A new study has discovered a striking gender gap in diabetes.

Women with diabetes are 44 percent more likely to develop coronary heart disease than diabetic men, the study found.

They are also 44 percent more likely to die of heart disease than men with diabetes.

Researchers examined data on 850,000 people. This information was pooled from 64 studies spanning 1966 to 2013.

"The days of lumping men and women together are coming to an end," said Dr. Tara Narula, associate director of the Cardiac Care Unit at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. "We need to see women as unique entities regarding their risk factors and, if we recognize there's this gender differential, we need to be more aggressive in screening and treating women for diabetes or heart disease."

Comfort food


The idea that eating certain foods make us feel better when we're down may be a myth, psychologists say.

In fact, we may simply feel better after some time has passed, regardless of what food we eat, a new study says. In the study, people were asked to pick foods that they thought would make them feel better if they were in a bad mood, such as chocolate, cookies or ice cream. They were also asked to pick foods that they liked, but that they didn't think would boost their mood.

The participants then watched a 20-minute video intended to elicit feelings of sadness, anger and fear. They rated their mood immediately after the video, and three minutes later. In those three minutes, they were served either their comfort food, a food they liked, a granola bar, or no food at all. (All participants received their comfort food during one visit, but received different foods on subsequent visits when the experiment was repeated.)

As expected, participants were in a bad mood immediately after watching the video. Three minutes later, their mood improved, regardless of whether they had their comfort food, another food, or no food at all.

"We were incredibility surprised by those results," said study researcher Heather Scherschel Wagner, a doctorate candidate at the University of Minnesota, who presented the results here at the Association for Psychological Science meeting.

Prior to the study, the researchers believed that there was something to eating comfort food, said Wagner, who noted that her own comfort food was her mom's French onion soup.

But the new findings suggest that "whether it's your comfort food, or it’s a granola bar, or if you eat nothing at all, you will eventually feel better. Basically, comfort food can't speed up that healing process," Wagner said.