Heart
10 Risk Factors for Heart Disease
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Heart disease is the number one killer in the world. Several factors that increase the risk for heart disease have been identified by the American Heart Association. Scientific studies have shown significant risk increases with some factors.
The risk factors that are listed are considered major risk factors and are those that medical research has shown to significantly increase the risk of cardiovascular disease. The more risk factors you have the greater the risk you have of developing heart disease. Some of us are at a much greater risk than others. Each factor itself can increase your risk depending on the amount of control you have over it. An example is your blood pressure or diabetes, both can place you at high risk, but if they are under control your risk becomes less whereas if they are uncontrolled the risk will increase even more.
10 Major Risk Factors for Heart Disease
Some of the factors that place us at a higher risk can be controlled, others cannot be controlled. These are considered to be major risk factors by the American Heart Association:
Hearts Actually Can Break
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Dorothy Lee and her husband of 40 years were driving home from a Bible study group one wintry night when their car suddenly hit the curb. Mrs. Lee looked at her husband, who was driving, and saw his head bob a couple of times and fall on his chest.
In the ensuing minutes, Mrs. Lee recalls, she managed to avoid a crash while stopping the car, called 911 on her cellphone and tried to revive her husband before an ambulance arrived. But at the hospital, soon after learning her husband had died of a heart attack, Mrs. Lee’s heart appeared to give out as well. She experienced sudden sharp pains in her chest, felt faint and went unconscious.
When doctors performed an X-ray angiogram expecting to find and treat a blood clot that had caused Mrs. Lee’s symptoms, they were surprised: There wasn’t any evidence of a heart attack. Her coronary arteries were completely clear.
Post heart attack recovery may not be aided by stem cell injections, but trial demonstrates promise
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University Hospitals Case Medical Center researchers could still be close to giving heart attack patients a second chance…just not as they originally thought.
LateTIME was a study of adult stem cells (autologous) harnessed from bone marrow that were believed to have the ability to improve heart function after an attack if injected into the heart within two weeks of the attack. Results are being released today at American Heart Association Scientific Sessions and published this week in Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
The results have shown the injections within that timeframe were not favorable, but the concept showed great promise, according to an accompanying JAMA editorial that assessed the trial.
The therapy still shows promise for recovering lost or damaged heart tissue resulting from a heart attack. Both UH Case Medical Center’s Drs. Dan Simon and Marco Costa, co-investigators in the LateTIME study, are currently participating in a similar trial, “TIME” that already has reduced the time between attack and stem cell injection.
Early sexual abuse increases heart risks
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Women who were repeatedly sexually abused as girls have a 62 percent higher risk of heart problems later in life compared with women who were not abused, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.
The findings, presented at the American Heart Association meeting in Orlando, Florida, underscored the lasting physical effects of early sexual abuse.
Much of the increased risk was related to coping strategies among abuse survivors such as overeating, alcohol use and smoking.
Eating your greens can change the effect of your genes on heart disease, say researchers
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A long-held mantra suggests that you can’t change your family, the genes they pass on, or the effect of these genes. Now, an international team of scientists, led by researchers at McMaster and McGill universities, is attacking that belief.
The researchers discovered the gene that is the strongest marker for heart disease can actually be modified by generous amounts of fruit and raw vegetables. The results of their study are published in the current issue of the journal PLoS Medicine.
“We know that 9p21 genetic variants increase the risk of heart disease for those that carry it,” said Dr. Jamie Engert, joint principal investigator of the study, who is a researcher in cardiovascular diseases at the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI-MUHC) and associate member in the Department of Human Genetics at McGill University. “But it was a surprise to find that a healthy diet could significantly weaken its effect.”
Gender differences in clinical presentation and outcome of transcatheter aortic valve implantation
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Severe aortic stenosis (AS) is increasing in frequency as the population ages. For a subset of patients in whom surgical conventional aortic valve replacement is excluded due to severe co-morbidities, an alternative to surgical aortic valve replacement – transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVI)- has emerged with a first-in-man case performed in France in 2002 by Pr. Alain Cribier. Since 2002, TAVI has undergone many modifications from first generation devices, and the technique is now performed routinely in selected centres to treat patients with symptomatic severe aortic stenosis who are ineligible or at high-risk for conventional surgical aortic valve replacement. Two transcatheter heart valves, the “Edwards Sapien valve” and the Medtronic Corevalve” are available in Europe. More than 30,000 procedures have been performed worldwide in the last decade.
