Category: 8. Health

Three hundred and seventeen more new dengue cases were reported in the 24 hours leading up to Sunday morning, bringing the total number of cases to 12, 271 this year.

According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), new cases were reported as follows: 127 in Barishal Division (Out of CC), 70 in Chattogram Division (Out of CC), 13 in Khulna Division (Out of CC), seven in Mymensingh (Out of CC), 52 in Dhaka Division (Out of CC), 26 in Dhaka North City Corporation and 22 in Dhaka South City Corporation.

The number of deaths remained at 45, with no new fatalities reported during this period, the DGHS added.

Currently, 1, 228 dengue patients are receiving treatment in hospitals across the country.

Last year, dengue claimed the lives of 575 people.

According to the DGHS, there were 101,214 dengue cases and 100,040 recoveries in the same year.

Three hundred and seventeen more new dengue cases were reported in the 24 hours leading up to Sunday morning, bringing the total number of cases to 12, 271 this year.

According to the Directorate General of Health Services (DGHS), new cases were reported as follows: 127 in Barishal Division (Out of CC), 70 in Chattogram Division (Out of CC), 13 in Khulna Division (Out of CC), seven in Mymensingh (Out of CC), 52 in Dhaka Division (Out of CC), 26 in Dhaka North City Corporation and 22 in Dhaka South City Corporation.

The number of deaths remained at 45, with no new fatalities reported during this period, the DGHS added.

Currently, 1, 228 dengue patients are receiving treatment in hospitals across the country.

Last year, dengue claimed the lives of 575 people.

According to the DGHS, there were 101,214 dengue cases and 100,040 recoveries in the same year.

US drug regulators have increasingly signaled a focus on faster approvals and rare diseases, but patients with ultra-rare ailments fear they are falling through the cracks, especially given challenges to conducting clinical trials.

One drug, elamipretide, garnered a narrow recommendation from independent advisers for the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but the agency rejected the drug’s application in May and recommended another potential pathway for approval.

Patients and advocates worry about new rules on who may receive the medication during this process, and whether the drug will reach approval before the pharmaceutical company runs out of funding for it.

It underscores the challenges of making progress on rare and ultra-rare diseases while also making sure treatments are safe and effective.

Hope Filchak is a sassy four-and-a-half-year-old who loves swimming in the lakes and pools near her home in Gainesville, Georgia. She’s also deaf and blind, with some functional vision in one eye and hearing with an aid in one ear. Hope was born with an extremely rare mitochondrial condition called MLS syndrome, of which there were only 64 documented cases in the US as of 2018.

MLS syndrome, for Hope, causes a potentially life-threatening heart condition called cardiomyopathy, which can make her heart pump blood less efficiently. In February 2024, she started sleeping about 17 hours a day, and her speech began regressing.

An echocardiogram revealed that Hope’s heart function had dropped about 14 percentage points, into potentially hazardous territory. She then started taking elamipretide, an investigational drug for mitochondrial conditions.

“Pretty soon, honestly, she had a lot more energy,” her mother, Caroline Filchak, said. Most importantly, her heart stabilized.

Hope’s aunt, Anna Bower, said her niece’s “quality of life dramatically improved” and soon after, she was “running, dancing, and playing” like any other child her age.

First developed in 2004, elamipretide has a long history. Advocates for patients with Barth syndrome – another mitochondrial condition with about 150 known patients – asked Stealth BioTherapeutics to pick up the drug in 2014 and shepherd it through the regulatory process. Stealth submitted its first application to the FDA in 2019, and then it went through four different review divisions at the agency.

In an October 2024 meeting of the FDA’s cardiovascular and renal drugs advisory committee, patients and physicians spoke about the positive effects of the drug, and the advisers eventually voted 10-6 to recommend it.

“Patients and families saw the [advisory committee’s] endorsement as an encouraging sign because the FDA almost always follows its recommendation,” Bower said in June. “But last month, it didn’t.”

The FDA rejected the application in May. Internal FDA reviewers noted that the drug had not met its endpoint in phase 2 trials of 12 study participants.

“We don’t feel like they looked at a totality of evidence where the patient’s voice was heard in the decision,” Caroline Filchak said, who added that it’s been difficult to measure the effectiveness of the drug because of how rare the disease is.

