Healthy eating helps reverse metabolic syndrome
(Reuters Health) – People with metabolic syndrome — a cluster of risk factors for heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes — have a better chance of reversing it if they stick to a healthy diet, a new study shows.
While it seems obvious that eating healthy would make you healthier, the findings are important because they show it’s a person’s dietary pattern, not just individual components of their diet, that matters, Dr. Alice Lichtenstein, an expert on diet and heart health from Tufts University in Boston, who was not involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.
A person is considered to have metabolic syndrome if they have three or more of the following risk factors: excess belly fat; high triglyceride levels (a harmful blood fat); low levels of “good” HDL cholesterol; high blood pressure; and either high blood sugar levels or type 2 diabetes.
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Brushing Teeth May Keep Away Heart Disease
By Bill Hendrick
WebMD Health News
Brushing your teeth is not only good for your pearly whites, it also decreases your chances of suffering a heart attack, a new study indicates.
Researchers in England analyzed data from more than 11,000 people taking part in a study called the Scottish Health Survey. They examined lifestyle habits such as smoking, overall physical activity, and oral health routines.
Patients were asked whether they visited a dentist at least once every six months, every one to two years, rarely, or never. They were also asked how often they brushed their teeth — twice daily, once a day, or less than every day.
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Early menopause raises heart disease risk
(Reuters) – Women who go through menopause early, before age 46, may have more than twice the risk of having a heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular event later in life, researchers reported on Monday.
The risk was the same even when women took hormone replacement therapy, which doctors once prescribed expressly to prevent heart disease, the researchers said at a meeting of the Endocrine Society in San Diego.
“It is important for women to know that early menopause is a potential risk factor for cardiovascular disease, the number one killer of American women,” Dr. Melissa Wellons of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who led the study, said in a statement.
“They can then work harder to improve their modifiable risk factors, such as high cholesterol and blood pressure, by exercising and following a healthy diet,” Wellons said.
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Is your desk job bad for your health?
(Health.com) — Sharon Gavin used to spend all day on her feet. Now she has a full-time desk job–and the transition has been a painful one.
In 2002, after 12 years as a nurse, Gavin took a new job that requires her to spend the bulk of her day in front of a computer screen. The switch to a more sedentary work life has left her with nerve pain in her neck, back, and left shoulder.
“This is too much sitting; that was too much standing,” says Gavin, 57, a patient safety specialist at a pharmaceutical company in Wilmington, Delaware.
Gavin’s problems aren’t uncommon. The hazards of sitting all day long–whether you’re staring at a computer screen at work or watching TV on the couch at home–are better understood now than ever. In recent years, researchers have linked too much sitting to back pain, repetitive stress injuries, obesity, and even an increased risk of diabetes and heart disease.
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High ‘good’ cholesterol tied to lower cancer risk
(Reuters Health) – High levels of high-density lipoprotein cholesterol – a.k.a. “good cholesterol” — may be linked to lower risks of cancer as well as heart attacks, new research suggests.
Dr. Richard Karas of the Molecular Cardiology Research Institute at Tufts University in Boston and his colleagues had previously found that people with low levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL, a.k.a. “bad” cholesterol) were actually at higher risk of cancer.
While that finding raised concerns that treating people to lower their cholesterol could be upping their cancer risk, Karas told Reuters Health, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
In the current study, the researchers used the same body of research-dozens of “gold standard” clinical trials of cholesterol-lowering drugs called statins-to investigate whether there might be a relationship between their high-density lipoprotein (HDL) levels and cancer risk. (Karas and one of his co-authors have received consulting fees or grants from two statin manufacturers.)
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U.S. heart attack rates declining: study
(Reuters) – Heart attack rates fell 24 percent in California between 2000 and 2008, probably because of better care, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.
The study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first large survey since the adoption of new treatments and medicines for preventing heart attacks. It examined more than 46,000 heart attack hospitalizations.
The decline, which reflects similar trends across the United States, follows bans on smoking in public places. Also, doctors have become better at treating high blood pressure and cholesterol.
