Heart
Studies link heart, diabetes risks with dementia
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Taking steps to stave off diabetes and heart disease may improve a person’s chances of staying mentally sharp later in life, several research teams said on Monday.
In one study, U.S. researchers found the same cluster of metabolic disorders that raise a woman’s risk for heart disease and diabetes also increase her chances of memory declines later in life.
A second study found that a history of diabetes and high cholesterol hasten the rate of mental declines in people with Alzheimer’s disease.
Peer-to-peer heart monitoring
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The possibility of remote monitoring for chronically ill patients will soon become a reality. Now, researchers in South Africa and Australia have devised a decentralized system to avoid medical data overload. They describe the peer-to-peer system in a forthcoming issue of the International Journal of Computer Applications in Technology.
People with a range of chronic illnesses, including diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart problems can benefit from advances in monitoring technology. Such devices could send data on a person’s symptoms directly to a centralized computer server at their health center. This would allow healthcare workers to take appropriate action, whether in an emergency or simply to boost or reduce medication in response to changes in the patient’s symptoms.
However, as tele-monitoring is set to become widespread, there will inevitably be an issue of data overload with which a centralized computer will not be able to cope. Computer scientists Hanh Le, Nina Schiff, and Johan du Plessis at the University of Cape Town, working with Doan Hoang at the University of Technology, Sydney, suggest a decentralized approach.
Heartbreaker: a bad marriage raises cardiac risk
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Women in strained marriages are more likely than other wives to have high blood pressure and other risk factors for heart disease, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
Researchers at the University of Utah studied more than 300 middle-aged and older couples who had been married more than 20 years. Each couple answered questionnaires about their relationship and mental state and took lab tests.
They found women in marriages with high levels of strife were more prone to depression and metabolic syndrome, a cluster of symptoms such a thick waist, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and abnormal blood sugar that significantly raise the risk of heart disease.
Arthritic heart patients fear exercise, CDC says
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Patients with arthritis and heart disease may be afraid to get the exercise they need to improve their health, U.S. government researchers said on Thursday.
They may not realize that a little exercise will relieve both conditions, the team at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The researchers studied data from two national health surveys to find that 57 percent of adults with heart disease have arthritis, too, the team reported in the CDC’s weekly report on death and disease.
Big-Hearted Fish Reveals Genetic Underpinnings of Enigmatic Cardiovascular Condition
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Big-Hearted Fish Reveals Genetic Underpinnings of Enigmatic Cardiovascular Condition, According to Penn Study
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine have unlocked the mystery of a puzzling human disease and gained insight into cardiovascular development, all thanks to a big-hearted fish.
Mark Kahn, MD, Associate Professor of Medicine, graduate student Benjamin Kleaveland, and colleagues report in the February issue of Nature Medicine that a human vascular condition called Cerebral Cavernous Malformation (CCM) is caused by leaky junctions between cells in the lining of blood vessels. By combining studies with zebrafish and mice, the researchers found that the aberrant junctions are the result of mutated or missing proteins in a novel biochemical process, the so-called Heart-of-glass (HEG)-CCM pathway.
The HEG-CCM pathway “is essential to regulate endothelial cell-cell interaction, both during the time that vertebrates make the cardiovascular system and later in life,” says Kahn. “Its loss later in life confers this previously unexplained disease, cerebral cavernous malformation.”
ESC reaffirms advice on cardiovascular risks associated with long-haul flights
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Following a review by The Lancet of the medical issues associated with commercial air travel, the European Society of Cardiology has reaffirmed its advice about the risks of venous thromboembolism (VTE), whose risk, according to The Lancet, is increased “up to four-fold” by long-haul flight.
Dr Steen Kristensen, Vice-president of the ESC, says: “Long distance flying is associated with an increase in deep venous thrombosis, which in some cases may lead to clotting of the lungs. People who are immobile, pregnant, taking contraceptive pills or have had venous thrombosis in the past are particularly at risk. To minimise the risk it is important to drink plenty of non-alcoholic fluid and to walk (exercise) before and during the flight. The use of compression stockings is for some travelers an important way of preventing deep venous thrombosis.”
Studies cited by The Lancet suggest that the risk of VTE increases when flight duration exceeds four hours. This raised risk is related to immobility, dehydration, and reduced oxygen in the cabin, as well as to individual risk factors such as obesity, recent surgery and predispositions to thrombosis (thrombophilias).
Gender affects outcome of heart valve surgery
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Men and women have different long-term outcomes after surgery to replace a defective heart valve, according to a report by Canadian researchers.
Valves play a critical role in making sure that blood flows only one way through the heart. Of the four valves present in the heart, the mitral and aortic valves are, by far, the ones most commonly replaced.
The mitral valve prevents blood that has come into the left ventricle, the main pumping chamber of the heart, from backing up into the blood vessels of the lungs, whereas the aortic valve stops blood that has just been pumped out of the heart from flowing back in.
Cardiac Imaging Method May Expose Patients to High Radiation Dose
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Use of the imaging technique known as cardiac computed tomography (CT) angiography (CCTA) has the potential to expose patients to high doses of radiation, and methods available to reduce radiation dose are not frequently used, according to a study in the February 4 issue of JAMA.
The 64-slice (able to scan 64 images per rotation) CCTA has emerged as a useful diagnostic imaging method for the assessment of coronary artery disease and has been proposed to be useful for evaluating patients in emergency departments with chest pain. “With the constantly increasing number of CCTA-capable scanners worldwide, the volume of CCTA scans performed is likely to show substantial further increase,” the authors write. They add that the clinical usefulness of CCTA for the assessment of coronary artery disease has to be weighed against the radiation exposure of CCTA and the small but potential risk of cancer. Many clinicians may still be unfamiliar with the magnitude of radiation exposure that is received during CCTA in daily practice and with the factors that contribute to radiation dose, according to background information in the article.
