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Americans see poor mental health as one of the biggest threats to public health, ranking just behind obesity and the long-running opioid epidemic, according to the latest Axios-Ipsos American Health Index. Almost 9 out of 10 people say their own emotional wellbeing is very or somewhat good, but they view mental health issues as a serious societal threat that now outranks access to firearms, cancer or COVID-19. (Millman, 2/23)

Disruptions in the blood-brain barrier along with a hyperactive immune system are the likely mechanisms behind "brain fog" in patients who are experiencing long COVID, an Irish research team reported today in Nature Neuroscience. Brain fog has been reported during acute COVID infection and has also been reported in nearly 50% of patients who experience long COVID, or symptoms well past the acute phase of COVID-19. (Schnirring, 2/22)

Viagra can be a wonder drug for men with erectile dysfunction, helping them maintain their sex lives as they age. Now new research suggests the little blue pill may also be beneficial to aging brains. The findings are based on a massive study of nearly 270,000 middle-aged men in Britain. ... The researchers noticed a distinctive pattern. The men who were prescribed Viagra or a similar drug had an 18 percent lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, compared with men who weren’t given the medication. (Amenabar, 2/22)

What you eat and don’t eat can reduce your risk of medical conditions such as heart disease and cancer and increase life expectancy, according to decades of research. But while much of the advice focuses on what not to eat, I also wanted to learn more about when and how people can eat to optimize their health. (Hetter, 2/22)

We're often told to eat more protein to maintain a healthy, balanced diet. But new research shows that eating too much could actually be bad for our health. ... In a new study, published in the journal Nature Metabolism, researchers found that eating too much of one particular amino acid, called leucine, may increase our risk of cardiovascular disease. (Dewan, 2/22)

When Christopher Johnson, PhD, set out to study whether lab mice fed prion-contaminated plants developed neurodegenerative disease, he expected the plants to take up only small prion clusters, but they absorbed large clusters characteristic of prion diseases in deer and other animals. ... Prions are infectious misfolded proteins that cause fatal neurodegenerative diseases such as chronic wasting disease (CWD) in cervids like deer and elk, scrapie in sheep and goats, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, or "mad cow" disease) in cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans. (Van Beusekom, 2/22)

Tweaking the microbes that populate our skin may be an effective strategy to deter mosquitoes from biting us and thus curb the spread of mosquito-borne diseases, a new study hints. Scientists previously knew that mosquitoes sniff out humans to bite by zeroing in on our unique scents. ... Now, a study has pinpointed chemicals generated by the skin microbiome that can actually repel mosquitoes. Specifically, this natural perfume drives away a species called Aedes aegypti, which spreads diseases such as chikungunya, dengue, yellow fever and Zika. (Khedkar, 2/22)

Researchers at the University of Oxford published new findings yesterday in Nature suggesting as many as 1 to 3 out of every 100 COVID-19 infections in the United Kingdom persist longer than 30 days, and patients with persistent infections are 55% more likely to report developing long COVID. Persistent infections have long been a concern to COVID-19 researchers, because people with prolonged infections tend to display a high number of viral mutations, making them reservoirs of new variants. (Soucheray, 2/22)

A multi-agency report ties a reduction in antimicrobial consumption (AMC) in Europe to a decrease in overall antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in people and farm animals from 2014 to 2021. The fourth joint report on integrated analyses of AMC was published yesterday in the EFSA Journal by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). (Van Beusekom, 2/22)

Scientists have issued a warning after finding significant levels of microplastics in human placentas. ... These plastics contain a concerning cocktail of chemicals that have been shown to interrupt the body's natural release of hormones, potentially increasing our risk of reproductive disorders and certain cancers. ... "Fetuses are vulnerable to environmental stressors," Matthew Campen, a pharmaceutical sciences professor at the University of New Mexico, told Newsweek. "Small influences during development can cause all sorts of problems with viability of the fetus or developmental issues in newborns." (Dewan, 2/22)