healthy life 1

In contrast to European and American guidelines that recommend pre-hospital antiplatelet therapy for heart attack patients suffering from ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), a new study presented at ESC Congress1 suggests this practice has no advantage over waiting for in-hospital treatment. "Pre-hospital administration is common practice -- despite the lack of definite evidence for its benefit," said study investigator Dr Elmir Omerovic, PhD, from Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Gothenburg, Sweden. "But our study -- which is the largest cohort study conducted so far -- adds to some previous evidence suggesting there is potential for harm. In fact, inadvertent prehospital administration of these drugs to patients with contraindications to antithrombotic therapy is common. Therefore, considering all current evidence, we think pre-hospital administration should be discouraged." The retrospective study used data from the Swedish Coronary Angiography a...

Researchers from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and IDIAP Jordi Gol have just published an article showing that autoimmune diseases significantly increase cardiovascular risk as well as overall mortality. This is particularly pronounced in people suffering rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosus. In addition, it has been seen that inflammatory bowel diseases, such as Crohn's or ulcerative colitis, increase the risk of stroke and death through any cause. The article is published this month in the journal  Heart . The 6-year study followed a cohort of nearly 1 million people aged between 35 and 85, with no history of cardiovascular disease. The large sample size allowed the estimation of cardiovascular event incidence and mortality in people diagnosed with autoimmune diseases . Some of these diseases are relatively frequent, so their impact is quite significant. It is estimated that rheumatoid arthritis affects between 150,000 and 200,000 pe...

Poor sleep is associated with ischaemic heart disease and stroke, according to research presented today at ESC Congress. The observational study in nearly 13,000 people revealed different patterns of sleep disturbance between the two conditions, with i schaemic heart disease being linked to shorter sleep and brief moments of waking up. "Poor sleep is associated with cardiovascular diseases such as ischaemic heart disease and stroke but the kind of sleep disturbances that are most risky is not well documented," said lead researcher Dr Nobuo Sasaki, of the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb Casualty Council, Japan.  "'Poor sleep' includes too short or too long sleep, difficulty falling asleep, and difficulty maintaining sleep." This study investigated the association between sleep disturbances and cardiovascular disease. It also aimed to clarify possible differences in sleep disturbances between ischaemic heart disease and stroke. The study included 12 876 reside...

A team of researchers at the NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre , UK -- a partnership between Leicester's Hospitals, the University of Leicester and Loughborough University -- has concluded that middle-aged people who report that they are slow walkers could be at higher risk of heart disease compared to the general population. The data analysed was collected between 2006 and 2010 by the UK Biobank from nearly half a million middle-aged people across the UK. 420,727 people were included in the research because they were free from cancer and heart disease at the time of collecting their information. The study is published in the  European Heart Journal . In the following 6.3 years after the data was collected there were 8598 deaths with the sample population being studied: 1654 from cardiovascular disease and 4850 from cancer . Professor Tom Yates, a Reader in Physical Activity, Sedentary Behaviour and Health at the University of Leicester and Principal Investigato...

Sleep apnea, left untreated for even a few days, can increase blood sugar and fat levels, stress hormones and blood pressure , according to a new study of sleeping subjects. A report of the study's findings, published in the August issue of  The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism , adds further support for the consistent use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), a machine that increases air pressure in the throat to keep the airway open during sleep. "This is one of the first studies to show real-time effects of sleep apnea on metabolism during the night," says Jonathan Jun, M.D., assistant professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the paper's senior author. Obstructive sleep apnea ( OSA) affects 20 -- 30 percent of adults, according to studies published in the  American Journal of Epidemiology  and  Lancet Respiratory Medicine . It occurs when the upper airway closes off during sleep, temporarily int...

A team of Cleveland Clinic researchers found that a common heart disease medication, beta blockers, may help treat pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH), a debilitating lung disease. Caused by high blood pressure in the pulmonary arteries, PAH is a progressive disease which usually leads to right-sided heart failure and death within five to seven years of diagnosis . In fact, right-sided heart failure is the leading cause of death in PAH patients. Right ventricular dysfunction (which leads to right-sided heart failure) occurs independently of increased blood pressure, yet all currently approved PAH treatments target the pulmonary vessels, rather than address the heart dysfunction that is the more likely cause of death in these patients. In contrast, targeting left ventricular dysfunction has been the foundation of left-sided heart failure therapy for nearly 40 years. Specifically, beta-adrenergic receptor blockade ("beta blockers") have been a cornerstone therapy fo...

Type 2 diabetes (T2D) has become a global epidemic affecting more than 380 million people worldwide; yet there are knowledge gaps in understanding the etiology of type-2 diabetes. T2D is also a significant risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD), but the biological pathways that explain the connection have remained somewhat murky. Now, in a large analysis of genetic data, published on August 28, 2017 in  Nature Genetics , a team, led by researchers in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, has first looked into what causes T2D and second clarified how T2D and CHD -- the two diseases that are the leading cause of global morbidity and mortality, are linked. Examining genome sequence information for more than 250,000 people, the researchers first uncovered 16 new diabetes genetic risk factors, and one new CHD genetic risk factor; hence providing novel insights about the mechanisms of the two diseases. They then showed that most of the sites on th...

The multicentre trial coordinated by the Research Centre of Applied and Preventive Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Turku, Finland, shows that lower socioeconomic status in childhood is associated with arterial stiffness in adulthood. The socioeconomic gap in cardiovascular disease is a major health problem that has not narrowed but widened. Previous studies have shown that the development of atherosclerosis begins already early in childhood and that childhood socioeconomic status predicts the risk of cardiovascular diseases far into adulthood. - One of the indicators for cardiovascular health and arterial function is arterial stiffness which has been detected to predict the incidence of arterial events, such as heart attacks and strokes. However, the impact of childhood socioeconomic status on arterial stiffness in adulthood has not been previously studied with longitudinal data, notes Doctoral Candidate Elina Puolakka who is conducting her doctoral dissertation on...

The taller you are, the more likely you may be to develop blood clots in the veins, according to new research in the American Heart Association journal  Circulation: Cardiovascular Genetics. In a study of more than two million Swedish siblings, researchers found that the risk of venous thromboembolism -- a type of blood clot that starts in a vein -- was associated with height, with the lowest risk being in shorter participants. They also found: For men shorter than 5'3," the risk for venous thromboembolism dropped 65 percent when compared to the men 6'2" or taller. For women, shorter than 5'1" who were pregnant for the first time, the risk for venous thromboembolism dropped 69 percent, compared to women that were 6 feet or taller. "Height is not something we can do anything about," said lead researcher Bengt Zöller, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor at Lund University and Malmö University Hospital in Malmö, Sweden. "However, the heig...

Considering weight across the life course, the prevalence of obesity among adults in the US rises considerably, suggesting that the effects on population health may be even more pervasive than previously understood, according to a new study led by a Boston university School of Public Health (BUSPH) researcher. Writing in the  American Journal of Preventative Medicine , Andrew Stokes, assistant professor of global health at BUSPH, and colleagues said their findings "highlight the importance" of considering the previously obese subpopulation when monitoring the obesity epidemic. "The results suggest that a much larger fraction of the population is affected by obesity than is reflected by statistics on current weight status alone," the researchers wrote. The researchers expanded the scope of their study to include all US adults who were ever obese as well as the currently obese. They found that 50.8 percent of American men and 51.6 percent of American women ha...