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Taking statin drugs and also exercising may reduce the risk of early death up to 70%, a new study finds. That finding comes from a study of 10,000 veterans. All had high LDL (“bad cholesterol”) and received care at a U.S. veterans’ hospital. Nearly all of them were men. Everyone took a treadmill test to assess fitness. Researchers looked at people’s medical records and kept track of people for 10 years. Those who took statins were 35% less likely to die during the study than people who did not take these drugs. Statins reduce LDL and inflammation. Death rates were 70% lower for people who had the highest fitness level and also took statins than for those who did neither. The fittest people had 60% lower death rates even if they did not take statins.

A new drug for insomnia helped people get a little more sleep with few side effects, researchers report. Suvorexant acts in a different way than drugs now on the market. It targets the brain chemicals that help keep people awake. Other drugs affect the brain in a broader way. That’s one reason for side effects, such as daytime sleepiness. The new study of suvorexant included 254 healthy adults with insomnia. People were randomly assigned to receive 1 of 4 doses of suvorexant. They took the drug for 4 weeks and placebo (fake) pills for another 4 weeks. They spent the first night of each treatment in a sleep lab. On their first day taking suvorexant, they slept about 5% to 13% longer than those who took the placebo. That equaled about 21 to 37 extra minutes of sleep. The average difference varied with the dose people were taking.

Changes in how humans live and travel have increased the spread of diseases we get from animals, a new series of reports says. The new reports, published in the journal Lancet, focus on zoonotic infections. These are diseases that spread from other animals to humans. Infections in wildlife may be spread to humans by carriers such as mosquitoes and ticks. Sometimes they are spread by direct contact. All of these contacts have increased, the Lancet articles say. Reasons include widespread changes in land use and more world trade and travel. For example, people may be exposed to wildlife for the first time when an area opens up to logging or farming. Some infections that spread to humans from animals, such as HIV, have become pandemics. This means they affect many people across a wide area. Until now, scientists have never predicted that an infection would become a pandemic.