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Based on research findings

A fruitty prescription for a healthy heart & long life

Dr. Dana King at the South Carolina Medical University USA who led a medical research on the impact of ‘Lifestyle changes’ on heart disease and long life has confirmed that it has a profound beneficial effect on a person’s general health of avoiding heart disease and living a long life.

He says “even in the middle age adopting a healthy lifestyle” can lower the risk of heart disease and premature death within years of changing habits. Even the middle ages can benefit from this.

THE PRESCRIPTION: Eating five or more fruits and vegetables everyday, exercising for at least two and half hours a week keeping weight down, and not smoking.

WASHINGTON: June 28-Even in middle age, adopting a healthy lifestyle can lower the risk for heart disease and premature death within years of changing habits, researchers reported on Thursday.

Middle-aged adults who began eating five or more fruits and vegetables everyday, exercising for at least 2 1/2 hours a week, keeping weight down and not smoking decreased their risk of heart disease by 35 percent and risk of death by 40 percent in the four years after they started. “The adopters of a healthy lifestyle basically caught up.

Within four years, their mortality rate and rate of heart attacks matched the people who had been doing these behaviours all along,” said Dr. Dana King at the Medical University of South Carolina, who led the research.

That is not to say people should wait until their 40s or 50s to get on track, he added.

“But even if you have not had a healthy lifestyle previously, it’s not too late to adopt those healthy lifestyle habits and gain almost immediate benefits.”

King and his team set out to find if late-starters could reap the rewards of habits like eating vegetables and walking 30 minutes a day. When they began tracking nearly 16,000 Americans between the ages of 45 and 64 in the late 1980s, only 8.5 percent were following all four of the habits they were studying, they reported in the American Journal of Medicine. Out of the other adults, 8.4 percent started practising all four habits by six years after the study began.

Those 970 lifestyle converts were most likely to pick up the fruit and vegetable habit at that late stage. Losing weight to fall within the healthy to overweight range — which the researchers counted as one of the healthy habits — was the least popular change.

LIVING LONGER

When they had picked up all four habits, they enjoyed a sharp decline in heart disease risk and in death from any cause.

It took all four — having just three of the healthy habits yielded no heart benefits and a more modest decrease in overall risk of death.

Still, said Dr. Nichola Davis at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, “these benefits are on a continuum.

The more of the healthy habits that you can adapt, the better. ...These are modest changes that they’re talking about.” King’s team took age, gender, race, and other risk categories for cardiovascular disease into account, although King said the converts likely took up other healthy life changes — such as cutting down on salt or upping their calcium intake — that might have contributed to their health benefits.

He and Davis, who was not involved in the study, said they were troubled so few Americans were doing them.

In particular, men, blacks, people with less education and lower incomes, and people with high blood pressure or diabetes were less likely to follow the health guidelines from the beginning or adopt them later in life.


Estrogen therapy may cut heart risks: study

Estrogen may reduce one heart disease threat among postmenopausal women in their 50s, although the therapy increases chances of blood clots and stroke, a study out Wednesday said.

The study found lower levels of calcified plaque in the coronary arteries of women who had their uteruses removed and used estrogen therapy to relieve menopause symptoms such as hot flashes. Coronary artery calcification is one factor leading to heart attack.

But the study’s senior author warned that the finding should not be interpreted to mean that estrogen should be used to prevent heart disease.

“Heart disease is complex, and the effect of estrogen on one risk factor does not adequately predict the risk of having a heart attack,” said Marcia Stefanick, professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center.

“But this study offers some reassurance for women of menopausal age that it’s not unsafe, in terms of the risk of heart attack, to take estrogen, at least for a few years,” she said.

Stefanick also warned that hormone therapy still carried other health risks such as the increased likelihood of blood clots and stroke.

The study, published in the June 21 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, was a follow-up to a the US-funded Women’s Health Initiative (WHI), the largest study of postmenopausal women.

The WHI study held two hormone therapy trials, one in which women who still had their uteruses were given a combination of estrogen and progestin and another in which women how underwent a hysterectomy were given estrogen alone.

The combination hormone therapy was halted in 2002 when evidence showed that the women faced a greater risk of breast cancer, stroke, blood clots and, in the first year of treatment, heart attack.

The single-hormone therapy stopped in 2004, a year earlier than its scheduled conclusion, because of concerns that estrogen increased the risk of stroke and blood clots, with no benefit for heart disease.

Stefanick, chair of the WHI study’s national steering committee, and other WHI investigators have continued to examine the data from both trials.

A second analysis of the estrogen-only trial, which included 1,064 women between the ages of 50 and 79, suggested that there might be some benefit for women in their 50s and those within 10 years of menopause, the new study said. AFP


Don’t get misled by baseless rumours

Dr. Wasantha Dissanayake (CMO) Cancer Hospital, Maharagama:

It is well proven that eating red meats and too much animal fat can cause cancers. Also using saturated fat in frying chicken can cause bowel, breast and ovarian cancers.

Eating fresh fruits, vegetables and dark green leafy vegetables which contain vitamin A, vitamin C, antioxidant vitamin E and the element Selenium can reduce the incidence of cancer.

So please don’t get misled by these false and baseless rumours and give your family kathurumurunga leaves, gotukola, kankun, mukunuwenna etc.


