A person is silhouetted against the sky at sunset at Papago Park in Phoenix on Thursday, March 2, 2023. (AP Photo / Charlie Riedel)

Experts cited several possible reasons for the increases, including higher rates of depression, limited availability of mental health services and the number of guns in U.S. homes.

The United States has had a "life expectancy disadvantage" since 1950, a new study suggests. (shunli zhao / Moment RF / Getty Images)

By 2019, the life expectancy gap between the U.S. and the highest-performing nation had grown to more than six years. The COVID-19 pandemic widened that gap even more, as the U.S. had more deaths from the virus than any other country and has been slower to recover.

FILE - This undated, colorized electron microscope image made available by the U.S. National Institutes of Health in February 2020 shows the Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, indicated in yellow, emerging from the surface of cells, indicated in blue/pink, cultured in a laboratory. (NIAID-RML via AP, File)

Millions worldwide have had long COVID, with dozens of widely varying symptoms including fatigue and brain fog. Scientists still don’t know what causes it, why it only strikes some people, how to treat it -– or even how to best diagnose it.

(CNN)

An international team of researchers wrote in the study that clinical trials may be warranted to investigate whether screening guidelines should recommend Black women start screening at younger ages, around 42 instead of 50.

(Pexels / Kei Scampa)

A nearly decade-long study from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at births in California. The study found that babies born to the richest Black women were still more likely to die than babies born to the poorest White women.

Irregular sleeping habits have been linked with atherosclerosis, a new study has found. (Adobe Stock)

When you don’t get enough good sleep, the short-term consequences are noticeable — maybe you’re distracted at work or snappy with loved ones. But in the background, irregular and poor-quality sleeping patterns could increase your risk for developing cardiovascular disease, according to a new study.

A robot nicknamed Icefin operates under the sea ice near McMurdo Station in Antarctica in 2020. The pencil-shaped robot is giving scientists their first look at the forces eating away at the Thwaites glacier. (Schmidt / Lawrence / Icefin/ NASA PSTAR RISE UP via AP)

Using a 13-foot pencil-shaped robot that swam under the grounding line where ice first juts over the sea, scientists saw a shimmery critical point in Thwaites’ chaotic breakup, “where it’s melting so quickly there, there’s just material streaming out of the glacier.”

“The Great Lake Jumper” Dan O’Conor takes a plunge into the frigid waters of Lake Michigan, as he does every morning, Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023, in Chicago. O’Conor has jumped every day since June 2020. (AP Photo / Erin Hooley)

You might call Dan O’Conor an amateur authority on cold water immersion. Since June 2020, the 55-year-old Chicago man has plunged into Lake Michigan almost daily, including on frigid winter mornings when he has to shovel through the ice.

Cancer risk and mortality, especially for ovarian cancer, rose as more ultra-processed foods were eaten, a new study found. (Adobe Stock)

Researchers examined information on the eating habits of people who were part of the UK Biobank, a large biomedical database. Eating patterns were then compared with medical records that listed both diagnoses and deaths from cancer.

This illustration provided by researchers depicts Kap Kobenhavn, Greenland, two million years ago, when the temperature was significantly warmer than northernmost Greenland today. (Beth Zaiken via AP)

With animal fossils hard to come by, the researchers extracted environmental DNA, also known as eDNA, from soil samples. This is the genetic material that organisms shed into their surroundings — for example, through hair, waste, spit or decomposing carcasses.

This illustration made available by the National Institute on Aging/National Institutes of Health depicts cells in an Alzheimer’s affected brain, with abnormal levels of the beta-amyloid protein clumping together to form plaques, brown, that collect between neurons and disrupt cell function. (National Institute on Aging, NIH via AP)

Japanese drugmaker Eisai and its U.S. partner Biogen had announced earlier this fall that the drug lecanemab appeared to work, a badly needed bright spot after repeated disappointments in the quest for better treatments of the incurable disease.

(WTTW News)

recent study from BMJ Global Health says as many as 1.35 billion young people ages 12-34 across the globe are engaging in listening practices that could make them susceptible to hearing loss. 

(WTTW News)

The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, an independent panel of health care experts, is recommending that adults under 65 get screened for anxiety.

Icebergs are seen through a window of an airplane carrying NASA scientists as they fly on a mission to track melting ice in eastern Greenland on Aug. 14, 2019. (AP Photo / Mstyslav Chernov, File)

Zombie or doomed ice is ice that is still attached to thicker areas of ice, but is no longer getting fed by those larger glaciers. Meanwhile the doomed ice is melting from climate change, said study co-author William Colgan, a glaciologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland.

(Credit: Eli Lilly and Company)

The Alzheimer’s Association reports that among Black Americans age 70 and older, more than 21% are living with that disease. Pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly is launching a clinical trial of a new drug therapy for those at risk, and they’re looking for participants in Chicago.

High school students run at sunset as they practice for the track and field season Monday, Feb. 28, 2022, in Shawnee, Kan. (AP Photo / Charlie Riedel, File)

New research hints that even a simple exercise routine just might help older Americans with mild memory problems.