It may be a good idea to look into nutritional supplements for heart conditions, as researchers have recently found that certain heart medications may have a harmful effect on the organ.

In a new study published in Circulation Research, it was found that beta-blockers that only target the beta-receptors may undermine the functions of the heart and put the organ in jeopardy.

However, beta-blockers that target both the alpha- and beta-receptors still offer the most benefits for cardiac patients.

Patients with heart disease usually have higher levels of catecholamines, which activate beta-receptors. When patients take beta-blockers, it causes the heart to produce a more efficient pump, but ultimately this process could lead to heart failure.

Alarmingly, the researchers report that this has been the treatment for cardiac patients for the past 50 years without fully understanding the molecular consequences.

Study leader Kevin Xiang feels that this study is key if people still continue to use beta-blockers as a treatment.

“It definitely will help people along the way to understand how to further manipulate this system. Beta blockers are still the most commonly used drug for heart disease,” Xiang said.

A new study is suggesting that those who receive the organ procedure have an elevated risk for developing skin cancer.

Researchers found in the Archives of Dermatology discovered that there were increased instances of multiple skin cancers in heart transplant patients.

While previous studies have indicated that renal transplant patients had a high risk of developing skin cancer, new findings suggest that heart transplant patients are twice as likely to develop the disease.

Findings reveal that of the 312 patients who received the organ transplant, 46.4 percent developed skin cancer in a 19-year follow up. Of those who developed the disease, there were a total of 1,395 different kinds of cancer.

The researchers wrote that while these findings were concerning, there was a low death rate. They recommended simple practices to keep skin healthy, in hopes of preventing the disease.

“Vigilant sun protection practices, skin cancer education, regular skin examinations and daily vitamin D [nutritional supplements] are appropriate interventions in these high-risk heart transplant patients,” they wrote.

The study published in the journal Circulation, finds that applying capsaicin, which is the main component in chili peppers and the active ingredient in some common pain creams, to specific skin areas on mice caused sensory nerves in the skin to trigger signals in the nervous system.

These signals activate cellular “pro-survival” pathways in the heart which protect the muscle, the article further explains.

“If proven effective in humans, this therapy has the potential to reduce injury or death in the event of a coronary blockage, thereby reducing the extent and consequences of heart attack,” says Keith Jones, a researcher at the University of Cincinnati where the study was performed.

Capsaicin, which is used topically to treat pain, produces a hot feeling on the skin. It is approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The research further supports the value of chili peppers as a natural health resource.

Chili peppers, which are high in vitamin C, have already been shown to help fight migraine headaches, relieve sinus congestion and aid digestion.

The phase 1 study of 53 patients found that stem cells from donor bone marrow promoted the growth of new blood vessels in heart tissue damaged by heart attack.

The patients received the stem cell injections within 10 days of having a heart attack. During follow-up, they were compared to patients who had received a placebo injection.

After six months, those who got the stem cells were four times more likely to be better off overall, pumped more blood with each heartbeat, and had one-quarter as many irregular heartbeats, when compared to the placebo group. There also were no serious side effects with the stem cell treatment, according to the report published in the Dec. 8 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

This is the strongest evidence so far that adult stem cells can repair heart attack damage, the Rush University Medical Center researchers said. It had been believed that only embryonic stem cells could turn into heart or other organ cells.

“The results point to a promising new treatment for heart attack patients that could reduce [death] and lessen the need for heart transplants,” Dr. Gary Schaer, head of the Rush Cardiac Catheterization Laboratory, said in a news release from the university.

The Spanish research involving more than 15,500 men and 26,000 women found large quantities of alcohol could be even more beneficial for men.

Female drinkers did not benefit to the same extent, the study in Heart found.

Experts are critical, warning heavy drinking can increase the risk of other diseases, with alcohol responsible for 1.8 million deaths globally per year.

The study was conducted in Spain, a country with relatively high rates of alcohol consumption and low rates of coronary heart disease.

