Health

(NEW YORK) — Zero-calorie sweetener erythritol, widely used in sugar replacement or reduced-sugar products, has been linked to an increased risk of cardiovascular events including heart attacks and strokes for older adults consuming high amounts and already at risk of heart disease, according to a new study published Monday.

The study first published in Nature Medicine, discovered that higher levels of erythritol were found among patients who experienced a major adverse cardiovascular event, which includes stroke, heart attack, blood clots and cardiovascular death, over three years of observation.

Researchers caution that more research is needed. It’s too early to definitively say that erythritol causes problems for people who consume it regularly, especially as the study’s results may not be generalizable to everyone.

Erythritol is a sugar alcohol that is naturally found in fruits such as watermelons, pears and grapes, but has since been processed as a food additive used to sweeten and enhance the flavor of foods, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA.)

The total U.S. population’s daily intake of erythritol has been estimated to reach up to 30 grams per day in some participants, according to data from a National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey filed by the FDA.

Due to a growing obesity epidemic worldwide, artificial sweeteners are becoming increasingly common ingredients found in soft drinks, “diet” foods and other processed products. Although federal regulatory agencies like the FDA have deemed most artificial sweeteners as safe, little is known about the long-term health effects.

Sweeteners without erythritol

The average U.S. adult, teenager and child consumes nearly 17 teaspoons, or 270 calories worth, of added sugar a day, according to a Harvard report.

Dietitian Anna Taylor spoke to the Cleveland Clinic and listed fresh or frozen fruit as the healthiest way to sweeten food or drinks.

Taylor also suggests looking for other sugar substitutes like Stevia-based sweeteners that are herbal as opposed to artificial. However, the study warns that erythritol is often combined with other sugar substitutes to help add bulk to the sweeteners.

Natural sugars like raw honey, maple syrup, agave nectar and raw sugar provide more nutrients than table sugar, including antioxidants, vitamins and prebiotic gut bacteria, but there are often hidden ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup, which has been linked to long-term metabolic complications, according to Taylor.

Overall, the healthiest sweetener to use is no sweetener at all. The American Heart Association recommends drastically lowering added sugar in a daily diet to help slow the risk of obesity and heart disease and to focus on more whole foods like a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

Taylor suggests breaking the sugar habit by weaning off sweeteners in everyday snacks and foods or substituting sweetened foods for other options.

“That’s true whether it’s in soda, sweet tea, fruit drinks, packs of sugar or sugar substitute for coffee or tea, or artificially sweetened flavor packets for water,” Taylor said to the Cleveland Clinic. “Drink plain water! At the very least, drink unflavored tea, coffee, bubbly water or water with fruit infused in it.”

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — While no firm conclusion has yet been made among health and government officials as to where COVID-19 came from, the U.S. Energy Department has now reportedly indicated it believes the virus was most likely the result of a lab leak in China — one of two prevailing theories under investigation along with natural human exposure to an infected animal.

The view of the Energy Department, which oversees a network of national labs, some which conduct bioresearch, was reported Sunday by The Wall Street Journal based on a classified intelligence report but has not been confirmed by ABC News.

People who read the report said the assessment was made with “low confidence,” according to the Journal, referring to the lowest of three confidence intervals in the intelligence community.

It’s the latest development in the ongoing work, in the U.S. and internationally, to determine where COVID-19 came from: to both trace back the virus in order to hold any responsible parties to account and to understand its inception in order to prevent the next pandemic.

But with no “smoking gun” and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence.

At the same time, the virus’ origins have become a contentious wedge issue at home while the Chinese government vehemently denies COVID-19 could have come from one of its labs in Wuhan.

A spokesperson for the Energy Department did not comment Sunday on the Journal’s new article but said in a statement to ABC News that the department “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

A spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee said in their own brief statement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had “provided a response to Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Select Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup’s February 13th letter requesting information about the origins of COVID-19 and we are reviewing the classified information provided.”

