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.

What About Smoking Rate in United States?

Cigarette smoking is known to be a risk factor of causing breathing problems and lung cancer, and it is a major cause of heart disease for men and women, too. About 20 percent of all deaths from heart disease in the United States are directly linked to smoking. That is why cigarette smoking is named as the leading preventable cause of disease of deaths in the United States.

While authorities have been trying many means to curb the smoking rate, there are still more than 46 million American adults still smoke cigarettes, and it is estimated that smoking still kills 1,000 Americans a day.

According to a report released on September 7, 2010 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), smoking rate remains unchanged in 2009 with about 1 in 5 adults still smoke regularly. Meanwhile, teen smoking has also not been improving, and remains at nearly 20 percent.

Since 2004, smoking rate has been flat after falling dramatically since the 1960s through heavy tobacco taxes. Perhaps the health authorities have lost momentum because of reductions of anti-tobacco campaigns, or a lack of funding to support programs that help smokers quit. Meanwhile, cigarette producers have come up with brilliant marketing strategies to increase their sales.

It is the second report that indicated nearly all children (98 percent) who live with a smoker have measurable tobacco toxins in their body worried health experts.

Environmental tobacco smoke (passive smoke or more commonly known as secondhand smoke) can cause chronic respiratory conditions, cancer and heart disease. It is estimated that each year, around 35,000 nonsmokers who exposed to secondhand smoke die from heart disease.

In surveying a total of more than 30,000 nonsmokers between 1999 and 2008, it was found that the detectable levels of cotinine had dropped over the 10 years, from about 52 percent to 40 percent. The reduction could be due to more smoking bans in workplaces, restaurants and other public places.

Nevertheless, the findings also highlighted some bad news. For example, most of the decline in smoking rate came about 10 years ago, and more than half of the children aged between 3 and 11 living in United States are exposed to secondhand smoke with no safe level of exposure. And more importantly, there has been virtually no improvement for children who live with a smoker.

Why You Should Eat Less Meat?

Most people, especially ladies, do not like to be overweight or obese. The reason is simple.

The extra pound gained would in some way make the person’s appearance look not so nice, at least this is the thought that most people have. But more importantly, the extra pounds gained could possibly lead this person to many medical disorders including hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, stroke, heart disease and even certain type of cancer.

There could be many reasons why people gain weight, but improper diet and sedentary lifestyle are considered to be the 2 most important one that have been confirmed by many studies. Results of a recent European study can be another confirmation that stressed the importance of proper diet.

Researchers from Imperial College London reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that meat lovers gained more weight over 5 years than those who ate less meat but with the same amount of calories.

More than 100,000 men and 270,000 women from 10 European countries were involved in a study that examined cancer and nutrition and other lifestyle factors. Over a period of 5 years, both men and women on average gained about a pound a year, with women gained a little less.

The interesting part is that the more meat a person ate, the more weight this person gained. For every additional 250 grams of meat (equivalent to a half-pound, 450-calorie steak) a person ate daily, this person would gain 4.4 pounds over a period of 5 years. Among different types of meats, researchers found the strongest association with weight gain was poultry, followed by processed meats and red meat.

Therefore, researchers urged people to eat less meat so as to improve weight management. By cutting the consumption of meat by 250 grams a day could reduce a person’s weight by 4 pounds. While this figure is not very large for a particular individual, it could have a profound effect on the population as a whole.

Why Long-Term Weight Loss Is Not Desirable?

The obesity epidemic has been a pressing issue for the world as overweight or obesity would bring about many medical disorders including diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke. The consequence is huge amount of health expenses would be required to cover these diseases.

Naturally, no one would like being overweight or obese and if someone makes a statement like “weight loss is always beneficial, and weight gain is always harmful”, I am quite certain that not many people would raise their hands to object.

However, a paper published in the International Journal of Obesity on September 7, 2010 by researchers from Kyungpook National University in Daegu in South Korea revealed that long-term weight loss might release into the blood industrial pollutants, which is linked to diseases such as Type-2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, hypertension, periodontal disease and rheumatoid arthritis. These hazardous compounds are normally stored in the fatty tissues, but when fat breaks down during weight loss, they get into the blood stream and can reach vital organs.

After studying concentrations of 7 such compounds in blood of 1,099 participants in the United States, they found that those who lost weight over 10 years had the highest concentrations of the compounds, known as persistent organic pollutants (POPs), compared to those who gained or maintained a steady weight.

The findings totally opposed to the overwhelming data showing attaining a healthy weight is good for preventing many diseases. When a study that goes against the common sense, it would naturally arouse doubts or even opposition from other health professionals.

Some of them feared that overweight or obese people might use such findings as an excuse to stop trying to reduce their weights through healthy diet and exercises, while others suggested people should figure out if the study seems sound and applies to the average population.

In fact, even the researchers themselves acknowledged that further studies are required to establish the link between long-term weight loss and health problems.

Is Vegetable Really Good for Diabetics?