The research involved men and women aged between 29 and 69, who were asked to document their lifetime drinking habits and followed for 10 years.

Crucially the research team claim to have eliminated the “sick abstainers” risk by differentiating between those who had never drunk and those whom ill-health had forced to quit. This has been used in the past to explain fewer heart-related deaths among drinkers on the basis that those who are unhealthy to start with are less likely to drink.

Good cholesterol

The researchers, led by the Basque Public Health Department, placed the participants into six categories – from never having drunk to drinking more than 90g of alcohol each day. This would be the equivalent of consuming about eight bottles of wine a week, or 28 pints of lager.

For those drinking little – less than a shot of vodka a day for instance – the risk was reduced by 35%. And for those who drank anything from three shots to more than 11 shots each day, the risk worked out an average of 50% less.

The same benefits were not seen in women, who suffer fewer heart problems than men to start with. Researchers speculated this difference could be down to the fact that women process alcohol differently, and that female hormones protect against the disease in younger age groups.

The type of alcohol drunk did not seem to make a difference, but protection was greater for those drinking moderate to high amounts of varied drinks.

The exact mechanisms are as yet unclear, but it is known that alcohol helps to raise high-density lipoproteins, sometimes known as good cholesterol, which helps stop so-called bad cholesterol from building up in the arteries.

‘Binge-drinking’

UK experts said the findings should be treated with caution because they do not take into account ill-health from a range of other diseases caused by excess drinking.

“Whilst moderate alcohol intake can lower the risk of having a heart attack, coronary heart disease is just one type of heart disease. Cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle, is associated with high alcohol intake and can lead to a poor quality of life and premature death,” said the British Heart Foundation’s senior cardiac nurse, Cathy Ross.

“The heart is just one of many organs in the body. While alcohol could offer limited protection to one organ, abuse of it can damage the heart and other organs such as the liver, pancreas and brain.”

The Stroke Association meanwhile noted that overall, evidence indicated that people who regularly consumed a large amount of alcohol had a three-fold increased risk of stroke.

“Six units within six hours is considered ‘binge-drinking’ and anyone indulging in regular ‘binge-drinking’ increases their risk of stroke greatly,” said research officer Joanne Murphy.

Public health specialists warned no-one should be encouraged to drink more as a result of this study.

“The relationship between alcohol and heart disease remains controversial,” said Professor Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

“While there is good evidence that moderate consumption is protective in people who are at substantial risk of heart disease – which excludes most people under the age of 40 – we also know that most people underestimate how much they drink. This paper adds to the existing literature but should not be considered as definitive. ”

In the UK, the recommendation is no more than two to three units of alcohol a day for women – the equivalent of one standard glass of wine – and three to four units for men.

The British Liver Trust said: “There have been several studies suggesting that small amounts of alcohol can reduce the risk of coronary heart disease in men over the age of 40.

“But these are often misinterpreted by people looking for a health reason to consume alcohol.

“If you want to look after your health, stay within the limits of no more than 3-4 units a day for men or 2-3 for women and aim to give yourself at least two days off alcohol a week.”

Professor Alan Maryon-Davis, president of the UK Faculty of Public Health, agreed that the message from this study was not clear: “At the end of the day, you’re juggling different risks and benefits, maybe helping your heart or maybe damaging your brain and liver.

“The simple message is moderation.

“Stick to the guidelines, and you won’t go far wrong.”

In one study, results showed that men who retained healthy levels of cholesterol in the range below 200 actually cut their risk of developing high-risk prostate tumors by more than 50 percent in comparison to men with high ranging cholesterol levels.

In the second study, findings showed that men with high levels of good (HDL) cholesterol were slightly less likely to develop prostate cancer in any form, compared to men with very low HDL cholesterol levels.

The studies were recently published in the journal of the American Association for Cancer Research called Cancer Epidemiology Biomarkers & Prevention. Both studies support prior research indicating that by limiting fats in the bloodstream, the risk of cancer can be lowered.

