ravages of COVID-19, new research warns that young patients can develop long-lasting fatigue and concentration problems, even if their COVID-19 infection was mild. That’s the troubling takeaway from three COVID-19 cases involving patients between the ages of 19 and 30. Investigators said they all developed…  read on >  read on >

The virus fueling the COVID-19 pandemic could become just an ordinary sniffle-causing nuisance within the next 10 years, a new study suggests. Researchers stressed that the projection is based on mathematical models, and not a crystal-ball prediction. But, they say, given what’s known about the human immune response to SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes…  read on >  read on >

Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine fully protects children aged 12 to 17, the company announced Tuesday. In a clinical trial that included more than 3,700 young volunteers, there were no cases of symptomatic COVID-19 infection in the two-thirds of participants who received both doses of the vaccine, which translates into an efficacy rate of 100%. That’s the…  read on >  read on >

Since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, doctors have reported rare but severe cases in infected children of an inflammatory disorder dubbed multisystem inflammatory syndrome (MIS-C). Now, a small new study out of Britain delivers some reassuring data for parents: Most symptoms of MIS-C (also known as pediatric inflammatory multisystem syndrome, or PIMS) appear to fade over…  read on >  read on >