Heart Disease Prevention - Can Heart Attack Occur Silently?

Typical symptoms that a heart attack victim have may include severe crushing chest pain and pressure; sudden shortness of breath; cold sweating. Sometimes, a heart attack can actually happen without one knowing it. It is called a silent heart attack or silent myocardial infarction. Click the following link for more details:

Heart Disease Prevention - Can Heart Attack Occur Silently?

Heart Disease Prevention - Will Women Be Less Likely To Take Post-Heart Attack Drugs?

After treatment, medications like ACE inhibitors, beta blockers and statins will usually be prescribed to heart attack survivors, both males and females, to prevent another one. However, according to a Canadian study, women seem to be less likely than men to take all the medications required after a heart attack to help prevent repeat episodes. 

Heart Disease Prevention - Will Women Be Less Likely To Take Post-Heart Attack Drugs?

Heart Disease Prevention - How To Improve Survival Rate Of Cardiac Arrest?

Training people in CPR and having automated external defibrillators (AED) handy will certainly help to increase the survival rate. Meanwhile, emergency medical service personnel must be trained to respond swiftly and correctly. For instance, operators managing 911 calls can be trained to talk people through CPR while waiting an ambulance to come, and the emergency departments need smooth and coordinated responses. To find out more, please click the following link.

Heart Disease Prevention - How To Improve Survival Rate Of Cardiac Arrest?

Heart Disease Prevention - Alternative Way To Predict Heart Heart

A new study, conducted by researchers from the University of Maryland School of Medicine and other institutes, suggested that the strength of a person’s hand-grip could actually predict the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Their findings were published online May 13, 2015 in the ‘Lancet’ medical journal. Find out more at: 

Heart Disease Prevention - Alternative Way To Predict Heart Heart

Why Heart Attack Risk Should Not Be Ignored In Young Women?

A heart attack, also known as myocardial infarction (MI), is permanent damage to the heart muscle due to a lack of blood supply. More than a million Americans have heart attack every year.

Many believe heart attack can occur only among old folks. In reality, heart disease can start off at an early age and that is why there is a growing number of people have heart attack in their early 30.

It is commonly thought that young women are not to be at risk for heart attacks, but a recent study indicated that heart attacks could be deadliest for young women. Researchers from Yale University School of Medicine and Yale-New Haven Hospital found that not only were young women more likely to be sicker than young men once they arrived at a hospital, they were also more likely to die there.

The researchers used the National Inpatient Sample to compared clinical characteristics, AMI (acute myocardial infarctions) hospitalization rates, length of stay, and in-hospital mortality for patients with AMI across ages between 30 and 54 years, and used survey data analysis techniques to divide them into 5-year subgroups from 2001 to 2010.

It was found that women had longer length of stay and higher in-hospital mortality than men across all age groups. Between 2 and 3 percent of young women aged between 30 and 54 who were hospitalized for a heart attack died over the years from 2001 to 2010, comparing to 1.7 percent to 2 percent of men the same age. The findings were published in the July 14’s issue of ‘Journal of the American College of Cardiology’.

Young women often ignore symptoms, ranging from chest pain and shortness of breath to fatigue and nausea that could suggest a heart attack. While the medical community has focused on educating more women on heart disease, it has not yet customized its message for young women. All of these things could simply lead to a delay in recognizing symptoms, a delayed diagnosis, and a delay in treatment strategies.

1 in 4 American women dies from heart disease. In fact, coronary heart disease, which is the most common type of heart disease, is the top killer of both men and women in the United States.

Prevention is always the best treatment for a serious condition like heart disease. Adopting a healthy diet plus having a regular physical activity can definitely help prevent heart disease. In the meantime, even the healthy people should have, on a regular basis, preventive heart disease screenings such as complete lipid panel screening to detect high cholesterol, C-reactive protein screening, glucose screening and high blood pressure screening.

Should Heart Disease Patients Have Intense Workout?

Intense workout has been found to have greater cardioprotective effects than moderate level of exercise, and higher levels of physical activity is believed to be effective in lowering cardiovascular events. But it is also known that intense exercise could raise the risk of sudden cardiac arrest and myocardial infarction (heart attack) in some persons.