The White House’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said in an appearance on CNN on Sunday that he could not confirm or deny the Journal report but that “right now there is not a definitive answer” from the intelligence community on where COVID-19 started.

“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure,” Sullivan said. “Here’s what I can tell you. President [Joe] Biden has directed, repeatedly, every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources behind getting to the bottom of this question.”

“If we gain any further insight or information, we will share it with Congress, and we will share it with the American people,” Sullivan said.

The White House declined on Sunday to say if Biden had been briefed on the Energy Department’s view, referring to Sullivan’s comments.

In 2021, the president launched a 90-day push for the U.S. intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” to find a more definitive conclusion regarding the source of the virus.

In a declassified summary of that work, released in August 2021, U.S. intelligence agencies said they remained “divided on the most likely origins of COVID-19” but that the two key hypotheses remain possible: either natural exposure to an infected animal or an accidental lab leak.

Consensus among top officials in the Biden administration has similarly been that the pandemic originated in one of those ways.

Four elements of the U.S. intelligence community said in 2021 that they had “low confidence” COVID-19 was initially spread from an animal to a human, while one element assessed with “moderate confidence” that the first human infection was the result of a “laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” and pointing to the “inherently risky nature of work on Coronaviruses.”

The agencies, however, generally agreed that the virus was most likely not developed as a biological weapon and that China’s leaders did not know about the virus before the start of the global pandemic.

This analysis marked something of an evolution from the earliest prevailing view after the pandemic began in early 2020 when, despite some fringe skepticism — often emanating from voices with a long record of criticizing China — the idea that COVID-19 jumped from animal to human somewhere in nature became the overwhelming consensus.

Political voices in favor of the lab-leak theory, particularly from former President Donald Trump, served to polarize the issue further and largely pushed the scientific community away from a willingness to consider that possibility.

The U.S. intelligence agencies said in their 2021 summary that baring new information, a more definitive explanation would not be possible without Beijing’s cooperation.

“Origins tracing is a matter of science,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said following the report’s release. “China always supports and will continue to participate in the science-based origins study.”

A joint World Health Organization-led team had presented a range of options in its own March 2021 report, calling a lab leak “extremely unlikely” but offering pathways for further investigation.

Team members voiced frustration with the lack of cooperation from the Chinese government — echoed in international criticism that politics had stymied science.

Since then, the WHO has become increasingly receptive to the possibility that the virus resulted from a lab leak. In July 2021, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that ruling out a lab leak theory was “premature” and recommended audits of the Wuhan labs in further studies.

China’s subsequent rebuff left the WHO to proceed without them as part of the U.N. agency’s recommended phase two study.

ABC News’ Will Steakin contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — Growing rates of obesity are contributing to more heart disease risks during and after pregnancy, experts warn.

People with obesity are more at risk of potentially lethal pregnancy complications like diabetes, hypertension, and pre-eclampsia. Those conditions increase the risk of heart disease and stroke, according to a recent report from the American Heart Association — a major concern, because heart disease is already the leading cause of pregnancy-related deaths.

“When comparing heart disease and poor pregnancy outcomes in women, we notice that obesity is a link,” Dr. Sadiya Khan, lead author of the paper and assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, told ABC News.

Obesity is an inflammatory condition that can damage blood vessels and make cells resistant to insulin, experts say. This ultimately contributes to the development of diseases like high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.

Obesity mixed with the expected hormonal changes during pregnancy, creates a perfect storm that can be detrimental to the pregnant person and baby, Khan says. The combination of changes from obesity and changes from pregnancy can lead to gestational diabetes, for example, she says.

Obesity is also linked to abnormal development of the placenta, research shows. That can increase the risk of pre-eclampsia, a complication characterized by high blood pressure and organ damage.

Regardless of weight, high blood pressure or diabetes during pregnancy can go away after delivery. However, people who had those conditions during pregnancy still have a higher chance of getting heart disease in their lifetime, research shows.

One study, published earlier this month, found pregnant people who had high blood pressure, diabetes, pre-eclampsia, a premature birth, or delivered a small baby were at risk of developing heart disease up to 46 years after delivery.

