The best exercise to help you sleep, the link between height and colon cancer, and more health news

Folks tussling with lousy sleep often turn to the sidewalk or the treadmill or the bike, figuring that aerobic exercise will earn them a few more minutes of solid snoozing.

They might be better off hefting some weights, a new study argues.

Resistance exercise appears to be better than aerobic workouts as a way to improve your 40 winks if you’re having problems sleeping, researchers reported Thursday at an American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.

For reasons that remain murky, new research warns that a spike in social media use during the pandemic might have worsened tic disorders in children.

Tics are sudden twitches, movements or sounds that people do repeatedly because they can’t control their body.

In the study, 90% of 20 tic patients aged 11 to 21 said they increased their use of social media during the pandemic. While tic frequency did not appear to rise with social media use, the scientists found that more time spent on social media was associated with the onset of more severe tic behaviors.

Suicide mortality increased from 2000 to 2018, then decreased from 2018 to 2020, according to a February data brief published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention National Center for Health Statistics.

Matthew F. Garnett, M.P.H., from the National Center for Health Statistics in Hyattsville, Maryland, and colleagues used mortality data from the National Vital Statistics System to describe the final suicide rates from 2000 to 2020.

The researchers found that the age-adjusted suicide rate decreased from 2018 to 2020 (14.2 to 13.5 per 100,000) after increasing from 2000 to 2018.

E-cigarette and hookah water pipe users may be at greater risk than tobacco cigarette smokers for cancers of the nose, sinuses and throat, according to a new study.

That’s because vapers and hookah users are more than twice as likely to exhale smoke through their nose as cigarette smokers, who typically exhale smoke through the mouth, the researchers explained.

“Our findings suggest that the unique way vapers and hookah smokers use their devices may expose the nose and sinuses to far more emissions than cigarettes,” said study lead author Emma Karey, a postdoctoral research fellow at NYU Langone Health in New York City.

Taller people have a higher risk of colon cancer than shorter folks, and researchers say height should be considered when it comes to screening for the disease.

For the new study, the research team at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore analyzed data from 47 international studies that included more than 280,000 cases of colorectal cancer and more than 14,000 cases of precancerous colon polyps (adenomas). Data from a Johns Hopkins’ study of more than 1,400 adults who had colonoscopies was also included.

Nearly 1 million Fitbit Ionic smartwatches sold in the United States have been recalled because they pose a burn hazard, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) said Wednesday.

About 693,000 of the smartwatches were also sold in other countries.

The lithium-ion battery in the Ionic smartwatch can overheat and cause burns, and consumers should immediately stop using them, the CPSC said in a statement.