Although gender differences in cardiovascular disease (CVD) have been explored for a long time, only a limited number of studies have been conducted to clarify differences between male and female patients with aortic stenosis (AS), in terms of clinical presentation and outcome, after surgical aortic valve replacement (AVR). Certain studies have shown an increased short-term mortality rate among women and the female gender has been identified as one of the predictors of peri-operative mortality after cardiac surgery by EuroSCORE.
The Institut Cardiovasculaire Paris-Sud (ICPS) started a TAVI program in September 2006. In order to address the issue of gender differences in clinical presentation and outcome of TAVI for severe aortic stenosis, clinical characteristics and outcome of 131 women and 129 men treated in ICPS from 2006 to december 2010, were compared. Data were collected prospectively and entered in a dedicated database.
Conference Explores Gender’s Role in Cardiovascular Disease
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Heart disease has sometimes been considered a men’s health issue, but the statistics prove otherwise. In the US alone, more than 42 million women live with the problem. Heart disease is responsible for more than one-third of deaths among American women each year, making it the number one killer of females older than 20. What’s more, the signs of heart attack in women differ from those in men, tending toward vomiting, throat discomfort, anxiety and a feeling of pressure in the chest as opposed to the crushing, right-side chest pain more often reported in men. Indeed, the physiology of heart disease differs between men and women in ways that scientists have only begun to understand.
Experts will present the latest research about these differences at the Physiology of Cardiovascular Disease: Gender Disparities conference, October 12–14, 2011 at the University of Mississippi in Jackson. The conference, sponsored by the American Physiological Society with additional support from the American Heart Association, will coincide with the grand opening of the Women’s Health Research Center at the university’s medical center. Presentations will cover gender differences in heart disease, vascular function, kidney disease and metabolism as well as provide insight on how perimenopause and menopause affect women’s heart health.
Diesel fumes pose risk to heart as well as lungs, study shows
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Tiny chemical particles emitted by diesel exhaust fumes could raise the risk of heart attacks, research has shown.
Scientists have found that ultrafine particles produced when diesel burns are harmful to blood vessels and can increase the chances of blood clots forming in arteries, leading to a heart attack or stroke.
The research by the University of Edinburgh measured the impact of diesel exhaust fumes on healthy volunteers at levels that would be found in heavily polluted cities.
Varenicline for smoking cessation linked to increased risk of serious harmful cardiac events
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The use of varenicline to stop smoking is associated with a 72% increased risk of a serious adverse cardiovascular event, states an article in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal) (pre-embargo link only) .
Heart disease is a common cause of serious illness and death in smokers and is often a reason for people to stop smoking. Varenicline is one of the most commonly used drugs to help people quit smoking worldwide. When varenicline was launched in 2006, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) safety reviewers reported that existing data indicated it could raise the risk of adverse cardiac events. The FDA recently updated the label for Chantix based on a small increased risk of cardiovascular events among smokers with heart disease.
A team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland; the University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom; and Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sought to investigate the serious cardiac effects of varenicline in tobacco users (smokers or smokeless tobacco users) compared with placebos in clinical trials. They looked at 14 trials that included 8216 patients (4908 people on varenicline and 3308 taking placebos). All trials except one excluded people with a history of heart disease.
Experts prove link between phosphate intake and heart disease
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This is the first time the connection between a high phosphate diet and atherosclerosis - the cause of heart disease - has been proven. The findings have been published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology (2 June 2011).
The research, which was funded by the Sheffield Kidney Association and the National Institute for Health Research, has shown that cholesterol deposits in the wall of arteries are increased following a higher phosphate diet. This leads to narrowing of the arteries, which is the cause of most heart attacks and strokes.
As a result, the research demonstrates the importance of reducing phosphate levels in the human diet or possibly using drugs called binders or other agents that stop phosphate being absorbed. Food high in phosphate includes biscuits, cakes, sweets, dairy products and meats such as offal and veal.