The FDA did offer a new pathway to approval, Stealth said in a press release. That process takes at least eight months, though it can also take years. Stealth laid off 30% of its staff after the rejection.

Advocates such as Filchak are worried the company will not be able to continue pursuing approval.

“If [the FDA] drag their feet like they have throughout this entire process, Stealth is not going to be able to continue operations,” she said.

Under the new pathway, the medication is not available for infants. Stealth has said that 35 patients around the world are receiving the medication, and two-thirds of them are very sick infants.

In a congressional hearing in late June, the Republican representative Earl L “Buddy” Carter of Georgia asked Robert F Kennedy Jr, the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, about treatments for rare mitochondrial conditions.

Carter mentioned two young constituents with these conditions, including Hope Filchak. The children “need your help in accessing life-saving medications”, Carter said, promising to follow up with Kennedy after the hearing.

For now, Hope has a three-month supply of the drug.

“For children like Hope, there are no other options,” Bower said. There are no FDA-approved medications like elamipretide, and there are no similar drugs in late-stage development.

Caroline Filchak said that this administration “does have a stated commitment to accelerating therapies for rare diseases. And it seems like this recent decision by the FDA doesn’t align with that commitment.”

Marty Makary, the FDA’s commissioner, recently announced plans to accelerate approval for select drugs and companies. He has also floated the use of machine learning, often called AI, to review applications quickly.

But there are already four ways for the FDA to expedite the review of new medications, and the approval speed is not the sticking point for drugs such as these, Filchak said.

Elamipretide is an example of the difficulty of developing drugs for ultra-rare conditions – and for approving them based on clinical evidence, said Holly Fernandez Lynch, bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.

“It’s not the poster child of FDA efficiency,” Fernandez Lynch said, noting the long time span and the four different review divisions at FDA.

“But it’s also not the poster child of ‘Oh my God, we have a drug that works amazingly well, and FDA is standing in the way, and why won’t they just use their regulatory flexibility?’”

The drug hasn’t been approved yet because it hasn’t met a pre-specified endpoint, Fernandez Lynch added: “If the evidence doesn’t support approval, if the systematic evidence collection doesn’t show benefit, then FDA really can’t approve it.”

The biotech company is now resubmitting data on knee strength improvement as part of its new application.

“Of course, these patients have a need. Of course, they have an altered tolerance for risk and altered tolerance for uncertainty,” said Fernandez Lynch.

“That’s the really devastating part of all of this. And it’s really heartbreaking, but it does not mean the FDA should grant approval to a product that hasn’t been demonstrated effective, because we really don’t know that it works.”

Approving a medication without this evidence could lead to issues developing other drugs for the same conditions, Fernandez Lynch said.

“People say, ‘Well, what’s the big deal? These patients have nothing. Just let them try it.’ I get that. If I was that mom, I would do the same thing, right? But the FDA has to make judgments for the population,” she said.

For Caroline Filchak, who works for a petroleum delivery company, she plans to continue advocating for her daughter and other affected children – and has even gotten the whole family involved.

“You don’t, when you think about having a kid, think that you’re going to be doing this, but you do what you’ve got to do for your kids,” she said, noting that she and her husband, Ben, took their seven-year-old son, Thomas, to the October meeting.

“We call him our baby advocate. Ever since that meeting, every night when he would say his prayers, he would pray that the FDA says ‘yes’.”

In a delicious turn of events, scientists succeeded in taking the optics of olive oil to create the first-ever microlaser made entirely from edible materials. If commercialized, they could offer an easy and safe way to monitor food or medications from inside your body.

The technology, introduced earlier this month in the journal Advanced Optical Materials, exploits an interesting tendency for droplets of common cooking oils, which emit a photon of light when subjected to a certain amount of energy. Arrange multiple droplets in a room full of mirrors, and together they shine more brightly—like a concentrated beam of light. 

The researchers tested more than a dozen different types of materials—sunflower oil, cooked butter, plain water, and more—to see which would generate the cleanest laser. And the winner was olive oil. 

One prominent component of olive oil is chlorophyll, the molecule most commonly known to make plants green. In this case, the chlorophyll molecules, trapped in the sticky surface of olive oils, generated photons in a chain reaction of sorts, transforming the droplet of olive oil into a laser. 