According to Elizabeth Platz of Johns Hopkins University who led the first study, “There might be this added benefit to keeping cholesterol low.” For the study, Platz’s team analyzed data of 5,586 men aged 55 and older that came from the Prostate Cancer Prevention Trial conducted back in the 1990s. All of these men had been a part of the placebo group during the trial.

Among the group, a total of 60 of the men developed high-risk, aggressive tumors that are known to grow and spread quickly. By comparing cholesterol levels of all the men in the group, it was revealed that those men with cholesterol levels under 200 had a 59 percent less chance of developing one of these high-risk tumors than those men having high levels of cholesterol.

Platz acknowledged that cholesterol levels had no significant effect on the overall incidence of prostate cancer in the study. However, she pointed out that the association between low cholesterol levels and a reduced incidence of aggressive disease “is a notable reduction which is not often seen for prostate cancer.”

Although the decrease in risk is highly significant, it must be noted that the researchers could not account for the number of men in the study who were taking cholesterol-lowering medications such as statin drugs, which include such name brands as Lipitor, Zocor, and Crestor. Therefore, some of the reduction in risk may have been due to the use of such drugs rather than from generally having low cholesterol levels.

The results of the second study are based on data gathered over 18 years from following more than 29,000 Finnish men who were taking various vitamins and nutrients to test whether or not they could lower their risk for cancer. All of the participants in the study were smokers. According to study leader Dr. Demetrius Albanes of the National Cancer Institute, findings showed that those men having the highest levels of HDL cholesterol were 11 percent less likely to develop prostate cancer than those with lowest levels.

In a statement, Albanes said, “Our study affirms that lower total cholesterol may be caused by undiagnosed cancer.” He then added, “In terms of a public health message, we found that higher levels of good cholesterol seem to be protective for all cancers.”

Researchers from both studies agree that further research is necessary to confirm findings, as well as to identify the molecular mechanisms behind the association.

In the United States, prostate cancer is the most common cancer among men. It is estimated that over 192,000 new cases will develop this year alone, and of those, the disease will claim 27,360 lives.

Researchers found that among more than 37,000 middle-aged and older Swedish men, those who regularly drank coffee were no more likely to develop heart failure than those who infrequently, if ever, drank the beverage.

The findings, reported in the American Heart Journal, add to evidence that coffee may not be the heart-health threat it was once suspected to be.

The initial studies suggesting that heavy coffee consumption might contribute to heart attacks or other cardiac problems were mainly retrospective — asking heart attack sufferers about their coffee consumption and comparing them with people who had never had a heart attack, for example.

But more-recent studies have been better designed to weed out a true association. These so-called prospective studies have first asked people about their coffee intake and then followed them over time to record new cases of heart trouble.

Those studies have generally linked coffee to either a neutral or even a protective effect on heart health, said Dr. Emily B. Levitan, one of the researchers on the new study.

Heart failure, however, has been little studied as compared with heart attack, noted Levitan, who was with Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston at the time of the study and is now based at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Heart failure is a chronic condition in which the heart muscle is weakened and cannot pump blood efficiently enough to meet all the body’s needs — leading to symptoms like fatigue and breathlessness on exertion.

A 2001 study raised concerns that heavy coffee drinking might contribute to heart failure. It found that of roughly 7,500 Swedish men, those who drank five or more cups of coffee per day had a higher risk of developing heart failure than men who drank less than that.

Based on that study, a recent statement from the American Heart Association (AHA) noted that coffee consumption might raise the risk of heart failure, but added that more research is needed to confirm that possibility.

The AHA statement motivated the current study, Levitan told Reuters Health.

She and her colleagues found that among 37,315 men ages 45 to 79, 784 went on to develop heart failure over nine years. The researchers found no clear relationship between the men’s reported coffee intake at the outset and their risk of developing heart failure.

Whether the findings apply to men with existing heart problems is not known, according to Levitan. Going into the study, none of the men had a history of heart attack; heart-muscle damage from a heart attack is one of the major causes of heart failure.