Scripps Research scientists find way to block stress-related cell death
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Scientists from the Florida campus of The Scripps Research Institute have uncovered a potentially important new therapeutic target that could prevent stress-related cell death, a characteristic of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s, as well as heart attack and stroke.
In the study, published recently in the journal ACS Chemical Biology, the scientists showed they could disrupt a specific interaction of a critical enzyme that would prevent cell death without harming other important enzyme functions.
The enzyme in question is c-jun-N-terminal kinase (JNK), pronounced “junk,” which has been implicated in many processes in the body’s response to stresses, such as oxidative stress, protein misfolding, and metabolic disorder. JNK also plays an important role in nerve cell survival and has become a target for drugs to treat neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.
Low Health Literacy Associated with Higher Rate of Death Among Heart Failure Patients
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An examination of health literacy (such as understanding basic health information) among managed care patients with heart failure, a condition that requires self-management, found that nearly one in five have low health literacy, which was associated with a higher all-cause risk of death, according to a study in the April 27 issue of JAMA.
Health literacy is the degree to which individuals can obtain, process and understand basic health information and services needed to make appropriate health decisions, as defined by the Institute of Medicine. According to background information in the article, many U.S. citizens and as many as 1 in 3 Medicare enrollees have low health literacy. Heart failure is a common and complex chronic disease with a high risk of illness and death. “Although patients with heart failure are frequently hospitalized, much care for heart failure is performed on a daily basis by individual patients outside of the hospital. This self-care requires integration and application of knowledge and skills. Therefore, an adequate level of health literacy is likely critical in ensuring patient compliance and proficiency in self-management. Little is known about the association between health literacy and outcomes among patients with heart failure,” the authors write.
Pamela N. Peterson, M.D., M.S.P.H., of the Denver Health Medical Center, Denver, and colleagues evaluated the association between low health literacy and all-cause mortality and hospitalization among a population of outpatients with heart failure.
Unique AED pads give hearts a second chance
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An invention by Rice University bioengineering students in collaboration with the Texas Heart Institute (THI) is geared toward giving immediate second chances to arrhythmia victims headed toward cardiac arrest.
For their capstone design project, a team of Rice seniors created a unique pad system for automated external defibrillators (AEDs), common devices that can shock a victim’s heart back into a proper rhythm in an emergency.
Often, the first shock doesn’t reset a heart and the procedure must be repeated, but the sticky pads on the chest must first be repositioned. The pads need to be in the right location to send current through the heart, and someone with no experience who tries to provide aid might miss the first time.
Penn Research Using Frog Embryos Leads to New Understanding of Cardiac Development
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During embryonic development, cells migrate to their eventual location in the adult body plan and begin to differentiate into specific cell types. Thanks to new research at the University of Pennsylvania, there is new insight into how these processes regulate tissues formation in the heart.
A developmental biologist at Penn’s School of Veterinary Medicine, Jean-Pierre Saint-Jeannet, along with a colleague, Young-Hoon Lee of South Korea’s Chonbuk National University, has mapped the embryonic region that becomes the part of the heart that separates the outgoing blood in Xenopus, a genus of frog.
Xenopus is a commonly used model organism for developmental studies, and is a particularly interesting for this kind of research because amphibians have a single ventricle and the outflow tract septum is incomplete.
Atherosclerotic plaques formed during a late and limited time period in life
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In a new study performed in humans, researchers from Karolinska Institutet have determined the age of atherosclerotic plaques by taking advantage of Carbon-14 (14C) residues in the atmosphere, prevailing after the extensive atomic bomb tests in the 50ties and 60ties. The findings, published in the scientific online journal PLoS ONE, suggest that in most people plaque formation occurs during a relatively short and late time period in life of 3-5 years.
The investigators collected carotid plaques during carotid stenosis surgery at the Stockholm South General Hospital (Södersjukhuset). The patients were admitted for surgery since their carotid lesions partly obstructed the blood flow to the brain, causing symptoms of insufficient oxygen called Trans Ischemic Attacks (TIA) that in some cases also had lead to strokes.
The plaques were carbon dated at Uppsala University, by using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS). As a result of the extensive atomic bomb test in the 50-ties and 60-ties, the atmospheric concentration of 14C rapidly increased. Since then the concentration of 14C is declining, which now can be used to determine the time of synthesis of any biological sample.