The brightness of the chlorophyll changes in accordance with the size and density of the oil droplets, making the laser highly sensitive to environmental conditions, according to the study. For example, adding it to different dishes of food and observing changes in the  laser allowed the researchers to measure things such as sugar concentration or acidity

What’s more, the researchers were able to encode data within the droplets akin to the lines of a barcode, into a peach compote. Surprisingly, the data—the specific date of April 26, 2017, which happens to be the first international Stop Food Waste Date—remained intact for over a year, demonstrating the microlaser’s potential to safely carry information, such as the identity of a manufacturer or an expiration date. 

“Since this is the first such study, there are many possibilities for developing various edible lasers and their applications, which could ultimately find their way to everyday use,” the study authors concluded.

Turns out, not all beans are created equal.

While black beans seem to be great at fighting low-grade chronic inflammation, chickpeas are more of a cholesterol-lowering powerhouse, according to recent research from Illinois Institute of Technology.

In a three-month study, researchers asked a group of roughly 24 prediabetic people to eat a cup of black beans every day, while another group of 24 with prediabetes was given chickpeas. In a third control group, participants cooked white rice.

By the end of just 12 weeks, the researchers noticed significant differences in inflammation levels for the black bean eaters, while chickpea eaters had a greater effect on their total cholesterol, moving from at risk (with an average total cholesterol around 200 mg/dL) into a heart-healthy range (186 mg/dL).

Chickpeas have cholesterol-lowering power

The reason why different beans house different health benefits probably has to do with the chemicals that color them and make each bean unique.

While the phytochemicals that make black beans black are known to have more anti-inflammatory properties, golden chickpeas have more of other plant chemicals called phytosterols, which are cholesterol-lowering compounds.

This is why nutrition buffs often recommend eating a wide variety of different colored plants, including fruits, vegetables, beans and whole grains. By eating a rich diversity of colorful whole foods, you’ll enjoy the complex natural “food matrix” found inside each one, lead researcher Indika Edirisinghe told Business Insider.

“It contains protein, it contains lipid, it contains fiber, vitamins, minerals,” and different combinations of each from bean to bean, he said. “Somebody can synthesize artificial bean by adding all the nutrients, but I don’t think you’re going to get the same effect.”

Registered dietician Joel Ramdial, who was not involved with this study, is the director of nutrition at Southeast Missouri State University’s department of sport sciences. He told BI that beans are one of the most dense and varied sources of dietary fiber you can find, making them a great ingredient to mix into your next meal.

“You can blend them up and mix them into things, you can roast,” he said. “You can put them in soups, you can mix them into sauces.”

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In order to make it easier on research participants to include a cup of chickpeas per day in their diets, Edirisinghe and his team equipped their study volunteers with canned chickpeas, a measuring cup, and several easy recipes.

Here are 5 chickpea recipes scientists recommend to lower cholesterol:

Cool ranch chickpeas

Ingredients:

• 2 15 oz. cans of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
• 1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tbsp. of ranch seasoning

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400F
2. Dry chickpeas well with paper towels
3. Spread onto a large baking sheet in an even layer
4. Bake until golden and crisp, 30 minutes
5. In a large bowl, toss the hot chickpeas with oil and seasoning
6. Spread out onto the baking sheet and bake for five more minutes
7. Remove from the oven. Chickpeas will continue to crisp as they cool.

Tomato cucumber feta salad with chickpeas

Ingredients:

• 1 15 oz. can of chickpeas, drained and rinsed
• 1 large cucumber, chopped
• 1 pint of cherry tomatoes, preferably multi-colored, halved
• 1/2 white onion, chopped
• 1/2 cup of feta cheese
• 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil
• 2 tbsp. of red wine vinegar
• Salt
• Pepper
• 2 tbsp. of fresh cilantro, chopped

Directions:

1. In a large bowl, combine the cucumber, tomato, chickpeas, and onion
2. In a small bowl, whisk together the oil and vinegar. Season with salt and pepper. Add to the large bowl and toss to combine.