“There are two potential reasons that these complications during pregnancy cause heart disease long term, ” Khan said. “Either the complication itself directly induces heart disease, or the complication is a reflection of someone’s underlying risk.”

Not everyone is equally at risk. Black women have a disproportionate risk of complications during pregnancy, like preeclampsia. Black women also have significantly higher rates of pregnancy-related death than white women in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“There is a growing awareness of the black maternal mortality crisis,” Dr. Natalie Bello, Director of Hypertension research at the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Co-Chair of the American College of Cardiology Reproductive and Cardio-Obstetrics Section, told ABC News. “We need to address the issues surrounding social and systemic barriers these women are faced with.”

Screening and treating people for cardiac complications during pregnancy — whether they have obesity or not — can help reduce long-term risks, Bello says. In addition, anyone who has a complication during pregnancy should be monitored for heart disease, she says.

“Pregnancy may be the only time someone gets medical care,” Bello said. “At that point they may not realize they carry a large risk, like obesity, for heart disease and complications during their pregnancy, so it is best to be screened early on in life to protect them during pregnancy and across the lifespan for their and their family’s heart health.”

With heart disease being the leading cause of death in women year after year, experts agree that lifestyle intervention during their entire life course needs to be the main driver to help reduce these unfavorable statistics.

“Blood pressure screening, a healthy weight, good sleep hygiene, are some examples someone can take to assure they are at a good place in regards to their heart health,” Bello said. “The next steps would be to check how to maintain these healthy parameters so they can go into their pregnancy heart healthy for themselves and their baby.”

Lily Nedda Dastmalchi, D.O., M.A., is a cardiology fellow at Temple University Hospital and a contributor to the ABC News Medical Unit.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(ATLANTA) — The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a health advisory Friday about an increase in an antibiotic-resistant strain of the Shigella bacteria.

Shigella is highly infectious and causes around 450,000 infections in the U.S. every year, according to the CDC.

Shigella is transmitted in several ways, including changing the diaper of a sick infant, by getting the bacteria on your hands and then touching your mouth, through sexual contact or by contaminated food and water, the CDC said in its advisory.

Usually, people recover without treatment, but those with severe cases or with underlying conditions that weaken the immune system may need to be treated with antibiotics.

The bacteria is easily transmissible and there are few antimicrobial treatment options for medical staff treating patients with the drug-resistant XDR strain of Shigella, according to the CDC, which prompted the warning.

The agency has asked health care professionals to be alert about suspecting and reporting cases of the XDR variant of Shigella to local and state health departments “given these potentially serious public health concerns.”

Last year, 5% of Shigella infections reported to the CDC were caused by the XDR strain of the bacteria. In 2015, there weren’t any infections from the XDR strain reported to the public health agency.

The increase in antimicrobial-resistant Shigella infections is primarily among men who have sex with men, people experiencing homelessness, international travelers and people living with HIV, the CDC reported.

The CDC said that health care staff should also educate their patients and communities who are most at risk of infection about prevention and how it is spread.

ABC News’ Sasha Pezenik contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — Britney Alba remembers the day she and her husband, Frankie Alba, received the news they were expecting twins. It had only been six months since they had welcomed their twin sons.

“Frankie and I were not trying but it just happened. We just found out we were pregnant … so we go and get our ultrasound,” the mom of four recalled to ABC News’ Good Morning America. “And Frankie was like, ‘Are you sure it’s not two?’ He was joking around and [the ultrasound technician] was like, ‘Let me check one more time.’ And she checked again and sure enough, there was a second heartbeat.”

“I was definitely in shock,” Frankie Alba, 25, recalled. “But I was excited at the same time. They’re definitely a blessing.”

The Albas said twins don’t run in either of their families and for them to expect twins twice was astonishing.

“I would have never guessed in a million years that I would have one set of twins, much less a second set,” Britney Alba, 27, added. “So we were super excited. Super excited. But it was like a laughing-and-crying-at-the-same-time moment.”