So when a person recovers from heart attack or heart surgery, he or she is usually asked to do moderate level of exercise. However, a new study, carried out by researchers from Norway, found that high intensity workout might be a safe option, too. Their findings were published online in journal ‘Circulation’ on August 9, 2012.

Researchers tracked 4,846 patients with coronary heart disease at 4 Norwegian cardiac rehabilitation centers. The cardiac rehab involves follow-up medical and lifestyle care to help people recover from a heart attack, heart failure or a heart surgery. All patients in the study participated in moderate-intensity training and organized high-intensity interval exercise training.

The moderate-intensity workout included one hour of walking or other exercise that resulted in exertion at about 60-70 percent of people's maximum heart rate.

For intense workout, people trained with repeated 4-minute intervals: 4 minutes of high impact exercise, such as cycling, jogging or cross country skiing, to get the heart rate up to 85-95 percent of maximum exertion, followed by 4 minutes of a more relaxed activity, such as walking.

It was found that a total of 129,456 hours were spent on working out at moderate intensity with one person died from cardiac arrest and 46,364 hours at high intensity with 2 cardiac arrests but survived.

Apparently, the findings indicated that the risk of a cardiovascular event is low after both high-intensity exercise and moderate-intensity exercise in a cardiovascular rehabilitation setting.

Nevertheless, the differences in the number of cardiac arrests during moderate and intense exercise were too small to conclude that the intense workout is as safe as the moderate workout.

As such, it is not recommended for cardiologists to broadly prescribe intense workout for heart disease patients. People should still stick to their prevailing guidelines by doing moderate workout until more data showing that intense workout are safe.

Will Cardiovascular Risk Decline For Older Folks With Hypertension?

The blood pressure of a person is considered as normal when the reading does not exceed 120/80 mmHg. ‘120’ is the so-called systolic pressure and ‘80’ is the diastolic pressure. When this person’s systolic reading reaches 140 mmHg or higher, or diastolic pressure reaches 90 mmHg or higher, he or she is said to have hypertension (high blood pressure).

Hypertension is known to be a preventable risk factor for cardiovascular disease (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD). It contributes to about 50 percent of all CVD and for every 10-point in diastolic blood pressure, the risk of getting CVD doubles.

A recent study, however, claimed that high blood pressure becomes less of a risk factor for incident cardiovascular disease (CVD) and coronary heart disease (CHD) with age. The findings were presented by researchers from Prevention of Metabolic Disorders Research Center, Tehran, Iran at the World Congress of Cardiology on April 23, 2012.

It took 9.3 years to complete the study that evaluated the risk of different blood pressure categories among 6,273 participants who aged 30 years old and above.

Analysis of results showed that the risk of developing incident CVD and CHD was significantly higher among people with high normal blood pressure during middle-age (between 30 and 60 years old) than for those with the same high normal blood pressure aged 60 and above. But incident CVD and CHD risk were found to be similarly high in people with diagnosed high blood pressure across all age-groups.

While the findings did reinforce the fact that hypertension is a serious risk factor for CVD in all age groups, they also suggested that people managing high normal blood pressure resources should direct their focus to those individuals who are in middle age.

Treating high blood pressure is important. A previous study showed that it was linked to a 35 percent cut in the risk of stroke and at least 16 percent reduction in the risk of myocardial infarction (heart attack).

Air Pollution Is Bad For The Heart!

In general, air pollution is any substance that is introduced into the atmosphere with harmful effects on living things and the environment. Air pollution can be visible or invisible, and it does contribute to global warming.

According to a French study, breathing in dirty air might increase the likelihood of getting a heart attack a few days afterwards. Researchers from the Paris Cardiovascular Research Center reported on February 14, 2012 in the ‘Journal of the American Medical Association’ that heart attacks were slightly more common at high levels of every main pollutant except ozone.

The researchers analyzed 34 studies comparing the risk of suffering a heart attack (or myocardial infarction) at different levels of inhaling industrial and traffic-related air pollutants including carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and very small soot-like particles. The number of people involved in the research ranged from about 400 to more than 300,000, with heart attacks confirmed in hospital records and disease and death registries.