According to World Health Organization (WHO), diabetes affects more than 285 millions people worldwide, of which 4 million people of them will die every year by 2010. The number could rise up to 438 millions by 2030 with the increasing obesity rate.

Type 2 diabetes, being the commonest form of diabetes, has swiftly spread from wealthy to the fast-developing countries because of the fatty, sugary diets and sedentary lifestyles.

While nutrition and exercise are important in the prevention of such disease, the dispute on ‘which foods work best and why’ continues. This is because only few good quality studies were carried out to explore such issue.

Recently, researchers from the University of Leicester, central England found that eating more spinach and other green leafy vegetables could actually reduce the risk of Type-2 diabetes. Their findings were published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on August 20, 2010.

6 studies involving 220,000 people were reviewed to explore the link between fruit and vegetable consumption and Type-2 diabetes. The results showed that eating one and a half extra servings (106 gm) of green leafy vegetables reduce the risk of diabetes by 14 percent, while eating more fruit and vegetables combined had negligible impact.

Researchers could not explain why leafy vegetables have such protective effect, though they suspected it is probably because of the high antioxidants such as Vitamin C and magnesium found in green leafy vegetables.

As such, they suggested more investigation should be carried out to confirm their findings. Other health experts also felt that it was too early to isolate green leafy vegetables and regard them alone as a way to reduce the risk of getting Type-2 diabetes.

Meanwhile, the researchers as well as other experts in the field urged people to continue consuming 5 portions of fruit and vegetables a day, which would benefit people in the prevention heart disease, stroke, some cancers and obesity as well as Type-2 diabetes.

The National Diet Nutrition Survey showed that, although fruit and vegetable intake has increased over the past decade, only a third of men and women eat the recommended five-a-day in 2008/09.

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.

Skinny-Thigh Could Cause Heart Disease

Overweight or obesity has been shown by earlier studies to be one of the many risk factors, like diabetes, smoking, hypertension, and high cholesterol, of heart disease.

A study appeared in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) on September 4, 2009 reported that women and men with thighs smaller than 60 cm (or about 23.6 inches) in circumference would face a much higher risk of premature death and heart disease. It is believed that this is the very first to examine the implications of thigh size on heart disease.

Danish researchers from Copenhagen University Hospital looked at data obtained from 1,436 men and 1,380 women. The body measurements of these participants were taken in Demark in the late 1980s. Over the next 12 years, more than 400 participants died and another 540 suffered either cardiovascular or heart disease, and the ratio of men to women was roughly 2 to 1.

The findings showed that survivors without any heart disease had significantly thicker thighs, after taking into account of other risk factors of heart disease. People with thigh size smaller than 60 cm had a much higher risk of premature death.

Nevertheless, 60 cm was the threshold. This means that larger (than 60 cm) thigh size did not seem to offer any additional benefit for either sex. In fact, those with the thinnest thighs (less than 18 inches around) were more than 3 times more likely to die compared with those with the 60-cm thighs, and more than twice as likely to have heart disease.

It is possible that, according to researchers, a lack of lower body muscle mass could affect a proper glucose and lipid metabolism, which in turn put the body at risk of developing disease. As such, they proposed further study to find out the reasons.

Meanwhile, suggestion by the researchers to use thigh size for assessing heart disease risks together with other measures like body mass index (BMI) and waist and hip circumference met objection from some health experts. The opposers doubted that the thigh size could be clinically useful.

What Else Can Cause Obesity?

While many studies have blamed the increasingly sedentary lifestyle and the availability of low-cost high-calorie foods to be the culprit for obesity epidemic in the developed countries, there might be other reasons behind this.

Researchers from Emory University School of Medicine and the University of Colorado at Boulder found that the bugs that help digest food could also cause the body to gain weight if they are not properly regulated. If wrong kinds of bacteria were dominant, they could cause a low-level inflammation leading to a pre-diabetic condition and an elevated appetite, as explained in a paper published on March 4, 2010 in the Journal “Science”.

In the study, researchers examined mice that were genetically engineered to be deficient in a key immune system protein, namely TLR5, which helps cells sense the presence of bacteria. Such protein plays an important role in the intestinal community, meaning it knows not to apply too much force and does not harm the good bacteria.

In the absence of TLR5, the immune system can still regulate bacteria but it just could not do it properly. When the bacterial composition changes, a low level inflammation sets in and insulin receptors are desensitized.

To justify the theory, a series of experiments were preformed on mice. The results showed that if the TLR5-deficient mice were given unrestricted diets, they ate 10 percent more and gained 20 percent more weight than the normal mice. Even if their food was limited, the TLR5-deficient mice were still less sensitive to insulin than the normal mice.

The TLR5-deficient mice also developed metabolic syndrome, which could cause weight gain, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels, and it could raise the risk for developing diabetes and heart disease.

While the study was limited to mice, experts still believe they might applicable to humans as well. The findings suggested that excess caloric consumption is not only the result of undisciplined eating style but also changes in appetite and metabolism caused by the intestinal bacteria.