What is already known about this topic?
Falls are the leading cause of injury among adults aged ≥65 years, who in 2014 experienced an estimated 29 million falls, resulting in 7 million fall-related injuries.
What is added by this report?
In 2018, 27.5% of adults aged ≥65 years reported at least one fall in the past year (35.6 million falls) and 10.2% reported a fall-related injury (8.4 million fall-related injuries). From 2012 to 2016, the percentages of these adults reporting a fall increased, and from 2016 to 2018, the percentages decreased.
Citation for this article: Moreland B, Kakara R, Henry A. Trends in Nonfatal Falls and Fall-Related Injuries Among Adults Aged ≥65 Years — United States, 2012–2018. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2020;69:875–881. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm6927a5external icon.
life underwriting
Watch Your Quarantini Intake
Nielsen reports alcohol sales in stores were up 54% in late March compared to that time last year, while online sales were up nearly 500% in late April. According to a Morning Consult poll of 2,200 U.S. adults conducted in early April, 16% of all adults said they were drinking more during the pandemic, with higher rates among younger adults: One in 4 Millennials and nearly 1 in 5 Gen Xers said they had upped their alcohol intake.
COVID-19 pandemic brings new concerns about excessive drinking
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I stumbled upon the same AHA news article in several other websites. The entire article was reprinted in its entirety and just one website provided attribution to the source. The copyright notice and proper attribution is included above.
Diabulimia
I live with “the world’s most dangerous” eating disorder
I have been struggling with diabulimia on and off since my diagnosis of type 1 diabetes in 2011, at age 30. I had just started a PhD and spent the first semester walking around campus with all the classic symptoms of type 1 diabetes: famished, dehydrated, constantly needing to urinate, and experiencing rapid weight loss. After my diabetes diagnosis, when I started injecting insulin, I gained the weight back—and then some. It didn’t take long to figure out that omitting insulin was not only an effective weight loss tool, compared with vomiting, it was a much less violent way to purge. Having a history of bulimia nervosa, I thought I had found the holy grail. I could eat what I wanted, not use insulin, and not gain weight.
And I thought Orthorexia Nervosa was bad.
Vulvar Melanoma Is Increasing in Older Women
Vulvar Melanoma Is Increasing in Older Women
The national incidence of vulvar melanoma is on the rise in women aged over 60 years, climbing by an average of 2.2% per year during 2000–2016, Maia K. Erickson reported in a poster at the virtual annual meeting of the American Academy of Dermatology.
These are often aggressive malignancies. The 5-year survival following diagnosis of vulvar melanoma in women aged 60 years or older was 39.7%, compared with 61.9% in younger women, according to Ms. Erickson, a visiting research fellow in the department of dermatology at Northwestern University, Chicago.
NEJM Journal Watch – 06.05.20
Prevalence of asymptomatic disease: An estimated 40–45% of people who test positive for SARS-CoV-2 do not have symptoms at the time of testing, according to a narrative review of 16 cohorts in the Annals of Internal Medicine. In four cohorts with longitudinal data, few of the asymptomatic patients (0–10%) went on to develop symptoms. But in one skilled nursing facility, 89% of initially asymptomatic patients became sick. The researchers say, “It is imperative that testing programs include those without symptoms.” They add, “The early data that we have assembled on the prevalence of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection suggest that this is a significant factor in the rapid progression of the COVID-19 pandemic.”
Smoking cigarettes — even one or less per day — is associated with increased mortality risk, a JAMA Network Open study shows. Researchers combined data from several federal smoking surveys performed between 1992 and 2011. In those surveys, some 500,000 adults reported their smoking histories. National mortality data showed that, compared with never-smokers, daily smokers (averaging 600 cigarettes per month) bore a 2.3-fold higher all-cause mortality risk, with non-daily smokers (averaging 40 per month) sustaining a 1.8-fold higher risk. Heightened mortality risks became apparent even at levels of 6 to 10 cigarettes per month. The researchers conclude: “Thus, all smokers should quit, regardless of how infrequently they smoke.”
Anorexia Nervosa – More Dangerous Than You Think
This article is written by an Emergency Medicine doctor for other Emergency Medicine doctors as a quick primer on recognizing and diagnosing anorexia. While those of us in the life insurance business are not diagnosticians you will definitely benefit from this short ten minute article on the next case you encounter where Momma Bear is applying for $2,000,000 on her skinny 15 year old daughter who can’t seem to gain weight no matter how much the kid eats.
AN is a common, severe psychiatric illness. It is often present with co-morbid psychiatric illnesses. There is a high mortality rate, 5.6% per decade. It is notoriously difficult to treat with psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy.
Paediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome – (PIM-TS)
Citation:
DFTB, T. Paediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, Don’t Forget the Bubbles, 2020. Available at:
http://doi.org/10.31440/DFTB.25760
DFTB, T. Paediatric Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome, Don’t Forget the Bubbles, 2020. Available at:
http://doi.org/10.31440/DFTB.25760
There has clearly been a lot of media interest in PIMS-TS but it is still an extremely uncommon disease entity in the context of all children presenting to emergency and acute care services. The vast majority of children, including those who were critically ill, have made a good recovery.
Alcohol Abuse and Covid-19
The binging population is of particular concern. “This is a huge problem, driven by people in their 30s and 40s,” Saab told Medscape Medical News. “It’s fascinating; with each subsequent generation, risk behavior increases. Nobody seems to know why that is. Different parenting, different life stressors, social media? Things have changed.”
In the 25- to 34-year age group, death from liver cirrhosis increased 10.5% from 2009 to 2016, according to data from the ACCELERATE-AH consortium, which is looking at alcohol use by patients before and after liver transplantation, as reported by Medscape Medical News.
Alcohol Abuse Agitated by COVID-19 Stirring Liver Concerns
Read the entire article at the link above.
Underwriting Among Early Effects Of COVID-19 On Life Insurance
COVID-19 has had the biggest short-term effect on life insurance in two ways:
Insurers extending grace periods for paying premiums.
Placing a greater emphasis on accelerated underwriting.
Full article at the link below.
Underwriting Among Early Effects Of COVID-19 On Life Insurance
Meat Intake and Colorectal Polyps
Meat Intake and Colorectal Polyps
Research professor of medicine Martha Shrubsole, Ph.D., and colleagues at Vanderbilt University Medical Center have published the first study to evaluate intakes of meat, cooking methods and meat mutagens and risk of developing sessile serrated polyps (SSPs, also called sessile serrated lesions). Shrubsole previously reported that consuming high levels of red meat increased the risk of developing all types of polyps, but that the likelihood of developing SSPs was two times greater than the risk of developing adenomas and hyperplastic polyps (HP).
Conventional colorectal adenomas are the precursor lesions for most colorectal cancers. SSPs, however, represent an alternative pathway to carcinogenesis that may account for up to 35 percent of colorectal cancers. Because a diagnostic consensus for SSPs was not reached until 2010, few epidemiologic studies have evaluated risk factors.
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