Quitting smoking helps after serious heart attack damage
(Reuters Health) – It’s never too late for smokers to do their hearts good by kicking the habit — even after a heart attack has left them with significant damage to the organ’s main pumping chamber, a new study suggests.
Past studies have found that smokers who kick the habit after suffering a heart attack have a lower rate of repeat heart attacks and live longer than their counterparts who continue to smoke.
But little has been known about the benefits of quitting among heart attack patients left with a complication called left ventricular (LV) dysfunction — where damage to the heart’s main pumping chamber significantly reduces its blood-pumping efficiency.
So it has been unclear whether that dysfunction might “drown out” the heart benefits of smoking cessation, said Dr. Amil M. Shah, the lead researcher on the new study and a staff cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
But in their study, Shah and his colleagues found that heart attack survivors with LV dysfunction may stand to benefit as much from smoking cessation as other heart attack patients do.
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Heart Risks Seen in Diabetes Medicine
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: June 28, 2010
WASHINGTON — Two studies published in influential medical journals and using very different methods found that Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine made by GlaxoSmithKline, substantially increased patients’ heart risks.
The studies were made public Monday in hopes of influencing an expert panel that will convene on July 13 and 14 to offer advice to the Food and Drug Administration about whether Avandia should be removed from the market.
An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association, accompanying one of the studies, concluded that there was little reason that patients should ever be given Avandia, since a similar medicine, Actos, works just as well but appears to involve fewer risks.
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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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Regular teeth brushing linked to healthier hearts
(Reuters) – People who don’t brush their teeth twice a day have an increased risk of heart disease, scientists said on Friday, adding scientific weight to 19th century theories about oral health and chronic disease.
British researchers studied nearly 12,000 adults in Scotland and found those with poor oral hygiene had a 70 percent extra risk of heart disease compared with those who brushed twice a day and who were less likely to have unhealthy gums.
People with gum disease are more likely to develop heart disease and diabetes because inflammation in the body, including in the mouth and gums, plays a role in the build up of clogged arteries, said Richard Watt from University College London, who led the study.
The 70 percent extra risk compares to a 135 percent extra risk of heart disease in those who smoke, he said.
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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.
What your heart and brain are doing when you’re in love
(CNN) — Poets, novelists and songwriters have described it in countless turns of phrase, but at the level of biology, love is all about chemicals.
Although the physiology of romantic love has not been extensively studied, scientists can trace the symptoms of deep attraction to their logical sources.
“Part of the whole attraction process is strongly linked to physiological arousal as a whole,” said Timothy Loving (his real name), assistant professor of human ecology at the University of Texas, Austin. “Typically, that’s going to start with things like increased heart rate, sweatiness and so on,”
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Cost Concerns Delay Heart Attack Care
April 13, 2010 — Patients without health insurance and even insured patients worried about paying for medical care are more likely to delay seeking treatment during a heart attack, new research confirms.
It is well recognized that uninsured and underinsured people access preventive medical care and receive treatment for chronic conditions like diabetes and asthma less often than people who are fully insured. But this study is among the first to suggest that cost concerns affect decisions about potentially lifesaving emergency medical care.
Nearly half of uninsured heart attack patients surveyed and 45% of people who considered themselves underinsured delayed seeking medical treatment for more than six hours after symptoms began, compared to 39% of patients without financial concerns.
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Robin Williams seeing more clearly after surgery, rehab
By Donna Freydkin, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Robin Williams, the motormouthed and masterfully quick-witted comedian, has become a man of leisure.
“It’s so nice having time off right now. There’s no rush. Enjoy it. When you have something like heart surgery, you appreciate the simple things, like breathing. I’m taking it a lot easier.”
Williams, 58, has recovered from the aortic valve replacement he underwent at the Cleveland Clinic last year.
“I was running down. They looked at my heart and went, ‘You’ve got a blown valve.’ A year later, I’m working well. It’s kicking hard,” he says.
He’s back to riding his bike, even tackling the San Francisco hills. And he has a new girlfriend, who accompanied him to the Oscars. “Yes, there’s a person. Very lovely, and it’s been very nice and very quiet,” he says. “Her name is Susan Schneider. Very sweet. Good peeps.”
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Happiness – or even just pretending to be happy – is good for your heart, researchers find
BY Jacob E. Osterhout
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Don’t worry, be happy – or just fake it.
A new study published in the European Heart Journal shows that happiness, even if feigned, may decrease the risk of heart attacks.
According to the AP, the researchers at Columbia University graded the happiness levels of close to 1,700 adults in Canada who had no heart problems in 1995.
They then went back after ten years and examined the 145 people who developed cardiac problems and discovered that they were not as happy as the subjects who were still healthy.
Using a five-point scale, researchers measured their subjects’ happiness, adjusting their results to take into account age, gender and smoking.
They discovered that for every point on the happiness scale, the subjects were 22 percent less likely to experience heart problems.
Even if subjects weren’t really happy, feigning a positive outlook still proved beneficial to their hearts.
“If you aren’t naturally a happy person, just try acting like one,” Dr. Karina Davidson, the studies lead author, told the AP. “It could help your heart.”
Cutting Off Blood Flow Limits Damage During Heart Attack
FRIDAY, Feb. 26 (HealthDay News) — Cutting off the flow of blood to the arm by repeatedly inflating a blood pressure cuff appears to reduce the amount of tissue damaged during a heart attack, a new Danish study shows.
This procedure somehow has a protective effect on heart muscle, by mechanisms that are not yet understood, the researchers said.
In a study of 142 patients being rushed to a hospital for treatment of severe heart attacks, the amount of heart tissue saved for those who got the treatment, called induced ischemia, was 30 percent greater than for those who didn’t, according to a report in the Feb. 27 issue of The Lancet.
“For patients being transported to the hospital for acute myocardial infarction [heart attack], we inflated the blood pressure cuff for five minutes, relaxed it and repeated it four times,” said study author Dr. Hans Erik Botker, a professor of cardiology at Aarhus University Hospital in Skejby.
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