The Albas’ first set of twins — Luka and Levi — were monochorionic-diamniotic (MoDi) identical twins, meaning they shared the same placenta but separate amniotic sacs. But their second set of twins — Lydia and Lynlee — turned out to be monoamniotic-monochorionic (MoMo) identical twins. The girls ended up sharing both the same placenta and amniotic sac.

“It was already rare for there to be identical twins back to back, but particularly just my twins because MoMo twins make up 1% of all twin pregnancies. It’s very rare,” Britney Alba said of what her doctors told them. “So just their pregnancy alone was rare. But then to have identical twin brothers right before them made it even more rare, so definitely a unique situation.”

There is not much research data available on the rarity of such twin pregnancies, but one Journal of Perinatology study estimates MoMo twin pregnancies happen once out of every 10,000 pregnancies, while another comparative study estimates MoDi twin pregnancies occur in 0.3% of all pregnancies.

In addition to being rare, a MoMo twin pregnancy is considered high risk. Having to share the same placenta and amniotic sac increases the risk for problems with blood flow to each twin and increases the risk that the umbilical cords could become entangled. Britney Alba was admitted to the University of Alabama at Birmingham Women and Infants Center at 25 weeks and spent over 50 days there before the girls were delivered.

The Albas welcomed Lydia and Lynlee in Oct. 25, 2022 and the newborn girls spent their first six weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit under the care of nurses and doctors.

They were able to go home to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, for the first time on Dec. 7, according to the Albas, and today, the family of six is settling into what they call their “new normal.”

“It is nonstop, fast paced, but we love it,” Britney Alba said. “The boys are great with the girls. Their main focus is just to play and have fun but when they do see the girls and they’re around them, they’re very sweet. They have gentle hands, sweet hands. And they’re just really good around their sisters.”

Both Albas say they feel “extremely blessed” and “extremely grateful” for their family.

“Even on those nights where we feel like we want to pull our hair out, and none of our children want to sleep, we just have to remind ourselves how lucky and how blessed we are to be able to have these children,” Britney Alba said.

“Life has definitely changed dramatically and very quickly but it’s a huge blessing for us and we are just looking forward to what the future holds with these babies because they’re special,” Frankie Alba added. “We can’t see life without our babies.”

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(WASHINGTON) — While no firm conclusion has yet been made among health and government officials as to where COVID-19 came from, the U.S. Energy Department has now reportedly indicated it believes the virus was most likely the result of a lab leak in China — one of two prevailing theories under investigation along with natural human exposure to an infected animal.

The view of the Energy Department, which oversees a network of national labs, some which conduct bioresearch, was reported Sunday by The Wall Street Journal based on a classified intelligence report but has not been confirmed by ABC News.

People who read the report said the assessment was made with “low confidence,” according to the Journal, referring to the lowest of three confidence intervals in the intelligence community.

It’s the latest development in the ongoing work, in the U.S. and internationally, to determine where COVID-19 came from: to both trace back the virus in order to hold any responsible parties to account and to understand its inception in order to prevent the next pandemic.

But with no “smoking gun” and limited access to raw data, discussion of the science has played out in a haze of circumstantial evidence.

At the same time, the virus’ origins have become a contentious wedge issue at home while the Chinese government vehemently denies COVID-19 could have come from one of its labs in Wuhan.

A spokesperson for the Energy Department did not comment Sunday on the Journal’s new article but said in a statement to ABC News that the department “continues to support the thorough, careful, and objective work of our intelligence professionals in investigating the origins of COVID-19, as the President directed.”

A spokesperson for the House Oversight Committee said in their own brief statement that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence had “provided a response to Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer and Select Subcommittee Chairman Brad Wenstrup’s February 13th letter requesting information about the origins of COVID-19 and we are reviewing the classified information provided.”

The White House’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, said in an appearance on CNN on Sunday that he could not confirm or deny the Journal report but that “right now there is not a definitive answer” from the intelligence community on where COVID-19 started.