For most of the pollutants, an increase in concentration of 10 micrograms per cubic meter of air was linked to between 1 and 3 percent increase in the risk of having a heart attack in the next week. With the exception of ozone, all the main air pollutants were significantly linked to a near-term raise in heart attack risk.

When people breath in polluted air, small particles can reach the tiny sacs in the lungs and be carried in the bloodstream to the heart. The pollutants might also lower blood vessels’ expansion and contraction abilities for keeping blood pressure constant. In fact, growing evidence has highlighted the link between high-pollution days and higher risk of suffering a stroke.

While the relative risks of air pollution are rather low comparing to traditional risk factors like smoking, hypertension or diabetes, everybody is exposed to air pollution in industrialized nations almost on a daily basis and hence even small effects can add up.

Air pollution is particularly harmful for people with pre-existing heart disease, so these people should minimize exposure to pollutants as far as possible.

Is Chest Pain A Definite Sign for Heart Attack?

When someone is having a serious pain in the chest, the first thing that comes to our mind is: is he or she having a heart attack (or myocardial infarction)?

Serious pain in the chest seems to be an obvious sign of a heart attack. Researchers from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, however, did not appear to agree.

In their paper published in August 2011 in the ‘Annals of Emergency Medicine’, they pointed out that a high degree of pain does not indicate that someone entering the emergency room with chest pains is having a heart attack.

After examining and following for 30 days more than 3,000 patients who arrived at the UPenn hospital emergency department complaining of chest pain, the researchers found that most severe chest pain was not a good predictor for identifying patients who were having heart attack or who were more prone to having one over the next month. Meanwhile, they also stressed that a patient who does not have severe chest pain does not mean that he or she is not having a heart attack.

The results of their study showed that pain that lasted more than an hour was not a useful sign of heart attack versus other conditions, and the pain of a heart attack also does not always settle in the chest area but might be in the chest, arm, jaw back or abdomen.

According to the researchers, failure to diagnose acute myocardial infarction accounted for 30 percent of malpractice claims paid out, with 2 to 5 percent of patients who were having heart attack being inappropriately discharged from emergency departments.

Though pain severity was not a good predictor, it could correctly identify people who had such symptom and arrived at the emergency department in an ambulance. This might be due to the fact that people tend to ignore chest pain until it is serious enough to call for emergency services.

While the cause of chest pain might or might not be a heart attack, people who have such experience should not ignore it because something serious must have emerged.

Lose Weight Can Help You Stay Away From Hypertension!

When a person’s systemic arterial blood pressure is elevated, this person is said to have hypertension, or more commonly known as high blood pressure. Having hypertension over a long period of time can place a person at higher risk of stroke, myocardial infarction, heart failure, arterial aneurysm, and even kidney failure.

Blood pressure measurements consist of 2 readings: systolic (higher) and diastolic (lower). A systolic blood pressure of more than 140 is high, and a diastolic blood pressure of over 90 is also high.

For most patients, dietary and lifestyle changes could improve blood pressure control thus reducing the risk of the likely health complications. However, medication treatment might still be required for other patients, especially those who cannot effectively or sufficiently change their lifestyle.

Researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center found that overweight or obese people were more likely to have a high systolic blood pressure, and for those with a high body mass index (BMI), how in shape they were only had a small impact on their blood pressure. Their findings were published in the American Heart Journal, July 2010.

BMI stands for body mass index, which is a measure commonly used to determine whether a person is overweight or obese. BMI is calculated by dividing the weight (in kilos) by the square of height (in meters). Overweight or obesity is a known risk factor of hypertension.

Data of approximately 35,000 patients consisting mostly white males was collected over the last 20 years at the Cooper Clinic in Dallas, Texas and analyzed. Measurements recorded when patients came into the clinic included body composition, blood pressure and fitness levels.

Results of analysis showed that having a higher BMI was associated with having a higher systolic blood pressure for all participants. Such correlation has already been found many times in the past. For people of the same age and gender, fitness did not seem to have any effect on blood pressure at all.

