Research from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia suggests that young female athletes who suffer concussions have longer recovery times than their male peers, but not because of differences in strength or hormones as some have speculated. Rather, it's because girls tend to take longer to seek or get specialty medical treatment, said a study published in the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine. The median number of days for girls to be seen by a specialist was 15, while it was nine days for boys.

Early inflammation may signal early death

Even in apparently healthy adolescents, signs of inflammation may portend premature death in adulthood. Adolescents who show signs of body-wide inflammation may be at risk of early death decades later, researchers report. A study in JAMA Pediatrics used blood samples from 106,000 healthy Swedish men, 16 to 20 years old, examined for compulsory military service. The test measures the erythrocyte sedimentation rate, or how fast red blood cells fall in a test tube. Inflammation causes red blood cells to clump and fall faster; the faster they fall, the greater the inflammation. Compared with men with a sed rate of less than 10 millimeters per hour, those with a reading higher than 15 had a 36% increased probability of premature death from any cause, a 78% increased risk of death from cancer, a 54% increased risk of cardiovascular mortality, and more than twice the risk of dying from a heart attack.

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