Daily dose of dark chocolate helps the heart: study

Eating a little bit of dark chocolate every day can reduce blood pressure without causing weight gain or other side effects, according to a study published Tuesday in the United States.

Previous research has shown that eating chocolate can lower blood pressure, but doctors have worried that any benefit could be offset by high doses of sugar, fat and calories.

The study conducted by German researchers at the University of Cologne sought to examine the effect of consuming small amounts of dark chocolate — which has lower levels of sugar and fat, said the study appearing in the July 4 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

A clinical trial carried out between January 2005 and December 2006 showed that 6.3 grams (30 calories) of dark chocolate a day was associated with a small but significant lowering of blood pressure, the study said.

The trial was carried out on 44 adults from 56 to 73 years old, including 24 women and 20 men, who suffered from pre-hypertension or stage one hypertension.

Participants were randomly assigned over 18 weeks to eat either dark chocolate containing 30 milligrams of healthy polyphenols or white chocolate, which has no cocoa.

For those who ate dark chocolate, their average systolic blood pressure was lowered by 2.9 millimeters of mercury and diastolic blood pressure by 1.9 millimeters without a change in body weight, plasma levels of lipids or glucose, the study said. Systolic refers to the top reading for blood pressure, and diastolic the bottom reading.

Consuming dark chocolate also helped reduce the prevalence of hypertension, or high blood pressure, from 86 percent to 68 percent, it said. The participants who ate white chocolate saw no reduction in their blood pressure.

While eating dark chocolate resulted in a relatively small reduction in blood pressure, “the effects are clinically noteworthy,” the study said.

For a population, a three millimeter reduction in systolic blood pressure would reduce the relative risk of stroke deaths by eight percent and the risk of coronary artery disease by five percent, the authors wrote.

The results of the trial were “intriguing,” the study said, as having heart patients eat small amounts of dark chocolate would be much simpler than the conventional approach which requires patients to change their entire diet.

Eating dark chocolate “is a dietary modification that is easy to adhere to and therefore may be a promising behavioral approach to lower blood pressure,” the authors wrote.

The researchers said future studies should examine the effects of dark chocolate in other populations and look at results over a longer period.
AFP


Drowning a common cause of death

Drowning is a very common form of accident in our country. Every year, over 1000 drown in rivers, tanks and the sea. Some times little children fall in to unprotected wells and pits and drown.

The majority of those who drown are children and adolescents. Sadly, some drown when trying to save others.

The National Committee for Prevention Injuries has recently started a campaign to prevent these accidents, and the Director General of Health Services has issued a circular on the subject outlining the step to be taken by the Medical Officers of Health in this regard.

The WHO has given a new definition to drowning. A WHO bulletin explains why this was done. This is what it says.

Drowning is a major global public health problem. Effective prevention of drowning requires programmes and policies that address known risk factors throughout the world. Surveillance, however, has been hampered by the lack of a uniform and internationally accepted definition that permits all relevant cases to be counted.

To develop a new definition, an international consensus procedure was conducted.

Experts in clinical medicine, injury epidemiology, prevention and rescue from all over the world participated in a series of “electronic” discussions and face-to-face workshops.

The major requirements of a new definition were intensely debated. The consensus was that the new definition should include both cases of fatal and non-fatal drowning.

After considerable dialogue and debate, the following definition was adopted: Drowning is the process of experiencing respiratory impairment from submersion/ immersion an liquid.

Drowning outcomes should be classified as: death, morbidity, and no morbidity. There was also consensus that the terms wet, dry, active, passive, silent and secondary drowning should no longer be used.

Thus a simple, comprehensive and internationally accepted definition of drowning had been developed.

Its use should support future activities in drowning surveillance worldwide, and lead to more reliable and comprehensive epidemiological information on this global, and frequently preventable, public health problem.

SOURCE: WHO Bulletin.

Sent by Dr Wijaya Godakumbura, Consultant Surgeon and member of the National Committee for Prevention Injurie


Aerobic exercise reverses signs of heart

NEW YORK - In patients with heart failure, aerobic training can help the organ pump better, investigators report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In contrast, Dr. Mark J. Haykowsky and colleagues observed that strength training, either alone or in combination with aerobic training, appeared to be of no benefit.

These opposing findings may underlie the inconsistent results of studies of exercise training in patients with heart failure.

Haykowsky, from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and colleagues searched for relevant studies and identified 14 trials that assessed heart performance in 812 stable patients with heart failure.

Nine trials evaluated aerobic training, four evaluated combined aerobic and strength training, and one involved strength training alone.

Aerobic training improved heart function significantly, the results showed.

The positive changes occurred even though the patients were already on drugs proven to benefit heart function, Haykowsky’s team observed. In fact, they found that the magnitude of improvement in heart function was similar to that achieved with standard drugs.

On the other hand, results of strength training, with or without, aerobic training were inconclusive.

In an editorial, Dr. Stanley A. Rubin, at the UCLA School of Medicine, urges caution before starting heart failure patients on an exercise training program.

Rubin outlines the considerations to be taken into account when starting a patient on an exercise training program — including pre-training evaluation, as well as the type, degree, and venue of exercise training.

SOURCE: Journal of the American College of Cardiology, June 19, 2007. REUTERS

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