While fitness plays an important role in the overall health and mortality, the results suggested that people trying to reduce their risk for hypertension should set losing their weight as first priority and increasing physical fitness as a secondary goal. In other words, achieving a normal body weight is the key to lower one’s blood pressure.

A New Way To Curb Heart Failure!

You might have heard a lot about heart failure, either from newspapers or from friends and relatives. For instance, someone had collapsed or dropped death because of heart failure. But, how much do you know about heart failure?

More often than not, heart failure is incorrectly used to describe other heart-related disease including myocardial infarction (heart attack) and cardiac arrest. According to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, heart failure is a condition in which the heart is unable to pump blood at an adequate rate or in adequate volume, or cessation of heartbeat (death).

Victims of heart failure might not die instantly but heart failure is a potentially deadly condition. About 2 percent of adults in developed countries suffer from heart failure. For those aged 65 and above, the number increases to between 6 and 10 percent.

Heart failure can be triggered by heart events such as myocardial infarction (heart attacks) and other forms of ischemic heart disease, hypertension, valvular heart disease, and cardiomyopathy. A number of symptoms, including shortness of breath (typically worse when lying flat), coughing, ankle swelling, and exercise intolerance, can be seen in people with heart failure.

Frequently, doctors treat their heart failure patients by changing lifestyle such as smoking cessation, light exercise, reduced salt intake and changes in diets; medications; implantation of devices or in serious case by surgery.

Recently, researchers from Nova Southeastern University (NSU) revealed a breakthrough method to curb heart failure. In a paper appeared in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, they reported that they had found a way, using gene therapy, to block the actions of a gene-encoded protein that can contribute to heart failure.

The protein, known as beta-arrestin 1, can raise the production of aldosterone, which is a hormone, from the body's adrenal glands into the blood. It also increases the re-absorption of sodium and water into kidneys, causing high blood volume and blood pressure. Moreover, it has several direct damaging effects on the heart, such as fibrosis, hypertrophy, and inflammation.

An increase in blood volume means higher blood pressure. This in turn decreases the pumping action of the heart, and is one of the causes of heart failure. By blocking beta-arrestin 1 through the gene therapy approach, it is hoped that reduction of the severity of heart failure could be achieved.

Would Vitamin Help Diabetics?

For people who are unable to get adequate amount of vitamins and minerals from their diet, taking vitamin supplements could be a feasible alternative to help them meet their nutrition requirements. The elderly, strict vegetarians, people on low-calorie diets and those that are malnourished are some good examples of this type of people.

How about diabetics? Would vitamin help control their condition? Most health organizations associated with diabetes do not advocate using vitamins. In fact, they usually warn against using large doses of vitamins or supplements, which could possibly cause adverse side effects.

In April 28, 2010 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers from the University of Western Ontario and the Robarts Research Institute in London, Ontario reported that patients with diabetic nephropathy would suffer rapid deterioration of the kidneys if treated with high doses of Vitamin B. Moreover, these patients are likely to face a higher risk of heart attack and stroke than patients who took a placebo.

Diabetic nephropathy is a progressive kidney disease because of longstanding diabetes mellitus, and it is a prime indication for dialysis in many Western countries. Even with the many treatments available right now, about 40 percent of the 21 million Americans who have diabetes still develop diabetic nephropathy.

Prior observational studies have shown that there is an association between high concentrations of plasma total homocysteine and the risk of developing diabetic nephropathy, retinopathy, and vascular diseases, including myocardial infarction and stroke. B-Vitamin therapy using folic acid, Vitamin-B6 and Vitamin-B12 is known to be capable of lowering the plasma concentration of homocysteine.

With an aim to developing a new approach to treatment, the researchers conducted a study to see if B-Vitamin therapy would actually slow progression of diabetic nephropathy and prevent vascular events in 238 patients with Type-1 or Type-2 diabetes. Meanwhile, the placebo-controlled trial was carried out at 5 university medical centers in Canada between May 2001 and July 2007.

