More research shows COVID-19 vaccines are safe for young adults

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What you need to know

  • Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, is most commonly caused by a viral infection like COVID-19, not by vaccination.
  • In line with previous research, a recent CDC study found no association between COVID-19 vaccination and sudden cardiac death in previously healthy young people.
  • A COVID-19 infection is much more likely to cause inflammation of the heart muscle than a COVID-19 vaccine, and those cases are typically more severe.

Since the approval of the first COVID-19 vaccines, anti-vaccine advocates have raised concerns about heart muscle inflammation, also called myocarditis, after vaccination to suggest that vaccines are unsafe. They’ve also used concerns about myocarditis to spread false claims that vaccines cause sudden deaths, which is not true.

Research has consistently shown that cases of myocarditis after vaccination are extremely rare and usually mild, and a new study from the CDC found no association between sudden cardiac death and COVID-19 vaccination in young adults.

Read on to learn more about myocarditis and what the latest research says about COVID-19 vaccine safety.

What is myocarditis?

Myocarditis is inflammation of the myocardium, or the middle muscular layer of the heart wall. This inflammation weakens the heart’s ability to pump blood. Symptoms may include fatigue, shortness of breath, chest pain, rapid or irregular heartbeat, and flu-like symptoms.

Myocarditis may resolve on its own. In rare cases, it may lead to stroke, heart failure, heart attack, or death.

What causes myocarditis?

Myocarditis is typically caused by a viral infection like COVID-19. Bacteria, parasites, fungi, chemicals, and certain medications can also cause myocarditis.

In very rare cases, some people develop myocarditis after receiving a COVID-19 vaccine, but these cases are usually mild and resolve on their own. In contrast, a COVID-19 infection is much more likely to cause myocarditis, and those cases are typically more severe.

Staying up to date on vaccines reduces your risk of developing myocarditis from a COVID-19 infection.

Are COVID-19 vaccines safe for young people?

Yes. COVID-19 vaccines have been rigorously tested and monitored over the past three years and have been determined to be safe for everyone 6 months and older. A recent CDC study found no association between COVID-19 vaccination and sudden cardiac death in previously healthy young adults.

The benefits of vaccination outweigh any potential risks. Staying up to date on COVID-19 vaccines reduces your risk of severe illness, hospitalization, death, long COVID, and COVID-19-related complications, such as myocarditis.

The CDC recommends people 65 and older and immunocompromised people receive an additional dose of the updated COVID-19 vaccine this spring—if at least four months have passed since they received a COVID-19 vaccine.

For more information, talk to your health care provider.

This article first appeared on Public Good News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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  • Correct An Upper Spine Hump (Simple Stretch & Exercise)

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    Generally called a neck hump in this video, it can be in the cervical (neck) vertebrae or it can be in the thoracic (upper back) vertebrae. It’s also known as a dowager’s hump, buffalo hump, or kyphosis.

    However, it can be fixed:

    What to do

    First understand the cause: it generally comes from poor posture, especially from prolonged desk work or phone use.

    With that in mind…

    1. Posture adjustments: lean back in a chair to counter gravity’s pull on your head. Avoid slumping; keep your head aligned with your spine.
    2. Stretching: lie flat on the floor without pillows to restore spinal alignment. Gradually reduce pillow height during sleep to decrease neck hyperflexion.
    3. Neck retraction: pull chin straight back while keeping your eyes looking forwards. Hold for 15 seconds, gradually increasing to 60 seconds. Perform 10 repetitions, resting between sets.
    4. Strengthening: lean forward and pull the chin back against gravity. Hold, or repeat for 10 repetitions. Over time, increase duration to a minute.

    For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:

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    Want to learn more?

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    The Pains That Good Posture Now Can Help You Avoid Later

    Take care!

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  • Forget Ringing the Button for the Nurse. Patients Now Stay Connected by Wearing One.

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    HOUSTON — Patients admitted to Houston Methodist Hospital get a monitoring device about the size of a half-dollar affixed to their chest — and an unwitting role in the expanding use of artificial intelligence in health care.

