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By Nancy Lapid, Health Science Editor

Hello Health Rounds readers! With wildfires spreading around the world, researchers are learning more about their health effects. Today we highlight a study that shows the danger of exposure to wildfire smoke for patients recovering from lung surgery. We also report on a potentially exciting advance in robotics that may one day allow a soft, tiny robot to travel deep into the lungs and other tissues to find and treat hard-to-reach cancers. A third study demonstrates the connection of a mother’s high blood pressure during pregnancy or later in life to the odds of chronic hypertension in her adult children.

In breaking news, see these stories from our Reuters journalists: Dangerous U.S. heat wave pushes eastward; Most unaccompanied children failed to win asylum in Greece; Depression and anxiety drive increase in UK people too ill to work; Junior doctors in England plan further strikes; and Biden pushes insurers to improve access to mental health care.

Wildfire smoke – shown here in Washington state in 2022 – is particularly dangerous for patients recovering from lung cancer surgery, a new study shows. REUTERS/Matt Mills McKnight

Patients recovering from lung cancer surgery who are exposed to wildfire smoke have poorer survival rates than patients who live where the air is cleaner, according to new data.

U.S. researchers studied 466,912 men and women who had surgery for non-small cell lung cancer between 2004 and 2019, including 168,645 who lived in zip code areas affected by wildfire smoke during the following year.

The risk of death during an average of roughly three years following discharge from the hospital was 49% higher for patients exposed to wildfire smoke within three months than for unexposed patients. It was 39% higher for those exposed between four and six months after their surgery, and 17% higher for patients with smoke exposure between seven and 12 months, according to a report published on Thursday in JAMA Oncology.

“Although much attention is paid to the health consequences of exposure to wildfires in western states, where intense and large wildfires are more likely to occur… in our study, individuals residing in the southern U.S. were more frequently exposed to wildfires,” the researchers wrote.

Given the increased wildfire activity in the U.S. and elsewhere around the world “identification of medically high-risk populations, such as patients with lung cancer, is crucial for disaster preparedness and response efforts,” they concluded.

Read more about wildfire smoke on Reuters.com

• What wildfire smoke novices need to know.
• What are the health risks from wildfire smoke?

A tiny ultra-soft experimental robot with magnetic tentacles that can travel deep into the lungs to detect and treat the first signs of lung cancer could pave the way for less invasive treatments, researchers say.

Compared to standard bronchoscopy equipment for visualizing the inside of the airways, the silicone robot – only two millimeters in diameter – traveled 37% deeper into the smallest airways of cadaver lungs, with less tissue damage, according to a report published on Thursday in Nature Communications Engineering.

The device has tentacles that allow it to navigate to multiple targets at once for obtaining biopsies or delivering treatments. It sits at the tip of a soft magnetic catheter that adapts to an individual’s anatomy as doctors navigate through the airways.

“This new approach has the advantage of being specific to the anatomy, softer than the anatomy and fully-shape controllable via magnetics. These three main features have the potential to revolutionize navigation inside the body,” study leader Pietro Valdastri of the University of Leeds said in a statement.

Valdastri’s team has also performed experimental endoscopic brain surgery using two of their tiny tentacled robots at the same time, passing the magnetic catheters into a replica of a skull via the nose, according to a report published on Thursday in Advanced Intelligent Systems.

Being able to use two of the devices simultaneously in a confined space like the skull “offers prospects for improving endoscopic procedures currently served by large and rigid tools, with associated benefit to the patient and surgeon,” they wrote.

Adults are at particularly high risk for hypertension themselves if their mothers had a combination of high blood pressure while pregnant and then chronically later on in life, a new study found.

Researchers studied 8,755 individuals born between 1976 and 1982 to 7,544 women who all resided in the same community at the time of delivery.

Those whose mothers were hypertensive while pregnant had 50% higher odds of having chronic hypertension themselves.

And those whose mothers developed chronic high blood pressure later in life had 73% higher odds of having the same problem themselves.

Having a mother with high blood pressure both while pregnant and then chronically later in life appeared to confer an even greater risk, more than doubling the likelihood of chronic hypertension in offspring, according to a report published on Tuesday in Hypertension.

“This has important clinical implications for patients who may be at increased risk due to these exposures,” the researchers said, adding those patients may benefit from additional screening and close clinical follow-up.

This newsletter was edited by Bill Berkrot.

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