3. Top with feta and cilantro

Honey sesame chickpeas

Ingredients:

• 1 15 oz. can of chickpeas
• 1 small onion, diced
• 2 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1/2 cup of honey
• 1/3 cup of soy sauce
• 2 tbsp. of toasted sesame oil
• 1 tbsp. of rice wine vinegar
• 2 tbsp. of vegetable oil
• 1/4 tsp. of crushed red pepper flakes
• 1 tsp. of fresh grated ginger
• Cooked rice, for serving
• Sesame seeds and sliced scallions, for garnish

Directions:

1. Put the diced onion, minced garlic, honey, soy sauce, sesame oil, vinegar, vegetable oil, red pepper flakes and ginger in a medium saucepan.
2. Add some water and bring to a boil
3. Reduce to simmer and cook for five to 10 minutes, until slightly thick
4. Add the chickpeas and return to a boil
5. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 10 minutes, until chickpeas are coated and sauce is thick

6. Serve over cooked rice, and garnish with the sesame seeds and sliced scallions, if desired

Chickpeas with leeks and lemon

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of chickpeas
• 4 leeks
• 1/2 lemon
• 1 branch of fresh rosemary
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1/4 cup of extra virgin olive oil
• Salt

Directions:

1. In a large skillet, heat the olive oil, garlic, and rosemary over medium heat
2. Once the garlic turns fragrant and the rosemary starts to sizzle, remove the rosemary and set it aside
3. Add the leeks to the pan, along with a good pinch of salt
4. Cook, stirring often, until the leeks are soft and sweet but still green, around five to eight minutes
5. Add in the chickpeas, and continue to cook, turning the beans in the oil, for five more minutes. The chickpeas should darken slightly in color.
6. Using a microplane or zester, add a few scrapes of lemon zest into the pan, plus a squeeze of lemon juice
7. Stir to combine
8. Season to taste with lemon juice, zest, or salt as needed

Roasted chickpea gyros

Ingredients:

• 1 15 oz. can of chickpeas
• 4 pita flatbreads
• 1 cup of tzatziki sauce
• 2 lettuce leaves, roughly chopped
• 1 tomato, sliced
• 1/4 red onion, cut into strips
• 1 tbsp. of olive oil
• 1 tbsp. of paprika
• 1 tsp of black pepper
• 1/4 tsp of salt

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400F
2. Pat the chickpeas dry with paper towels, removing any skins that come off
3. In a large bowl, gently toss the chickpeas with the oil, paprika, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and salt
4. Spread the chickpeas onto a greased, rimmed baking sheet and roast for roughly 20 minutes, until lightly brown but not hard
5. Spread tzatziki on one side of the pita bread, then sprinkle in 1/4 of the chickpeas, and add your veggies
6. Fold and enjoy!

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Middle-aged and older women who say they feel lonely are likely to spend more hours in front of the television a few years later, according to a new longitudinal study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders. In contrast, men in the same age range showed no comparable pattern, and watching additional television did not predict becoming lonelier over time for either gender.

The research team, led by Zijun Liu and Liye Zou at Shenzhen University’s Body-Brain-Mind Laboratory, set out to clarify how social disconnection and sedentary leisure might be linked. The World Health Organization recently identified loneliness among older adults as a growing public-health issue, while public-health bodies also warn about the health risks that accompany prolonged sitting and screen time.

Although snapshots of data have linked both issues—people who sit more often report feeling lonelier—previous studies could not determine which tends to come first. The authors wanted to know whether feeling lonely drives people toward the television or whether long hours on the couch quietly erode social ties over the years. Untangling that timeline could help guide interventions that aim to improve emotional wellbeing and reduce passive screen habits later in life.

“Sedentary behavior research is a newly emerging but rapidly growing field, partly because the 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behavior issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) did not specify a quantitative threshold for sedentary behavior,” explained Zou, a full professor of psychology. “Given its correlates of adverse outcomes such as cardiovascular disease, mental disorders, and obesity, sedentary behavior has increasingly been recognized as a critical public health concern. Meanwhile, the WHO has declared loneliness in ageing populations to be a significant and growing social-economic burden.”

“As a key marker of leisure-time sedentary behavior, watching TV is the most prevalent sedentary behavior in ageing populations. In the context of healthy ageing policies, a deeper understanding of the temporal relationship between loneliness and TV viewing is crucial. This could help us determine whether sedentary behavior or loneliness should be prioritized for the targeted intervention, thus optimising the allocation of public health resources and improving the efficiency of interventions.”