“Some elements of the intelligence community have reached conclusions on one side, some on the other. A number of them have said they just don’t have enough information to be sure,” Sullivan said. “Here’s what I can tell you. President [Joe] Biden has directed, repeatedly, every element of our intelligence community to put effort and resources behind getting to the bottom of this question.”

“If we gain any further insight or information, we will share it with Congress, and we will share it with the American people,” Sullivan said.

The White House declined on Sunday to say if Biden had been briefed on the Energy Department’s view, referring to Sullivan’s comments.

In 2021, the president launched a 90-day push for the U.S. intelligence community to “redouble their efforts” to find a more definitive conclusion regarding the source of the virus.

In a declassified summary of that work, released in August 2021, U.S. intelligence agencies said they remained “divided on the most likely origins of COVID-19” but that the two key hypotheses remain possible: either natural exposure to an infected animal or an accidental lab leak.

Consensus among top officials in the Biden administration has similarly been that the pandemic originated in one of those ways.

Four elements of the U.S. intelligence community said in 2021 that they had “low confidence” COVID-19 was initially spread from an animal to a human, while one element assessed with “moderate confidence” that the first human infection was the result of a “laboratory-associated incident, probably involving experimentation, animal handling, or sampling by the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” and pointing to the “inherently risky nature of work on Coronaviruses.”

The agencies, however, generally agreed that the virus was most likely not developed as a biological weapon and that China’s leaders did not know about the virus before the start of the global pandemic.

This analysis marked something of an evolution from the earliest prevailing view after the pandemic began in early 2020 when, despite some fringe skepticism — often emanating from voices with a long record of criticizing China — the idea that COVID-19 jumped from animal to human somewhere in nature became the overwhelming consensus.

Political voices in favor of the lab-leak theory, particularly from former President Donald Trump, served to polarize the issue further and largely pushed the scientific community away from a willingness to consider that possibility.

The U.S. intelligence agencies said in their 2021 summary that baring new information, a more definitive explanation would not be possible without Beijing’s cooperation.

“Origins tracing is a matter of science,” Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian said following the report’s release. “China always supports and will continue to participate in the science-based origins study.”

A joint World Health Organization-led team had presented a range of options in its own March 2021 report, calling a lab leak “extremely unlikely” but offering pathways for further investigation.

Team members voiced frustration with the lack of cooperation from the Chinese government — echoed in international criticism that politics had stymied science.

Since then, the WHO has become increasingly receptive to the possibility that the virus resulted from a lab leak. In July 2021, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged that ruling out a lab leak theory was “premature” and recommended audits of the Wuhan labs in further studies.

China’s subsequent rebuff left the WHO to proceed without them as part of the U.N. agency’s recommended phase two study.

ABC News’ Will Steakin contributed to this report.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(COLUMBUS, Ohio) — The measles outbreak in central Ohio that left 85 children infected has officially been declared over, Columbus Public Health announced Thursday.

“CPH has received the last pending test result, which was negative for suspected measles cases,” the agency tweeted. “We have surpassed 42 days, or two incubation periods, since the last rash onset, which fits the CDC’s definition of the end of an outbreak.”

According to data from CPH, no cases have been recorded since Dec. 24.

Over the course of the outbreak, which began in November 2022 and was seen across several schools and day cares, 80 of the 85 children infected were unvaccinated.

Four had received at least one dose of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and one patient had an unknown vaccination status.

An overwhelming majority, or 65%, of cases occurred among children between ages 1 and 5 with children under age 1 being the next most affected group.

In total, 36 children were hospitalized, but none of the sickened children died.

“We did have several children that required intensive care,” Kelli Newman, communications director at CPH, told ABC News. “Most cases that were hospitalized were due to dehydration, which is common in young children like that.”

Measles is a very contagious disease with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying every individual infected by the virus can spread it to up to 10 close contacts, if they are unprotected including not wearing a mask or not being vaccinated.

Complications from measles can be relatively benign, like rashes, or they can be much more severe, like viral sepsis, pneumonia or brain swelling.

