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 |