To answer these questions, the researchers drew on the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a nationally representative cohort that has tracked the health and lifestyles of adults aged fifty and older since the early 2000s. The present analysis focused on three survey waves collected between 2008 and 2013. After excluding respondents with missing data or implausibly high viewing times, the final sample included 6,788 participants—3,684 women and 3,104 men—with an average baseline age in the early sixties.

Each participant answered two straightforward questions about weekday and weekend television viewing, from which the researchers calculated daily hours. Feelings of social disconnection were measured with the three-item University of California Los Angeles Loneliness Scale, which asks how often someone lacks companionship, feels left out, or feels isolated. Scores can range from three to nine, with higher numbers reflecting more frequent loneliness.

The team also collected a broad set of background characteristics that could muddy the picture: age bracket, marital status, educational attainment, employment, body-mass index, physical-activity frequency, and symptoms of depression. Including these factors in the statistical models helped isolate the unique contribution of loneliness and television habits to one another.

To track influence across time rather than at one moment, Liu and colleagues used random-intercept cross-lagged panel models. This method separates two kinds of patterns: stable differences between people (for example, the fact that some individuals are both lonelier and more sedentary than their peers across the entire study) and within-person changes (for example, whether a spike in loneliness in one wave predicted a later increase in personal viewing hours). Models were run separately for women and men so any sex-specific effects would be visible.

Several descriptive trends emerged before the directional tests began. At baseline, women reported slightly higher loneliness scores than men and also watched about half an hour more television per day, on average. Across the full six-year span, television time and loneliness were positively related at the between-person level for both sexes. People who generally spent longer in front of the screen also tended to rate themselves as lonelier, suggesting a stable link between the two traits across the population.

The heart of the study lay in the lagged paths that connected one wave to the next. For women, feeling lonelier during one survey wave predicted an uptick in daily television viewing—about a 9-minute increase for each one-point rise on the loneliness scale—by the time the next survey rolled around two years later. That association held after the researchers accounted for physical activity, marital changes, and the other covariates.

No evidence suggested that heavier viewing later made women feel lonelier. In men, neither direction reached statistical significance, even though they showed the same between-person link. Both women and men displayed strong stability in loneliness itself: those who felt isolated at one survey tended to report similar feelings two years on.

“This study provides new evidence suggesting that loneliness may be a predictor of TV viewing time,” Zou told PsyPost. “No evidence was found for a converse effect, meaning that loneliness and TV viewing were not bidirectionally related. An observed sex difference indicates that loneliness may predict increased time spent viewing TV in middle-aged and older women, but not men. This highlights the need for targeted interventions to address loneliness in ageing women.”

Taken together, the findings paint a picture in which loneliness in women, but not men, sets the stage for more time spent watching television as the years go by. Because the analysis controlled for depressive symptoms and exercise frequency, the effect of loneliness appears to stand somewhat apart from these related influences.

One interpretation is that television provides a convenient and socially acceptable way to fill time and attention when face-to-face interaction feels out of reach. The set may serve as an emotional companion or simply a distraction that is easier to access than community activities. The absence of a similar pattern in men raises questions about how older men manage feelings of isolation—some may under-report loneliness due to social expectations, or they may seek different outlets such as hobbies away from screens.

“This study reveals an important connection between loneliness and a specific type of sedentary behavior, TV viewing, particularly among middle-aged and older women,” Zou explained. “We found that increased TV viewing time can be predicted by levels of loneliness. This highlights the importance of raising awareness of the phenomenon of loneliness for the general public, and the need for relevant innovations and support services. Our study adds to the current body of evidence indicating that loneliness can predict subsequent TV viewing time and elevated sedentary behavior in women. Therefore, loneliness should be monitored and addressed early on, as this may help to effectively prevent time spent TV viewing.”

But the researchers are cautious about over-extending their conclusions. “First, due to the limitations of the database, our study utilized self-reported assessment of sedentary behavior and loneliness, which may introduce recall bias,” Zou noted. “Device-based measures, such as accelerometers and inclinometers, can provide more objective data. Second, as our study was observational and epidemiological, our findings demonstrate the correlations rather than causal relationships.”

