Older patients drive more safely than younger patients after having outpatient surgery and receiving a short-acting anesthetic, according to a new study.

It included 198 patients whose driving abilities were tested on a driving simulator before and after they had a minor surgical procedure while under sedation. The researchers looked at the participants’ degree of weaving on the road and the number of driving violations (such as running red lights) and accidents.

The amount of weaving before and after surgery differed little, indicating that the anesthetic drugs had largely worn off by the time the patients left the hospital, according to lead investigator Dr. Asokumar Buvanendran and colleagues.

“We also looked to see if older patients were in more or less pain than younger patients and whether that played into the ability to drive,” Buvanendran said in an American Society of Anesthesiologists news release.

Women with recently diagnosed diabetes may be more likely to also get a breast cancer diagnosis than those without diabetes, suggests a new study from Canada.

It’s not the first time diabetes has been linked to new cases of breast or other cancers. But the findings also hint that at least part of the reason why doctors find more breast cancer in diabetics is because they’re looking harder — and not necessarily because diabetes itself raises a woman’s cancer risk.

“The relationship that we see (between diabetes and cancer), we wondered if it was something about the fact that people with diabetes go to the doctor’s office more often,” said Jeffrey Johnson, from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, who worked on the study.

“When a new diagnosis of diabetes is made, people undergo a lot of tests and general health exams.” That may include breast cancer screening with mammograms, he added.

The Energy Star program makes it easier for consumers to pick appliances. Now the Institute of Medicine is recommending the government create a similar system for foods and drinks sold in the grocery store.

In a new report, the IOM — an independent group that advises the government on health policy — recommends instituting a front-of-the-package rating system that gives foods zero to three points, depending on their levels of saturated and trans fats, sodium and added sugars.

Those were chosen because they “are the components of diet most closely linked to chronic-disease risk,” said Alice Lichtenstein, vice-chair of the IOM committee and a professor at Tufts University, at a press conference today.

Foods with too-high levels of any one of those components would get no points. The ratings would be displayed using stars, check marks or some other icon.

Even tiny premature babies in hospital care after birth can make baby sounds, and are especially vocal when their parents are talking to them — a finding that could be significant in terms of later language ability, a U.S. study said.

Very premature babies are known to be slower-than-average in picking up language skills. It is also not known whether the sounds they hear soon after birth are related to later language development.

But infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) of a hospital are in are in a very different sound environment from the womb, where their mother’s voice is the most prominent sound, said Melinda Caskey, a pediatrician at Women and Infants Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island.

U.S. health regulators on Thursday relaxed rules to make it easier for hospitals and doctors to receive financial incentives if they work together to coordinate patient care.

The so-called Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are an experimental part of President Barack Obama’s healthcare overhaul, meant to improve the quality of care while lowering costs in Medicare, the federal insurance program for the elderly and disabled.

Officials from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said they expect the program to save Medicare up to $940 million over the next four years.

That is less than 1 percent of the $2.4 trillion the government will pay out in Medicare benefits during that time, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The foreclosure crisis may be making Americans sick.

A study published online yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health surveyed nearly 2,500 homeowners over the age of 50 who were asked if they had fallen more than two months behind on their mortgage payments since 2006.

Of those who had, 22% developed depressive symptoms over the next two years, compared to only 3% of those who weren’t delinquent. Twenty-eight percent reported food insecurity — meaning they were hungry or did not have adequate access to food in their households — compared to 4% for those who weren’t behind on their payments.

And about a third said they were not taking medications properly due to cost, compared to 5% of those who weren’t delinquent.

“For an older person with chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension, the types of health problems we saw are short-term consequences of falling behind on a mortgage that could have long-run implications for that person’s health,” said the study’s principal investigator, Dawn E. Alley, assistant professor of epidemiology and public health at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.

Young adults who were born very prematurely have higher blood pressure and more fat despite a normal body weight, both signs that may point to a heightened risk of health problems such as heart disease and diabetes later in life, a new study finds.

British researchers examined 23 otherwise healthy people aged 18 to 27 who were born at 33 weeks of gestation or less. The participants had higher blood pressure, more fat in their muscle and liver, and more fat tissue despite having a normal body-mass index (BMI) compared to young adults who were full-term babies.

These traits are associated with type 2 diabetes and heart and circulatory disease, the Imperial College London team noted in a news release.

The study appears in the journal Pediatric Research.

“This was only a small study, but the differences we found were quite striking,” said lead investigator Neena Modi, a professor at Imperial College London. “The results suggest that we need to monitor the health of premature babies beyond infancy and childhood.

A 28-year-old woman in India came to her doctor with an unusual complaint: a sudden and persistent increase in her sex drive. She felt constantly aroused, often with no stimulation at all.

Unable to find an explanation, the woman’s physician and gynecologist referred her to the department of emergency medicine at the Sri Gokulam Hospital and Research Institute in Salem, Tamil Nadu. Four days later, she was dead.

What disease could take a woman from distressing sexual symptoms to death in less than a week? The answer is a virus that has been nearly eradicated in humans in the U.S. but remains a scourge in the developing world: rabies.

Famous more for the symptomatic fear of water (actually a sign that the virus has paralyzed the swallowing muscles), rabies sometimes first shows up as unexplained hypersexuality, caused by the virus inflaming the brain. Unfortunately, by the time this symptom shows up, the disease is incurable.

A new federal survey estimates that more than 8 million adults in the United States had considered suicide in a year’s time and more than two million actually made plans to kill themselves.

Women, Caucasians and those under age 30 were more likely to have suicidal thoughts, according to the first-of-its-kind study released on Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study indicates a wide variation in suicidal behavior by state. One in 15 adults in Utah had serious thoughts of suicide, the highest in the nation. That compared to Georgia, the lowest, with 1 in 50 adults saying they had seriously considered killing themselves.

More than 1 million adults reported attempting suicide, according to the survey, which studied data from 2008-2009. Rhode Island had the highest number of reported attempts at one in 67 adults, according to the study.

Far from being healthy, supplements such as multivitamins, minerals and folic acid may actually raise the odds for death in older women who take them, a new study suggests.

Dietary supplements are widely used in the United States, often with the hope of avoiding chronic disease. However, the long-term health consequences of many compounds are unknown, the researchers said.

“Our study raises concerns about the safety of a number of commonly used dietary supplements,” said lead researcher Jaakko Mursu, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Eastern Finland, in Kuopio. “We would advise people to reconsider whether they need to use supplements and put more emphasis on a healthy diet,” he said.

The report was published in the Oct. 10 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.