$20 million for childhood mental health research

Larry Humphreys, a retired Federal Emergency Management Agency worker in Moultrie, Georgia, says he and his wife won’t be traveling much next year after their monthly health insurance premium payment increases more than 40%, to $938. Humphreys, 68, feels betrayed by the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. “As federal employees we sacrificed good salaries in the private sector because we thought the benefits from government would be better now, in retirement,” he said. As the nation’s largest employer-sponsored health insurance program, the FEHB Program covers more than 8.2 million federal government employees and retirees, and it was once celebrated…

PHOENIX — Current genetic screening guidelines fail to identify most people with an inherited condition known as familial hypercholesterolemia that can cause dangerously high cholesterol and early heart disease, a Mayo Clinic study found.  The condition often passes silently through families for generations. It is highly treatable, yet people who remain undiagnosed are at greater risk for heart attacks and strokes.  Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, affecting millions of adults each year. It includes conditions such as coronary artery disease, heart failure and stroke. One of its key risk factors is high…

Getty Images ROCHESTER, Minn. — Mayo Clinic researchers have developed a new tool that can estimate a person’s risk of developing memory and thinking problems associated with Alzheimer’s disease years before symptoms appear. The research, published in The Lancet Neurology, builds on decades of data from the Mayo Clinic Study of Aging — one of the world’s most comprehensive population-based studies of brain health. The study found that women have a higher lifetime risk than men of developing dementia and mild cognitive impairment (MCI), a transitional stage between healthy aging and dementia that often affects quality of life but…