    The slender, battery-powered gadget, called a BioButton, records vital signs including heart and breathing rates, then wirelessly sends the readings to nurses sitting in a 24-hour control room elsewhere in the hospital or in their homes. The device’s software uses AI to analyze the voluminous data and detect signs a patient’s condition is deteriorating.

    Hospital officials say the BioButton has improved care and reduced the workload of bedside nurses since its rollout last year.

    “Because we catch things earlier, patients are doing better, as we don’t have to wait for the bedside team to notice if something is going wrong,” said Sarah Pletcher, system vice president at Houston Methodist.

    But some nurses fear the technology could wind up replacing them rather than supporting them — and harming patients. Houston Methodist, one of dozens of U.S. hospitals to employ the device, is the first to use the BioButton to monitor all patients except those in intensive care, Pletcher said.

    “The hype around a lot of these devices is they provide care at scale for less labor costs,” said Michelle Mahon, a registered nurse and an assistant director of National Nurses United, the profession’s largest U.S. union. “This is a trend that we find disturbing,” she said.

    The rollout of BioButton is among the latest examples of hospitals deploying technology to improve efficiency and address a decades-old nursing shortage. But that transition has raised its own concerns, including about the device’s use of AI; polls show the public is wary of health providers relying on it for patient care.

    In December 2022 the FDA cleared the BioButton for use in adult patients who are not in critical care. It is one of many AI tools now used by hospitals for tasks like reading diagnostic imaging results.

    In 2023, President Joe Biden directed the Department of Health and Human Services to develop a plan to regulate AI in hospitals, including by collecting reports of patients harmed by its use.

    The leader of BioIntelliSense, which developed the BioButton, said its device is a huge advance compared with nurses walking into a room every few hours to measure vital signs. “With AI, you now move from ‘I wonder why this patient crashed’ to ‘I can see this crash coming before it happens and intervene appropriately,’” said James Mault, CEO of the Golden, Colorado-based company.

    The BioButton stays on the skin with an adhesive, is waterproof, and has up to a 30-day battery life. The company says the device — which allows providers to quickly notice deteriorating health by recording more than 1,000 measurements a day per patient — has been used on more than 80,000 hospital patients nationwide in the past year.

    Hospitals pay BioIntelliSense an annual subscription fee for the devices and software.

    Houston Methodist officials would not reveal how much the hospital pays for the technology, though Pletcher said it equates to less than a cup of coffee a day per patient.

    For a hospital system that treats thousands of patients at a time — Houston Methodist has 2,653 non-ICU beds at its eight Houston-area hospitals — such an investment could still translate to millions of dollars a year.

    Hospital officials say they have not made any changes in nurse staffing and have no plans to because of implementing the BioButton.

    Inside the hospital’s control center for virtual monitoring on a recent morning, about 15 nurses and technicians dressed in scrubs sat in front of large monitors showing the health status of hundreds of patients they were assigned to monitor.

    A red checkmark next to a patient’s name signaled the AI software had found readings trending outside normal. Staff members could click into a patient’s medical record, showing patients’ vital signs over time and other medical history. These virtual nurses, if you will, could contact nurses on the floor by phone or email, or even dial directly into the patient’s room via video call.

    Nutanben Gandhi, a technician who was watching 446 patients on her monitor that morning, said that when she gets an alert, she looks at the patient’s health record to see if the anomaly can be easily explained by something in the patient’s condition or if she needs to contact nurses on the patient’s floor.

    Oftentimes an alert can be easily dismissed. But identifying signs of deteriorating health can be tough, said Steve Klahn, Houston Methodist’s clinical director of virtual medicine.

    “We are looking for a needle in a haystack,” he said.

    Donald Eustes, 65, was admitted to Houston Methodist in March for prostate cancer treatment and has since been treated for a stroke. He is happy to wear the BioButton.

    “You never know what can happen here, and having an extra set of eyes looking at you is a good thing,” he said from his hospital bed. After being told the device uses AI, the Montgomery, Texas, man said he has no problem with its helping his clinical team. “This sounds like a good use of artificial intelligence.”

