Health

The researchers hope that treating PTSD could reduce the risks of premature birth

An analysis of more than 16,000 births by female veterans found that women with post-traumatic stress disorder are significantly more likely to give birth prematurely.

PTSD has long been suspected of increasing the risk of premature delivery, but the study, jointly conducted by Stanford University and the U.S. Department of Veterans’ Affairs, provides strong support for the need to treat mothers with PTSD.

“Stress is setting off biologic pathways that are inducing preterm labor,” Ciaran Phibbs, the study’s senior author and an associate professor of pediatrics at Stanford, said in a statement. The study, published online on Thursday in Obstetrics & Gynecology, offered hope that treatment could prove effective in reducing the risk. While women with PTSD in the year leading up to delivery faced a higher risk of premature delivery, women who had been diagnosed with PTSD but had not experienced symptoms of the disorder in the past year did not.

“This makes us hopeful that if you treat a mom who has active PTSD early in her pregnancy, her stress level could be reduced, and the risk of giving birth prematurely might go down,” Phibbs said.

The implications extend beyond women in combat, since PTSD is not unique to combat. In fact, half of the veterans in the study had never been deployed to combat.

With Republicans soon to be in charge of the House and Senate, talk of repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is heating up again. Here’s what you need to know about Republicans’ plans for the law and whether the GOP has a chance at changing—or repealing—it in the next two years.

Full Repeal

House Republicans have voted more than 50 times to repeal Obamacare. Even with its new Senate majority, the GOP lacks the 60 votes necessary to overcome a filibuster, meaning repeal legislation is unlikely ever to reach President Obama’s desk. Even if it did, he has said he would veto such a bill.

Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has indicated he may try to alter the ACA through the budget reconciliation process that requires just a 51-vote majority, but full repeal isn’t possible under the special budget rules.

Odds: Not going to happen

Repealing the individual mandate

Obamacare’s requirement that nearly all Americans have health insurance is unpopular, but as a centerpiece of the law, the individual mandate is critical to its function. Voiding the mandate would likely cause insurance premiums to rise steeply and would increase the uninsured rate, which the ACA has steadily brought down since its enactment. The mandate’s unpopularity means some Senate Democrats might feel pressure to vote for repeal, but President Obama has indicated he would veto such an action, saying Nov. 5, “The individual mandate is a line I can’t cross.”

Odds: Not going to happen

Repealing the medical device tax

Getting rid of one of the ACA’s revenue generators, a 2.3 percent tax on medical devices, had bipartisan support even before the recent midterm elections and is likely to come up for a vote soon. The medical device lobby is powerful and has made the case that the tax, which started in 2013, is being passed to consumers in the form of higher health care and insurance costs. The provision is expected to generate about $30 billion over ten years. The medical device tax, part of a package of new fees meant to offset costs of the ACA, is not critical to the law’s function and President Obama may agree to roll it back if he can get something in return.

Odds: Possible

Repealing, altering or delaying the employer mandate

The ACA requires that mid-sized and large employers provide health insurance to full-time workers. Most already did even before the law, but there’s evidence that the employer mandate is causing some companies to eliminate insurance for part-time workers or convert some full-time positions into part-time ones. The employer mandate has already been delayed multiple times, most recently earlier this year when the White House announced that medium-sized businesses would not have to comply with the provision until 2016. The requirement for large businesses is scheduled to begin in 2015, but given that the provision is not in effect for any companies yet and the White House has delayed it before means it’s a target for repeal or revision.

Odds: Possible

Eliminating the Independent Payment Advisory Board

The IPAB is an independent panel created by the ACA to lower Medicare payments to health care providers if Congress doesn’t act to keep the program’s spending under control. IPAB is somewhat unpopular—Republicans have erroneously dubbed it a “death panel”—but since the board seats aren’t even filled and it hasn’t taken any action, garnering enough support to get rid of it might be challenging.

Odds: Possible

Lower the minimum threshold for what insurance must cover

Health plans for sale through the ACA’s insurance marketplaces, or exchanges, all have minimum requirements for what they cover and limits on how much consumers must pay out of pocket. Aside from those under 30 or those who’ve been given special exemptions, who can comply with the individual mandate by purchasing high-deductible catastrophic insurance, everyone must have standard comprehensive health plans to meet the individual mandate. But Republicans have said cheaper plans that provide less coverage should be offered to more people and should meet the requirement to have insurance.

Odds: Unlikely

Is it really worth the price and hype?

Welcome to Should I Eat This?—our weekly poll of five experts who answer nutrition questions that gnaw at you.

4/5 experts say no.

Coconut water—salty, sweet, translucent—gets many health freaks amped up. Electrolytes! Potassium! A natural hangover cure! But it also sets 4/5 experts’ eyes a’rolling.

“I’d rather spend my money on natural foods and not an expensive, over-hyped fluid,” says Nancy Clark, a registered dietitian and sports nutrition counselor. “It is a good source of potassium, but so are bananas and potatoes. ”

In fact, manufacturers do love to claim that coconut water packs as much potassium as a whole banana. It also has as much sugar as a banana—even an unsweetened version can run you 15 grams of sugar per bottle. But it packs none of the fiber the fruit does.