The CDC says anybody who either had measles at some point in their life or who has received two doses of the MMR vaccine is protected against measles.

In the decade before the measles vaccine became available, an estimated three to four million people were infected every year, 48,000 were hospitalized and between 400 and 500 people died, according to the federal health agency.

One dose of the measles vaccine is 93% effective at preventing infection if exposed to the virus. Two doses are 97% effective.

Children are recommended to receive their first dose between 12 and 15 months old and their second dose between ages 4 and 6.

According to a report from the CDC published in January, during the 2021-22 school year, 88.3% of kindergartners in Ohio had received two doses of the MMR vaccine, less than the national average of 93%.

“I think this is kind of a wake up call for all of us,” Newman said. “While this outbreak is behind us, and we’re grateful for that, we know that the next outbreak could just be one missed vaccine away.”

Newman said CPH spent a great deal on the ground working with community partners and pediatricians to get the MMR vaccine out into the community, as well as educate on the importance of vaccination, in response to the outbreak. This included setting up special vaccine clinics and having pediatricians call parents whose children were behind the schedule to remind them to bring them in for their second shot.

In 2000, measles was declared eradicated from the U.S. thanks to the highly effective vaccination campaign.

However, last November, a joint report from the CDC and the World Health Organization declared measles to be an “imminent threat” around the world.

The report found that in 2021, nearly 40 million children — a record-high — missed a dose of the measles vaccine. Specifically, 25 million missed their first dose and 14.7 million missed their second dose.

The authors stated much of the progress that was made in beating back the disease was lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the U.S., a May 2022 study found one-third of American parents reported a child with a missed vaccination due to barriers imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Newman said that many parents of the unvaccinated children infected with measles had chosen not to have their kids receive the MMR shot due misconceptions that it causes autism, a theory that has been widely debunked across the scientific community.

“Many of these kids were vaccinated for everything, but MMR because there was a lingering misconception that it caused autism,” Newman said. “That’s what we heard in feedback when we worked with parents during the case investigation and so that was something we had to provide a lot of education and engagement around, and we’re continuing to do that.”

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — By the time Ceirra Zeager graduated from college last year, she had already survived a heart attack and open-heart surgery.

Now, the 23-year-old is sharing her story to help other people, especially women, know the signs and symptoms of heart disease.

“You really have to advocate for yourself,” Zeager told Good Morning America. “And if you’re feeling something that’s abnormal, you should really get it checked out and just trust your gut that something may be wrong.”

Zeager, who is from Ephrata, Pennsylvania, suffered a heart attack at age 14. She said she began to feel symptoms the morning after she attended her first winter formal dance with friends.

“I remember trying to put my favorite shirt on,” she said. “It was a pink and gray top, and I always remember what it looks like because that moment just changed my life, trying to put that on and realizing that I couldn’t put it on.”

Zeager said she felt like her chest was “closing in,” and the pain got so severe that her parents drove her to a local hospital.

At the hospital, Zeager said she remembers waiting a long time only to have one doctor tell her parents that she had “teenage anxiety.”

“I had a crushing chest feeling and a loss of breath,” she said. “It was such intense pain that I thought to myself, ‘If this is teenage anxiety, I do not want to be here.'”

Without a clear diagnosis, Zeager said she was sent to a nearby children’s hospital, where doctors eventually rushed her into emergency surgery.

“I woke up from surgery and my sister was crying and I asked why, and she said, ‘You had a heart attack,'” Zeager recalled. “I was in shock.”

Zeager said doctors discovered she had an atrial septal defect, or ASD, a type of congenital heart defect where there is a hole in the wall that divides the upper chambers of the heart, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The hole increases blood flow to the lungs, which can damage blood vessels in the lungs over time.

Each year, around 2,000 babies in the United States are born with ASD, but many cases are not diagnosed until adulthood, according to the CDC.

In Zeager’s case, she said she did not know she had ASD until a blood clot had traveled through the hole and lodged in a coronary artery, causing her heart attack.