Nor did the study include women. It’s possible, Levitan noted, that the results could be different for women, but that would be unlikely.

“I don’t think there is any strong evidence of an association between coffee and heart failure,” she said. It would be “premature,” Levitan added, for people to give up coffee in an effort to prevent the disease.

Sources: msnbc.msn.com

The scientists followed 1,169 nondiabetic men and women who had been hospitalized for a first heart attack. Each filled out a standardized health questionnaire that included a question about chocolate consumption over the past 12 months. Chocolate contains flavonoid antioxidants that are widely believed to have beneficial cardiovascular effects.

The patients had a health examination three months after their discharge from the hospital, and researchers followed them for the next eight years using Swedish national registries of hospitalizations and deaths. After controlling for age, sex, obesity, physical inactivity, smoking, education and other factors, they found that the more chocolate people consumed, the more likely they were to survive. The results are reported in the September issue of The Journal of Internal Medicine.

But before concluding that a box of Godiva truffles is health food, chocolate lovers may want to consider some of the study’s weaknesses. It is an observational study, not a randomized trial, so cause and effect cannot be definitively established.

Even though the researchers controlled for many variables, chocolate consumption could be associated with factors they did not account for — mental health, for example — that might reduce the risk for death.

The scientists did not ask what kind of chocolate the patients ate, and milk chocolate has less available flavonoid than dark chocolate. Finally, chocolate consumption did not reduce the risk for any nonfatal cardiac event.

Still, Dr. David L. Katz, an associate professor of public health at Yale who was not involved in the work, said the study added “an interesting element, following a group of adults who’ve had a heart attack and noting an impressive reduction in cardiac deaths.” While the study is observational, he said, “the broader context is reassuring.”

While the chocolate eaters in the study had a statistically insignificant reduction in the risk of death from any cause over the eight-year span, the reduced risk for dying of heart disease was highly significant. And it was dose-dependent — that is, the more chocolate consumed, the lower the risk for death.

Compared with people who ate none, those who had chocolate less than once a month had a 27 percent reduction in their risk for cardiac death, those who ate it up to once a week had a 44 percent reduction and those who indulged twice or more a week had a 66 percent reduced risk of dying from a subsequent heart event. The beneficial effect remained after controlling for intake of other kinds of sweets.

A co-author of the paper, Dr. Kenneth J. Mukamal, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard, said that there was considerable data from other studies suggesting that chocolate lowered blood pressure and that this might be a cause of the lower cardiac mortality found in the study.

Dr. Katz, of Yale, agreed that “there are many reasonable biological mechanisms” for a protective effect from chocolate.

“I like the study,” he said. “It adds to the general fund of knowledge we already have.”

Dr. Mukamal sounded a note of caution about the findings.

“Although this is interesting and provocative, chocolate does not come without costs,” he said. “For people looking for a small snack to finish a meal, this is a great choice. But it should be supplementing healthy eating and replacing less healthy snacks.”

The results of a small study prompted the researchers to advise people who have high blood pressure or heart disease to avoid energy drinks because they could impact their blood pressure or change the effectiveness of their medications.

The drinks generally have high levels of caffeine and taurine, an amino acid found in protein-rich foods like meat and fish that can affect heart function and blood pressure, the researchers say.

“We saw increases in both blood pressure and heart rate in healthy volunteers who were just sitting in a chair watching movies. They weren’t exercising. They were in a resting state,” says James Kalus of Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who led the study.

The increases did not rise to dangerous levels in the group of 15 healthy volunteers, whose average age was 26, the researchers say.

But the increases potentially could be significant in people with cardiovascular disease or those taking drugs to lower heart rate or blood pressure, they told a meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Florida.

The American Beverage Association industry trade group defends the findings.

“While the amount of caffeine in energy drinks or coffee may cause a slight and temporary increase in blood pressure, it would have no greater effect than walking up a flight of steps,” it says in response to the study.

