Hearts and Minds
Suffering a heart attack or other severe cardiac event is a life-threatening and life-changing event. It happens a lot. Every year, roughly 805,000 people in the U.S. have a heart attack -- that's about one every 40 seconds.
Physical recovery can be arduous and lengthy, but there's a mental toll as well. One in three heart patients, according to a 2023 meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, live with anxiety, depression and ongoing stress.
"The technology of cardiology is locked down. People get that. What's not locked down is the patient experience," Sam Sears, a professor of health psychology at East Carolina University and author of more than 200 research studies on psychological interventions for heart health, told STAT. "The human factors in all this just don't get addressed as a standard of care."
An improved standard of care, advise Sears and others, is helping patients to not only change lifestyles and habits to become heart-healthier, but also to embrace and live with their new lives.
Body of Knowledge
The human brain makes up 2% of a human's body mass. A shrew's brain is about 10% of its body mass, the greatest brain size percentage relative to body mass with one known exception: An especially tiny genus of ant called Brachymyrmex boasts a brain roughly 12% of its body mass.
Get Me That, Stat!
Females are typically found to suffer from dental caries (cavities) more than males: 8.8% to 4.5% according to one study. Three factors help explain this: 1. Teeth come in earlier in girls, lengthening exposure; 2. Easier access to food and frequent snacking during food preparation; 3. Pregnancy.
According to the NIH, 2.2% of American adults ages 20 to 64 have no teeth, while the same age demographic has, on average, 25.5 remaining teeth. A full complement of teeth is 32, including wisdom teeth.
Stories for the Waiting Room
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