Jörg Hausleiter, M.D., of the Deutsches Herzzentrum München, Klinik an der Technischen Universität München, Munich, Germany, and colleagues investigated the magnitude of radiation dose of CCTA in daily practice, factors contributing to radiation dose and the use of currently available strategies to reduce radiation dose. The trial, the Prospective Multicenter Study On Radiation Dose Estimates Of Cardiac CT Angiography In Daily Practice I (PROTECTION I), an international, multicenter study (21 university hospitals and 29 community hospitals) included 1,965 patients undergoing CCTA between February and December 2007. Analysis was used to identify independent predictors associated with radiation dose, which was measured as dose-length product (DLP; equals the average radiation dose over a specific investigated volume multiplied by the scan length), which best mirrors the radiation a patient is exposed to by the entire CT scan, according to the authors.
U.S. doctors urged to use heart scans judiciously
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Doctors should be judicious in their use of X-ray heart imaging techniques and avoid their routine use to screen for cardiac problems, a leading U.S. medical group said on Monday.
The American Heart Association urged doctors to weigh risks and benefits carefully in ordering diagnostic tests such as computed tomography, or CT, angiograms and nuclear stress tests in order to minimize the doses of ionizing radiation.
Such low-dose radiation has the potential to cause cancer.
Air pollution may prompt abnormal heart rhythm
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Patients with heart rhythm disturbances who have an implantable heart defibrillator are particularly vulnerable to air pollution, a Swedish study indicates.
In patients with these devices, known as implantable cardioverter defibrillators, or ICDs, exposure to air pollution may rapidly (within 2 hours) prompt ventricular arrhythmia—a potentially life-threatening condition in which the heart rhythm becomes irregular, the study shows.
Previous studies have documented an association of ventricular arrhythmias with air pollution exposure lasting from 24 to 48 hours.
Longer Sleep Linked With Lower Incidence of Calcification in Coronary Arteries
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Participants in a study who slept on average an hour longer per night than other participants had an associated lower incidence of coronary artery calcification, which is thought to be a predictor of future heart disease, according to a study in the December 24/31 issue of JAMA.
Risk factors for coronary artery calcification (the accumulation of calcified plaques visible by computed tomography [a method of imaging body organs]) include established heart disease risk factors such as male sex, older age, glucose intolerance, tobacco use, dyslipidemia (disorders of lipoprotein metabolism, which includes high cholesterol levels), high blood pressure, obesity, raised inflammatory markers and attaining a low educational level. Recent data suggest that sleep quantity and quality are connected to several of these risk factors. “However, some of these correlations have only been documented in studies in which sleep is measured by self-report, which may be biased or insufficiently accurate,” the authors write.
Christopher Ryan King, B.S., of the University of Chicago, and colleagues tested whether objectively measured sleep duration predicted the development of calcification over 5 years of follow-up. The study included 495 participants from the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults [CARDIA] study, who were black and white men and women age 35-47 years. At the start of the study in 2000-2001, the participants had no evidence of detectable coronary calcification on computed tomography scans.
Early cardiac activity predicts good IVF outcome
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A beating fetal heart 4 weeks after in vitro fertilization (IVF) predicts successful completion of the first trimester of pregnancy.
“Early ultrasound, in the patient with no history of miscarriage, is a very good predictor of a viable pregnancy,” Dr. Peter G. McGovern from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark told Reuters Health.
McGovern and his colleagues measured fetal cardiac activity 4 weeks after IVF in 139 women undergoing fresh IVF cycles.
Living with extended family hard on women’s hearts
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Having multiple generations living under one roof may take a toll on women’s heart health, a large study of Japanese adults suggests.
The study, which started following nearly 91,000 middle-aged and older adults in 1990, found that women who lived with their spouse, children and parents or parents-in-law were at elevated risk of developing heart disease.
Compared with their counterparts who lived with a husband only, these women were about three times more likely to be diagnosed with coronary heart disease by 2004.
Fibrate drug does not cut heart risks in diabetics
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Long-term treatment with fenofibrate, a type of fibrate drug often used to lower cholesterol, does not reduce coronary plaques or signs of “atherosclerosis” in patients with type 2 diabetes, according to a report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Prior research has suggested that fibrate therapy can have beneficial cardiovascular effects. However, in the main analysis of the Fenofibrate Intervention and Event Lowering in Diabetes (FIELD) study, researchers found that treatment with fenofibrate did not reduce heart attacks in type 2 diabetics.
The focus of this FIELD substudy was to determine if fenofibrate therapy reduced atherosclerosis, a main risk factor for heart attacks, in patients with type 2 diabetes. Included were 170 patients randomly assigned to receive fenofibrate or inactive “placebo” for 5 years.
Alcohol linked with irregular heartbeat in women
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Consuming two or more alcoholic beverages per day may slightly increase the risk of developing an irregular heartbeat , also referred to as atrial fibrillation, in women, according to a report in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Prior research established a similar association in men, but the question remained open in women because earlier studies were underpowered to assess the risk, lead author Dr. David Conen, from University Hospital, Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues note.
Atrial fibrillation, the most common arrhythmia, occurs when rapid, disorganized electrical signals in the heart cause very fast and irregular contractions (fibrillations), resulting in inefficient pumping of blood through the heart. Although atrial fibrillation may not cause symptoms, the condition still increases the risk of stroke. Atrial fibrillation may also lead to chest pain, heart attack or heart failure.