“So singling out energy drinks in a unique manner, particularly when compared to a more commonly consumed caffeinated beverage like coffee, does not provide a full and proper context for consumers.”

Kalus declined to say which brand of energy drink was used in the study. He says the drinks generally contain similar ingredients.

“By giving the brand, it would dilute the message that all of these drinks need to be looked at,” he says.

Drink then measure

The study participants were asked not to consume other forms of caffeine for two days before starting the study and then throughout a study, in which they drank two cans of energy drinks daily over seven days.

Each can contained 80 milligrams of caffeine and 1000 milligrams of taurine.

The volunteers’ heart rates rose by about 8% on the first day and 11% on the seventh day.

Maximum systolic blood pressure, the top number in blood pressure readings that represents pressure while the heart contracts, rose by 8% on the first day and 10% on the seventh day.

Diastolic blood pressure, the bottom number that gives the pressure when the heart relaxes between beats, rose by 7% on the first day and 8% on the seventh day.

The study did not identify ingredients responsible for the changes, but Kalus says it is probably caffeine and taurine.

Kalus says the study did not address possible health effects from the way some people consume these drinks, such as mixing them with alcohol.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au

“Stroke is no longer an affliction of old age,” said lead researcher Timothy J. Wolf, an instructor of occupational therapy and neurology and investigator for the Cognitive Rehabilitation Research Group at Washington University School of Medicine, in St. Louis. “People in the working ages of life are having strokes with greater regularity than ever before.”

Reporting in the September/October issue of the American Journal of Occupational Therapy, the team also found that while more people under the age of 65 are suffering strokes, rehabilitation is often not offered to younger people with mild stroke.

Wolf and his colleagues gathered data on 7,740 people treated for stroke at a St. Louis hospital between 1999 and 2008. They found that 45% were under 65 and 27% were under the age of 55. This differs drastically from data from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, which states that 66% of all strokes occur in people over 65, the researchers noted.

Most of the strokes among those under 65 were mild. “These individuals typically do not have outward signs of impairment and therefore are discharged with little or no rehabilitation,” Wolf noted. “What we now know though, from following up with this group of people, is that they are having trouble reintegrating back into complex activities of everyday life such as employment,” he said.

About 71% of patients who had a mild to moderate stroke were discharged directly home, discharged with home services only, or discharged with outpatient services only, the researchers found.

On follow-up, 46% of those with a mild stroke said they were working slower, 42% said they were not able to do their job as well, 31% said they were not able to stay organized and 52% said they had problems concentrating.

“If you are young and have a mild stroke, chances are you will not receive rehabilitation services,” Wolf said. “That does not mean that you do not have any impairments. It means that we as a health-care community are not doing a good enough job at detecting the more subtle deficits associated with mild stroke.”

The health-care community needs to pay more attention to this trend in strokes, and begin to modify assessment and intervention strategies to meet the needs of younger, less neurologically impaired stroke patients, Wolf said.

“Right now, our services are heavily weighted toward assessment and intervention for motor impairments and preparing an individual with a stroke to return home,” he said. However, “the younger working age stroke survivor has needs that go way beyond self-care, and he or she needs to be able to return to work and community roles,” Wolf stated.

Dr. Richard Isaacson, an assistant professor of neurology and medicine at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, said that while people may be having strokes younger, it is hard to know from this single study whether this is a trend throughout the United States.

Nevertheless, “this brings attention to the fact that stroke is not just a disease of old people, it’s a disease of people as we age,” Isaacson said.

He speculated that if a trend exists it could be due to risk factors for stroke, including high blood presure, high cholesterol,diabetes and obesity. “People in their middle-age need to realize they need to control these risk factors,” Isaacson added.

And he agreed that doctors need to do more to help younger people with mild strokes re-enter their lives.

“Neurologists do not obtain enough information to determine whether a patient will have difficulty with returning to work, family and other life events,” Isaacson said. “A lot of times we don’t realize that this person needs occupational therapy to help them focus in getting back to full participation in their previous activities.”

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

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