Coconut water is famous for nutritional posturing. Tod Cooperman, MD, president of the independent tester of health products ConsumerLab.com, conducted a study on coconut water in 2011. Most of the products it tested failed to meet their mineral claims and came up short on sodium and magnesium—two of coconut water’s heralded electrolytes. “While it’s certainly safe to drink coconut water, it’s been overhyped and even mislabeled,” Cooperman says. “If you plan on using it for mild hydration, it’s fine. But if you are doing prolonged physical exercise, you are losing sodium (not potassium) in your sweat, and coconut water is not a good source of sodium.”

The findings were used in a class-action lawsuit against Vita Coco in 2012 for exaggerating its nutritional claims with words like “super hydrating,” “nutrient-packed” and “mega-electrolyte.” The company agreed to a $10 million settlement.

Even so, the health halo of cocoH2O hasn’t gone away. Though it’s healthier than a regular neon-colored sports drink and does pack an impressive amount of potassium, “drinking one to two boxes of coconut water a day could lead to an increased intake of 60 to 120 calories a day, more for flavored waters or larger sizes, which adds up, particularly if one is trying to lose weight,” says Maya Rao, MD, a nephrologist at Columbia University. Both she and Jennifer Koslo, PhD, a registered dietitian and specialist in sports dietetics, recommend plain, boring, unhyped water for the average person. A 2012 study—which Vita Coco funded—found little difference in the hydration or performance of men after they worked out and drank bottled water, coconut water or a sports drink.

But before you totally cast aside the tropical fruit juice, Kristin Kirkpatrick, registered dietitian and manager of wellness nutrition services at Cleveland Clinic’s Wellness Institute, rushed to the liquid darling’s defense. If you’re looking for a break from regular water, it’s a much better choice than a sports drink loaded with excessive sugar, she says. And athletes aren’t the only ones who could use some extra potassium: “Individuals that may be struggling to get enough fruits and vegetables (major sources of potassium) in their diets” can benefit as well, she says. “Potassium may help to ward off stroke and early death in women, according to a 2014 study in the journal Stroke, and decreased potassium levels may be linked to a higher incidence of blood pressure.”

So should you drink coconut water? If you like your bananas unpeeled, de-fibered and super-expensive, this drink is for you. But free and boring water, plus a cheap piece of fruit, appears to work just as well.

Read next: Should I Eat Cheese?

"We're removing the doorway that HIV uses to get into cells"

Natural immunity is the most reliable way to protect yourself from viruses, bacteria and parasites. And the best way to acquire such immunity, in most cases, is to expose your immune system to the bug in question—either by getting infected or getting immunized.

Until now, such protection was only possible with diseases like chicken pox or polio. But now, scientists at Harvard University say that people might soon arm themselves against HIV in a similar way, but through a different method.

Chad Cowan and Derrick Rossi, both in the department of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University, and their colleagues report in the journal Cell Stem Cell that they have successfully edited the genomes of blood cells to make them impervious to HIV. In order survive, HIV needs to insert its genome into that of a healthy cell, and to infect these cells, HIV latches onto a protein on their surface called CCR5. If CCR5 is mutated, however, it’s as if the locks have been changed and HIV no longer has the right key; it can’t attach itself and the cells are protected from infection. So the scientists tried a new gene editing technique called CRISPR that allows them to precisely snip out parts of a cell’s genome, and they spliced out the CCR5 gene. To their surprise, the technique was relatively efficient, transforming about half of the cells they treated with CRISPR into CCR5-free, or HIV-resistant, cells.

“It was stunning to us how efficient CRISPR was in doing the genome editing,” says Cowan.

Scientists have previously used CRISPR to make another change in how HIV infects cells; they snipped out the HIV genes that the virus inserted into healthy cells. That process essentially returned HIV infected cells back to healthy ones.

The latest results, however, suggest that the technique may be useful even before HIV gets inside cells. CRISPR could be useful in treating HIV patients if it can replace patients’ own immune cells with the blockaded versions. The cells Cowan and Rossi used were blood stem cells, which give rise to the body’s entire blood and immune system. In order to work as a potential treatment for HIV, patients would provide a sample of blood stem cells from their bone marrow, which would be treated with CRISPR to remove the CCR5 gene, and these cells would be transplanted back to the patient. Since the bone marrow stem cells populate the entire blood and immune system, the patient would eventually have blood cells that were protected, or “immunized,” against HIV. “We’re removing the doorway that HIV uses to get into cells,” says Cowan.

To test this idea, they are already working with another research group to see if the HIV-impervious cells can treat mice infected with HIV.

Because healthy cells would be barricaded from HIV, the process might also lead to a cure for the disease. While the results are currently being tested to treat animals already infected with HIV, it may also be possible to one day transform a person’s immune cell genomes to be protected against the virus. Some people are already fortunate enough to be protected this way—a small percentage of people of European ancestry have natural immunity against HIV because they have two copies of mutated CCR5. They have been well studied and so far, their CCR5 aberrations don’t seem to be linked to any known health issues. “They are totally normal except for the fact that they are resistant to HIV,” says Cowan. “That’s a heartening thing: to have a group of people who are alive today who have been studied and looked at and seem totally fine.”

That’s why clinicians who research the virus and treat HIV patients are excited by the possibilities of CRISPR-aided strategies. If it’s possible to close the door on HIV, then it may be realistic to start thinking about closing the door on the AIDS epidemic in the near future.