    Patients and nurses alike benefit from remote monitoring like the BioButton, said Pletcher of Houston Methodist.

    The hospital has placed small cameras and microphones inside all patient rooms enabling nurses outside to communicate with patients and perform tasks such as helping with patient admissions and discharge instructions. Patients can include family members on the remote calls with nurses or a doctor, she said.

    Virtual technology frees up on-duty nurses to provide more hands-on help, such as starting an intravenous line, Pletcher said. With the BioButton, nurses can wait to take routine vital signs every eight hours instead of every four, she said.

    Pletcher said the device reduces nurses’ stress in monitoring patients and allows some to work more flexible hours because virtual care can be done from home rather than coming to the hospital. Ultimately it helps retain nurses, not drive them away, she said.

    Sheeba Roy, a nurse manager at Houston Methodist, said some members of the nursing staff were nervous about relying on the device and not checking patients’ vital signs as often themselves. But testing has shown the device provides accurate information.

    “After we implemented it, the staff loves it,” Roy said.

    Serena Bumpus, chief executive officer of the Texas Nurses Association, said her concern with any technology is that it can be more burdensome on nurses and take away time with patients.

    “We have to be hypervigilant in ensuring that we are not leaning on this to replace the ability of nurses to critically think and assess patients and validate what this device is telling us is true,” Bumpus said.

    Houston Methodist this year plans to send the BioButton home with patients so the hospital can better track their progress in the weeks after discharge, measuring the quality of their sleep and checking their gait.

    “We are not going to need less nurses in health care, but we have limited resources and we have to use those as thoughtfully as we can,” Pletcher said. “Looking at projected demand and seeing the supply we have coming, we will not have enough to meet demand, so anything we can do to give time back to nurses is a good thing.”

    KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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  • Unwell Women – by Dr. Elinor Cleghorn

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    For a demographic that makes up a little over half of the world’s population, women are paradoxically marginalized in healthcare. And in other ways too, but this book is about health.

    Dr. Cleghorn had to fight for seven (!) years to get her own lupus condition recognized as such, and continues to have to fight for it to be taken seriously on an ongoing basis. And yet, 95% of the book is not about her and her experiences, but rather, the bigger picture.

    The book is divided into sections, by period in history. From Hippocrates to the modern day, Dr. Cleghorn gives us a well-researched, incredibly well-referenced overview of the marginalization of women’s health. Far from being a dry history book in the early parts though, it’s fascinating and engaging throughout.

    The modern day sections are part shining a light into dark areas, part practical information-and-advice “did you know this happens, and you can do this about it”, and part emphatic call-to-action to demand better.

    Bottom line: this book is in this reviewer’s “top 5 books read this year”, and we highly recommend it to you.

    Click here to check out Unwell Women, and don’t settle!

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    This one didn’t use the “The New Science Of…” subtitle that many books do, and this one actually is a “new science of”!

    Which is exciting, and/but comes with the caveat that the overall protocol itself is still undergoing testing, but the results so far are promising. The constituent parts of the protocol are for the most already well-established, but have not previously been put together in this way.

    Dr. Bredesen argues that Alzheimer’s Disease is not one condition but three (medical consensus agrees at least that it is a collection of conditions, but different schools of thought slice them differently), and outlines 36 metabolic factors that are implicated, and the good news is, most of them are within our control.

    Since there’s a lot to put together, he also offers many workarounds and “crutches”, making for very practical advice.

    The style of the book is on the hard end of pop-science, that is to say while the feel and tone is very pop-sciencey, there are nevertheless a lot of words that you might know but your spellchecker probably wouldn’t. He does explain everything along the way, but this does mean that if you’re not already well-versed, you can’t just dip in to a later point without reading the earlier parts.

    Bottom line: even if you only implement half the advice in this book, you’ll be doing your long-term cognitive health a huge favor.

    Click here to check out The End of Alzheimer’s, and keep cognitive decline at bay!