Though doctors were able to plug the hole, Zeager said the heart attack upended her life.

“I had a pretty difficult transition back into normal life,” she said, adding, “It took me a few years to really grasp what had happened. I was very thankful they figured out what happened, but I was also kind of in a selfish mindset of ‘Why did this happen to me? Why wasn’t this ever caught before?'”

Zeager went onto to recover from the heart attack and graduate from high school, but said while in college, she started to experience symptoms again.

“I was feeling the quality of my life diminishing,” she said. “I was tired and exhausted. I would walk through a short room and be completely out of breath.”

Zeager said she had to advocate for herself to get an echocardiogram, which showed one of her heart valves was leaky.

She then sought a second opinion from another cardiologist, who told her she needed surgery as soon as possible to repair or replace the leaky valve.

The mental health struggle of heart disease

Zeager said she considers herself one of the lucky survivors as she has to take daily medications to manage her heart health but is expected to live a long and healthy life.

Though she is OK physically, Zeager said she has struggled over the years to cope mentally with her heart condition and is now on a mission to raise awareness of mental health alongside heart health.

“They all prepare you for what you’re physically going to go through, but then they don’t ever mention, ‘This is going to be hard for you to deal with mentally,'” said Zeager, who was named a “2023 Real Woman” by the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women campaign. “There almost should be like a cardiac rehab, but for your brain.”

According to the Cleveland Clinic, studies show that people living with heart disease, including heart attacks, are at a higher risk for developing depression.

At the same time, mental health disorders can add stress to the heart and can be associated with heart disease, according to the CDC.

Zeager said she often found herself feeling depressed and “in a rut,” but did not know where to turn for help because she didn’t see people talking about mental health and the heart.

“It can be embarrassing to be in the mindset of ‘I need help,'” she said. “Even after open-heart surgery, when I literally felt myself in a rut, I still didn’t get help because I didn’t know where to go to and who to talk to. I didn’t have those resources.”

Zeager said some of her mental health struggles stemmed from not feeling heard by doctors, so her biggest advice to other women is to be proactive in their medical care and to seek out answers.

Heart disease, which refers to several types of heart conditions, is the leading cause of death for women in the United States, according to the CDC.

Dr. Harmony Reynolds, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Health in New York City, said women should not be worried about “false alarms” if they feel heart disease symptoms.

“It’s important to walk in and say, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack. Tell me why I’m not,'” said Reynolds, who did not treat Zeager. “If they say, ‘Oh, no, no, you’re just nervous,’ like what happened with Ceirra, then you have to say back, ‘Well, how can you tell I’m not?'”

She continued, “You have to advocate for yourself a little bit … and this way we make sure that everybody gets the attention they need.”

When it comes to symptoms to watch out for, Reynolds said not everyone has recognizable symptoms, but others may feel something noticeable that could be a sign of a heart attack.

“When I’m with patients, I’ll point from my mouth to my belly button and say that the discomfort can really be anywhere between, so the jaw, neck, shoulders, arms, chest, back, upper stomach,” she said. “Any of those areas may be important as a heart disease discomfort.”

Women can often experience symptoms other than chest pain when having a heart attack, including shortness of breath, lightheadedness, nausea and sweating.

Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.

(NEW YORK) — Rep. Andy Barr, R-Ky., is raising awareness for heart health two months after the signing of a new law named for his late wife, who died in June 2020 from a rare condition.

Barr appeared on GMA3 on Wednesday to mark Heart Valve Disease Awareness Day and to discuss the Cardiovascular Advances in Research and Opportunities Legacy Act — or CAROL Act — named for his wife, with whom he shares two daughters.

“This is about Carol’s legacy,” Barr said. “What I want to do is raise awareness and let people know who have this diagnosis, look, this is a big deal. You need to get checked out,” he continued.

His family’s experience had opened his eyes.