Dr. Robert Yeh of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues said the 24 percent drop was seen even though doctors can better detect heart attacks and despite the growing rates of diabetes and obesity, both of which raise the risk of heart attack.
“We would expect an increase in heart attacks because we’re picking up more heart attacks than we used to,” Yeh said in a telephone interview. “We found that, despite that, they are still going down.”
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Mediterranean diet helps existing heart disease, too
(Reuters Health) – Eating a Mediterranean-style diet can help heart patients stay healthy, new research from Greece shows.
This eating pattern, which includes lots of fruits and vegetables, nuts, vegetable oils, low-fat dairy products, legumes, whole grains, and fish, has been shown to help shield people from heart disease and may also ward off certain cancers, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou of the University of Athens and her colleagues note in their report.
But less information is available on whether the Mediterranean diet might be helpful for people who already have heart disease.
To investigate, Chrysohoou and her team looked at 1,000 patients who had suffered heart attacks or severe chest pain while at rest or with only light exertion. They rated each patient on a scale of 0 to 55 based on how closely their eating matched the Mediterranean ideal.
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Study suggests processed meat a real health risk
(Reuters) – Eating bacon, sausage, hot dogs and other processed meats can raise the risk of heart disease and diabetes, U.S. researchers said on Monday in a study that identifies the real bad boys of the meat counter.
Eating unprocessed beef, pork or lamb appeared not to raise risks of heart attacks and diabetes, they said, suggesting that salt and chemical preservatives may be the real cause of these two health problems associated with eating meat.
The study, an analysis of other research called a meta-analysis, did not look at high blood pressure or cancer, which are also linked with high meat consumption.
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Memo to boss: 11-hour days are bad for the heart
(Reuters) – People working 10 or 11 hours a day are more likely to suffer serious heart problems, including heart attacks, than those clocking off after seven hours, researchers said on Tuesday.
The finding, from an 11-year study of 6,000 British civil servants, does not provide definitive proof that long hours cause coronary heart disease but it does show a clear link, which experts said may be due to stress.
In all, there were 369 cases of death due to heart disease, non-fatal heart attacks and angina among the London-based study group — and the risk of having an adverse event was 60 percent higher for those who worked three to four hours overtime.
Working an extra one to two hours beyond a normal seven-hour day was not associated with increased risk.
“It seems there might a threshold, so it is not so bad if you work another hour or so more than usual,” said Dr Marianna Virtanen, an epidemiologist at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health and University College London.
The higher incidence of heart problems among those working overtime was independent of a range of other risk factors including smoking, being overweight or having high cholesterol.
But Virtanen said it was possible the lifestyle of people working long hours deteriorated over time, for example as a result of poor diet or increased alcohol consumption.
More fundamentally, long hours may be associated with work-related stress, which interferes with metabolic processes, as well as “sickness presenteeism,” whereby employees continue working when they are ill.
Virtanen and colleagues published their findings in the European Heart Journal.
Commenting on the study, Gordon McInnes, professor of clinical pharmacology at the University of Glasgow’s Western Infirmary, said the findings could have widespread implications for doctors assessing patients’ heart risks.
“If the effect is truly causal, the importance is much greater than commonly recognized. Overtime-induced work stress might contribute to a substantial proportion of cardiovascular disease,” he said.
Bran Reduces Heart Disease Deaths
Study Shows Whole-Grain Foods Lower Cardio Risk in People With Diabetes.
By Salynn Boyles
WebMD Health News
Reviewed by Laura J. Martin, MD
May 10, 2010 — People with diabetes who eat plenty of bran-rich whole grains appear to have a reduced risk of death from heart attack, stroke, and other cardiovascular causes, a new study shows.
Researchers from Harvard University followed almost 8,000 nurses with type 2 diabetes for almost three decades.
They found that women who ate the most bran had a 35% lower risk of death from heart disease and a 28% lower risk of death from all causes than women who ate the least.
Compared to people without diabetes, diabetic people have two to three times the risk of heart disease and early death.
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