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    Learn to Age Gracefully

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  • Superfood Broccoli Pesto

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    Cruciferous vegetables have many health benefits of their own (especially: a lot of anticancer benefits). But, it can be hard to include them in every day’s menu, so this is just one more way that’ll broaden your options! It’s delicious mixed into pasta, or served as a dip, or even on toast.

    You will need

    • 4 cups small broccoli florets
    • 1 cup fresh basil leaves
    • ½ cup pine nuts
    • ¼ bulb garlic
    • 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
    • 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
    • 1 tbsp lemon juice
    • 2 tsp black pepper, coarse ground
    • 1 tsp red pepper flakes
    • ½ tsp MSG or 1 tsp low-sodium salt

    Method

    (we suggest you read everything at least once before doing anything)

    1) Steam the broccoli for 3–5 minutes. Allow to cool.

    2) Blend the pine nuts, garlic, lemon juice, and nutritional yeast.

    3) Add the broccoli, basil, olive oil, black pepper, red pepper, and MSG or salt, and blend in the food processor again until well-combined.

    4) Serve:

    Enjoy!

    Want to learn more?

    For those interested in some of the science of what we have going on today:

    Take care!

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  • Gentler Hair Health Options

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    Hair, Gently

    We have previously talked about the medicinal options for combatting the thinning hair that comes with age especially for men, but also for a lot of women. You can read about those medicinal options here:

    Hair-Loss Remedies, By Science

    We also did a whole supplement spotlight research review for saw palmetto! You can read about how that might help you keep your hair present and correct, here:

    One Man’s Saw Palmetto Is Another Woman’s Serenoa Repens

    Today we’re going to talk options that are less “heavy guns”, and/but still very useful.

    Supplementation

    First, the obvious. Taking vitamins and minerals, especially biotin, can help a lot. This writer takes 10,000µg (that’s micrograms, not milligrams!) biotin gummies, similar to this example product on Amazon (except mine also has other vitamins and minerals in, but the exact product doesn’t seem to be available on Amazon).

    When thinking “what vitamins and minerals help hair?”, honestly, it’s most of them. So, focus on the ones that count for the most (usually: biotin and zinc), and then cover your bases for the rest with good diet and additional supplementation if you wish.

    Caffeine (topical)

    It may feel silly, giving one’s hair a stimulant, but topical caffeine application really does work to stimulate hair growth. And not “just a little help”, either:

    ❝Specifically, 0.2% topical caffeine-based solutions are typically safe with very minimal adverse effects for long-term treatment of AGA, and they are not inferior to topical 5% minoxidil therapy❞

    ~ Dr. Bajoria et al.

    (AGA = Androgenic Alopecia)

    Read more: Comparing Current Therapeutic Modalities of Androgenic Alopecia: A Literature Review of Clinical Trials

    Argan oil

    As with coconut oil, argan oil is great on hair. It won’t do a thing to improve hair growth or decrease hair shedding, but it will help you hair stay moisturized and thus reduce breakage—thus, may not be relevant for everyone, but for those of us with hair long enough to brush, it’s important.

    Bonus: get an argan oil based hair serum that also contains keratin (the protein used to make hair), as this helps strengthen the hair too.

    Here’s an example product on Amazon

    Silk pillowcases

    Or a silk hair bonnet to sleep in! They both do the same thing, which is prevent damaging the hair in one’s sleep by reducing the friction that it may have when moving/turning against the pillow in one’s sleep.

    • Pros of the bonnet: if you have lots of hair and a partner in bed with you, your hair need not be in their face, and you also won’t get it caught under you or them.
    • Pros of the pillowcase: you don’t have to wear a bonnet

    Both are also used widely by people without hair loss issues, but with easily damaged and/or tangled hair—Black people especially with 3C or tighter curls in particular often benefit from this. Other people whose hair is curly and/or gray also stand to gain a lot.

    Here are Amazon example products of a silk pillowcase (it’s expensive, but worth it) and a silk bonnet, respectively

    Want to read more?

    You might like this article:

    From straight to curly, thick to thin: here’s how hormones and chemotherapy can change your hair

    Take care!

    Don’t Forget…

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