Health

Background: The life expectancy gap has substantially widened — and shrunk — before.At the turn of the 20th century, women had a life expectancy just two years higher than men, Dr. Yan said. But over the next 75 years, that gap began to widen, largely because more men smoked and developed cardiovascular disease or lung cancer.As smoking rates declined, excess deaths reduced among men, in particular.But in 2010, that gender gap began to widen yet again, this time driven by opioid overdose death rates, which are more than twice as high for men. That year, the life expectancy for men…

There are more Americans who say they have serious cognitive problems — with remembering, concentrating or making decisions — than at any time in the last 15 years, data from the Census Bureau shows.The increase started with the pandemic: The number of working-age adults reporting “serious difficulty” thinking has climbed by an estimated one million people.About as many adults ages 18 to 64 now report severe cognitive issues as report trouble walking or taking the stairs, for the first time since the bureau started asking the questions each month in the 2000s.And younger adults are driving the trend.The sharp increase…

The handful of patients had severe heart disease that had caused chest pain and heart attacks. After trying available cholesterol-lowering medications, they could not get their cholesterol as low as cardiologists recommended.So they volunteered for an experimental cholesterol-lowering treatment using gene editing that was unlike anything tried in patients before.The result, reported Sunday by the company Verve Therapeutics of Boston at a meeting of the American Heart Association, showed that the treatment appeared to reduce cholesterol levels markedly in patients and that it appeared to be safe.The trial involved only 10 patients, with an average age of 54. Each had…

While that collective experience is enough to have taught us how the body responds when gravity’s pull is substantially reduced, the magnetosphere still shields the I.S.S., and only the 24 astronauts who flew in the Apollo program have gone beyond it. (The moon orbits an average of more than 238,000 miles away.) Though these two dozen astronauts spent little more than a week at a time without its protection, they have died of cardiovascular disease at a rate four to five times as high as that of their counterparts who stayed in low Earth orbit or never entered orbit at…