He explained that “when she was in seventh grade, Carol was diagnosed with an underlying heart condition, a heart murmur known as mitral valve prolapse. Now, there’s approximately 11 million Americans who have heart valve disease. And for most of them, it’s a benign condition. And we certainly thought it was a benign condition. Our doctors told us that this was no big deal. We just needed to monitor it.”

“But unfortunately, she was one of the 0.2% of Americans with heart valve disease who had a sudden cardiac death event,” Barr said of his wife, who was found dead in their home.

According to the American Heart Association, mitral valve prolapse is a condition that affects the valve between the left heart chambers. Common symptoms include palpitations (bursts of rapid heartbeats), fatigue or chest discomfort.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advises that if doctor hears a murmur (unusual sound) when listening to your heartbeat, “Depending on the location of the murmur, how it sounds, and its rhythm, the doctor may use echocardiography, a test that uses sound waves to create a movie of the valves to see if they are working correctly.”

Barr said on GMA3 that the money in the CAROL Act is important for scientific advancements.

“We can stop this,” he said. “There’s amazing, amazing research that’s going on. We need to fund that research.”

He also urged people to be mindful of their own health.

“With early detection and intervention, this can be fixed and people who have heart valve disease can live long and healthy lives with surgical intervention and other types of treatments,” he said.

The CAROL legislation annually gives $28 million for research to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which goes toward distinguishing between benign and life-threatening cases of heart valve disease.

There’s also $8 million earmarked annually for the CDC to fund a registry to give workers in health professions data on sudden cardiac events and fund an awareness campaign.

Barr said he hopes his efforts now can help other families and spare them “the same tragedy.”

“Carol was an awesome, awesome mom. She was a great lady. Her life was cut too short. … Through her memory, we’re going to we’re going to help people deal with heart valve disease in a better way,” he said.

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(NEW YORK) — A record number of drug overdose deaths were recorded in North Carolina in 2021, according to new data from the state Department of Health and Human Services.

In 2021, a total of 4,041 people died from drug overdoses, the highest figure reported in The Tar Heel State in a single year.

It’s also a 22% increase from the 3,304 fatal overdoses recorded in 2020.

“North Carolina’s communities and families are meeting the tragedy of overdose deaths and the opioid crisis head on, every day,” NCDHHS Secretary Kody Kinsley said in a statement.

“With the right treatment and support, recovery is possible, and individuals can go on to live full and productive lives. Our goal is to break the costly cycle of addiction and the smartest investment we can make to do that is expanding Medicaid,” the statement continued.

According to the department, a high number of overdose deaths were linked to fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is between 50 and 100 times stronger than morphine.

An estimated 77% of the total overdose deaths in 2021 involved illegally manufactured fentanyl, which was often mixed with other substances.

This is similar to what’s been seen on a macro level across the United. States. In 2021, a record 107,622 Americans died from drug poisoning or overdose, with 66% linked to synthetic opioids like fentanyl, the Department of Justice said in a press release last year.

During his State of the Union address earlier this month, President Joe Biden said he wanted to address the fentanyl crisis with steps including more drug detection machines at the southern border and stronger penalties for those who traffic the drug.

In response, the NCDHHS said it was expanding mobile units that could distribute medication that treats opioid use disorders and naloxone, which can reverse an opioid overdose.

The NCDHHS said the COVID-19 pandemic also exacerbated a crisis that was already in fully swing by the time the virus spread around the world.

Overdose deaths were 72% higher than the 2,352 recorded in North Carolina in 2019, data showed. Fatal overdoses rose by 40% in the state in just the first year of the pandemic.

When it came to breakdown by race/ethnicity, clear disparities could be seen.

Overdose death rates among white North Carolinians rose 53% from 2019 to 2021, from 27.4 per 100,000 residents to 42.0 per 100,000.

By comparison, rates among state residents of American Indian or Indigenous descent spiked by 117% from 43.3 per 100,000 in 2019 to 94.1 per 100,000 in 2021.

Meanwhile, Black residents had the highest overdose death rate increase, going from 16.1 per 100,000 in 2019 to 38.5 per 100,000 in 2021 — a 139% jump.

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