“Third, our focus was exclusively on TV viewing without including other types of sedentary behavior. In fact, an increasing number of researchers highlight that different contexts of sedentary behavior have different impacts on mental health. For example, mentally active sedentary behavior, such as reading, may show a different impact than mentally passive sedentary behavior, such as watching TV.”

“Thus, future studies should employ more complex methods in order to offer a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between sedentary behavior and mental health. Additionally, more laboratory-based study designs (e.g., randomized controlled trials and sedentary behavior interventions) could be constructed to explore the relationship between sedentary behavior and human well-being, with a particular focus on the context of sedentary behavior (e.g., watching TV versus reading) and the underlying potential neurobiological mechanisms.”

Despite these limitations, the study has several strengths, including its large sample size and use of a robust statistical model that accounts for stable individual differences. By analyzing the data separately for men and women, the researchers were able to identify important sex-specific patterns that might otherwise have been missed.

“My long-term goal is to develop a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic relationships between sedentary behavior and human well being across the lifespan, with a particular focus on modifiable lifestyle factors,” Zou explained. “Previous sedentary behavior-mental health studies still lack systematic summarization. The absence of a synthesized framework significantly impedes and limits the development of high-quality studies. Collectively, building upon the current investigation of TV viewing and loneliness, our plan is to propose a sedentary behavior-mental health model that accounts for the context and the type of sedentary behavior.”

The study, “Bidirectional relationships between television viewing and loneliness in middle-aged and older men and women,” was authored by Zijun Liu, Andre Oliveira Werneck, Fabian Herold, Cassandra J. Lowe, Mats Hallgren, Boris Cheval, Benjamin Tari, Brendon Stubbs, Markus Gerber, Ryan S. Falck, Arthur F. Kramer, Neville Owen, and Liye Zou.

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The research team, led by Professor Paul McNamee from the University of Aberdeen and collaborators from Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore and the University of Turin, analysed Understanding Society national data from January 2015 to March 2023 to compare results pre- and post-pandemic.

Researchers examined a range of health behaviours including fruit and vegetable consumption, alcohol use and physical activity as part of the study as well as comparing measures of mental health. They found that on both counts women were more negatively affected by the pandemic than their male counterparts.

The study found women reported fewer days of fruit consumption and smaller reductions in alcohol intake during the Covid pandemic.

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Psychological distress increased for both women and men during the pandemic, with women experiencing a greater rise. And the link between health behaviours and mental health weakened for women during the pandemic, with a healthy lifestyle no longer showing a significant connection to mental health.

In contrast, these relationships remained consistent for men. Prior to the pandemic, health behaviours offered greater protective benefits for women’s mental health, but during the pandemic, this protective effect became stronger for men. 

Professor Paul McNamee who led the research at the University of Aberdeen said: “We found that women reported poorer overall changes in health behaviours than men during the pandemic. Specifically, women reported fewer days of fruit consumption and smaller reductions in alcohol intake. We also found that psychological distress increased for both women and men during the pandemic, with women experiencing a greater rise.”

Professor Paul McNamee led the research at the University of Aberdeen (Image: University of Aberdeen)

Dr Karen Arulsamy from Duke-NUS Medical School said: “The adverse changes in women’s health behaviours compared to men persist through to May 2023, suggesting longer-term effects were likely worsened by financial pressures during this period. It’s important we keep tracking these trends.”

Dr Silvia Mendolia from the University of Turin said: “Our study also shows that the pandemic considerably weakened the protective effect of health behaviours on mental health for women but not for men. For women, adopting a healthy lifestyle was strongly correlated with mental health before the pandemic, but this relationship was no longer significant during the pandemic.”

Professor McNamee concluded: “Although conducted using data before and during the pandemic, these findings still have relevance today – they suggest that at times of heightened stress, women from lower socio-economic backgrounds with caregiving responsibilities that limit their ability to maintain levels of social engagement face more challenges in engaging in healthier behaviours. Therefore, targeted interventions such as social prescribing, accessible through referral from primary care providers and other voluntary agencies, could be made more widely available.”

The research was funded by a research award from the Scottish Government Rural & Environmental Science and Analytical Services’ (RESAS) Strategic Research Programme 2022-27. Financial support was also provided by the University of Aberdeen and the Chief Scientist Office of the Scottish Government Health & Social Care Directorates.