Patients were prescribed with single tablet of B-Vitamins with folic acid (2.5 mg/d), Vitamin-B6 (25 mg/d), and Vitamin-B12 (1 mg/d), or matching placebo. After an average period of 31.9 months, patients with Vitamin-B were found to have a faster rate of reduction of kidney filtering and so the kidney function, as compared with those on a placebo course. For patients with the diabetic nephropathy, the risk of heart attack and stroke were also higher than those who took placebo.

What Can Plavix and Aspirin Do For Heart Disease Patients With AF?

A blood thinner, a common name for an anticoagulant agent, is a drug used to prevent formation of blood clots by hindering coagula. Blood thinner does not really thin the blood; it just prevents the blood from clotting. Doctors usually prescribe blood thinners to heart disease patients who are at risk for heart attack and stroke.

So far, anticoagulants such as warfarin and aspirin have been the only effective therapies in treating heart disease patients suffering from atrial fibrillation (AF). AF is a condition in which the heart's 2 upper chambers, the atria, quiver instead of beating effectively. This will raise the risk of blood clotting or pooling in the chambers that could eventually trigger a heart attack or stroke.

According to the American Heart Association (AHA), there are some 2.2 million Americans suffer from AF. These patients often need to be fitted with a pacemaker. Yet many of them cannot be treated with warfarin to stop blood clotting because warfarin increases the risk of an internal hemorrhage by up to 70 percent.

At the annual conference of the American College of Cardiology in Orlando on March 31, 2009, researchers from Ontario's McMaster University revealed that they managed to help AF patients cut the risk of heart attack and stroke by combining Plavix with aspirin.

Plavix is known under the generic name of clopidogrel. It is used to prevent the platelets in blood from coagulating and forming clots.

ACTIVE-A, a clinical trials involving 7,554 patients, aimed to determine whether the addition of clopidogrel to aspirin could reduce major vascular events and stroke in AF patients at an acceptable risk of increased hemorrhage. In the trials, the researchers showed that combination of Plavix and aspirin could help AF patients who are unable to take other blood thinners like warfarin.

The combination of clopidogrel and aspirin reduced major vascular events by 11 percent, including a 28 percent reduction in stroke and a 23 percent reduction in myocardial infarction (also known as heart attack), as found in the study.

It is believed that this is a new treatment for AF for the first time in 20 years.

How Effective Is Crestor In Preventing Heart Disease?

Being manufactured by AstraZeneca, Crestor is a cholesterol-lowering medicine that aims to reduce levels of bad cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein, or LDL) and triglycerides in the blood, and in the meantime increase levels of good cholesterol (high-density lipoprotein, or HDL). It has been approved for use in over 95 countries with nearly 15 million patients being prescribed presently worldwide.

By lowering the bad cholesterol, it is possible to help prevent heart disease and hardening of arteries. These two conditions can develop heart attack, stroke, as well as vascular disease. Nevertheless, how effective is this medicine?

Presented during November 2008 at an annual meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans and published online by the New England Journal of Medicine, the study known as “JUPITER” revealed that Crestor could actually reduce by 44 percent the risk of heart problems among patients who currently do not face a high risk of getting a heart disease.

The study involved 17,802 men and women, of the age of 50 and more, who took 20 milligrams of Crestor on a daily basis. It was found that the combined risk of myocardial infarction, stroke, arterial revascularization, hospitalization for unstable angina, or death from cardiovascular causes was reduced by 44 percent as compared with placebo among men and women with elevated hs-CRP but low to normal cholesterol levels.

By the way, CRP is a protein that is produced by the liver. It plays an important role in inflammatory processes and serves as a biological marker to measure the risk of artery blockage.

Also shown in the study, patients who took Crestor also had the combined risk of heart attack, stroke or death from heart disease reduced by 47 percent. Meanwhile, their risk of heart attack was cut by more than half, the risk of stroke was reduced by nearly half and the total mortality of the participants was lowered by 20 percent.

It was also recorded in the study that a daily dose of 20 milligrams of Crestor was well tolerated in nearly 9,000 patients during the course of the trial, and there was no difference between treatment groups for major adverse events, including cancer or myopathy.