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Registered San Pedro Nurse Tracey Desai gives tips to new mother Lani on how to position her daughter while breastfeeding. Lani said she wanted to breastfeed her child from the beginning, and feels that the benefits outweigh the difficulties.

Longer-term and exclusive breastfeeding may be helped by giving a baby small amounts of formula in its first days of life, a new study has found.

Published in the journal Pediatrics this week, the study found that newborns who are losing weight after birth and are given a small amount of formula to supplement while the mother’s milk comes in are more likely to be exclusively breastfeeding at three months old.

The research comes out of the University of California, San Francisco, and is likely to be controversial. The Center’s for Disease Control and Prevention recently launched a campaign to get mothers to breastfeed exclusively.  The agency says less than half of American babies still breastfeed at six months.

Breast milk is more easily digestible than formula, which is critical for a developing digestive system, said Dr Neal Kaufman, a pediatrician and one of the Commissioners of First 5 LA. Kaufman and others say the fatty acids, vitamins, and antibodies that babies get through mother’s milk make it the “perfect” first food. 

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Rosaura Guizar, a patient at UMMA Community Clinic in South Los Angeles, is examined by Simmi Gandhi, a nurse practitioner at UMMA. A recent survey suggests that most nurse practitioners believe they should be able to lead their own practices – and most physicians disagree with them.

Ask nurse practitioners if they should be allowed to lead their own medical practices, and more than 8 in 10 will say yes. That's already happening in some parts of South Los Angeles, an area that's already lacks resources to fully meet the area's health care demand.

But ask physicians that same question, and not even 1 in 5 are comfortable with that idea.

That's according to a new survey published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which the authors wrote suggests that "physicians and nurses do not agree about their respective roles in the delivery of primary care."

A recent congressional report estimated that the U.S. is short about 16,000 primary care doctors. By 2025, that gap is expected to grow to about 52,000. Mid-level providers like nurse practitioners and physician assistants are expected to help fill that void nationwide, especially as the Affordable Care Act expands access to health care via the statewide insurance marketplaces and the Medicaid expansion.

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Researchers found that people who lived near busy roadways had a 4 percent higher chance of dying from heart problems.

Central. Slauson. Florence. Alameda. Vernon.

Those are a few of the busy streets running through parts of South Los Angeles – and according to a new study, living near those thoroughfares could be bad for your kidneys.

Dr. Murray Mittleman, the director of cardiovascular epidemiology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, was the senior author of the study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

"What we found was that among individuals who had a history of having had a stroke, people who lived closer to major roadways had a [decrease] in their kidney function," he said. "The closer an individual lived to a major roadway, the bigger the [decrease] in their kidney function we observed."

While Mittleman and his team didn't establish a cause-and-effect relationship – only an association – he did suggest that association could have substantial health implications.

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A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says black and Latino people are less likely to have their high blood pressure under control.

Latinos and blacks are less likely to have their blood pressure under control than whites, says a recent federal report, and more likely to have a more serious form of the condition. Read the full study below.

Dr. Cesar Barba, the interim medical director at UMMA Community Clinic in South Los Angeles, has said that he and his staff tend to more than 1,200 high blood pressure patients, whose cases account for more than 1 in 5 of their patient diagnosis.

"That is likely our number-one diagnosis," he said, adding that most of his patients are either black or Latino.

Barba's experience aligns with the recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which said high blood pressure affects nearly 1 in 3 U.S. adults.

A "multifactorial" issue

Blood pressure is high in general in South L.A., Barba explained, pointing to the prevalence of relatively cheap salty food in the area as one of the primary reasons. More than 86,000 South L.A. households make less than $20,000 annually – and about another 59,000 make below $40,000, according to the L.A. Times' Mapping L.A. project. That low socioeconomic status can push people to over-consume cheap, salty food.

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Experts knew experiencing domestic violence puts people at an increased risk of depression, but now a new study indicates that depression may also put someone at an increased risk of domestic violence.

For women, the link between domestic violence and depression may go both ways, according to a new study.

Writing in PLOS Medicine, the authors analyzed previously-published data involving more than 36,000 people and found that women who experienced domestic violence were more likely to be depressed – which researchers already knew.

But they also found that depression seemed to put women at higher risk of domestic violence. 

That same two-way relationship wasn't found in men, and Adriana Molina, the co-chair of the Violence Prevention Coalition of Greater Los Angeles's steering committee, found that "really interesting."

"That part made me wonder how much of it is depression and how much is the socialization, and the fact that we are socializing our women to not speak up or put up with domestic violence," she said.

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