Tag Archives: association

Lifestyle change may ease heart risk from job stress

Being under stress at work is tied to a higher risk of heart problems, new research confirms - but putting down the beer bottle and going for a walk may help. Researchers found that job strain - defined as having a lot of demands at work, but little control - was tied at a 25 percent higher chance of having a heart attack or dying of heart problems. But heart risks were cut in half among people - stressed or not - who maintained a healthy lifestyle compared to those who drank, smoked or were obese. “For many people avoidance of work stress is unrealistic,” lead researcher Mika Kivimaki, from University College London, said in an email. “Thus, we wanted to ask the question whether adopting an otherwise healthy lifestyle would reduce heart disease risk among those with job strain,” he said. Kivimaki and his colleagues combined the results of seven European studies that surveyed 102,000 people about their general lifestyle habits and health, including how much strain they were under at work. None of those participants had heart disease at the start of the study. Over the next seven years, on average, there were about 1,100 heart attacks or deaths from heart disease across the trials. About one in six people in the studies initially reported being under job strain. Rates of heart problems over a decade ranged from 12 cases per 1,000 generally healthy people without job strain to 31 per 1,000 people with job strain and multiple lifestyle risks, such as rarely exercising or having more than three or four alcoholic drinks a day. Kivimaki's team calculated that close to 4 percent of all heart attacks and heart disease deaths could be attributed to job strain and about 26 percent to drinking, smoking, obesity and lack of physical activity. The researchers wrote in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that for people with stressful jobs, adopting a healthier lifestyle may be a strategy to lower heart risks. “We hope this message reaches those who want to reduce their heart disease risk but feel they cannot avoid work stress,” Kivimaki said. One researcher who has studied work stress and heart disease separately said the new review may underestimate the link between job strain and heart disease. OTHER FACTORS? Paul Landsbergis of SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York, said other types of job stress that may influence heart risks - such as having low social support and job insecurity - weren't taken into account. The new study doesn't prove pressure at work caused heart problems. But cardiologist Dr. Vincent Figueredo from Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia said the results are in line with past studies suggesting that chronic stress, including from job strain, can have negative health effects. “With chronic stress, there's activation of these systems that can have long-term effects on things like insulin resistance, central obesity (and) high blood pressure,” Figueredo, who wasn't involved in the new research, said. What this review adds, he said, is that workers may be able to do something about those extra risks. “It does offer some hope for those people who do have that job strain they can't do anything about at work,” Figueredo said. “If you're stuck being stressed at work, at least go out and exercise, don't smoke and eat healthy.”source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/17/lifestyle-change-may-ease-heart-risk-from-job-stress/

Could marijuana reduce diabetes risk?

There's an unexpected link between marijuana use and factors related to Type 2 diabetes that has medical researchers intrigued. Several studies have found that marijuana users take in more food calories than nonusers, but they still have lower rates of obesity and diabetes, and lower average body mass index (BMI) levels. In a new study, researchers investigated what effects marijuana and its active ingredient tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) might have on people's metabolism, especially insulin levels. [5 Diets That Fight Diseases] Insulin resistance an important risk factor for diabetes is a metabolic disorder that occurs when the body's cells cannot properly intake insulin. The American Heart Association estimates 35 percent of U.S. adults have metabolic disorders that include insulin resistance. To examine the link between THC and metabolism, researchers gathered the results of 4,657 adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a cross-sectional study administered annually by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of the study's participants, 579 were current marijuana users, 1,975 had used the drug in the past but not recently, and 2,103 had never tried marijuana. Researchers analyzed the participants' fasting insulin levels, cholesterol levels, insulin resistance and waist sizes. Multiple benefits seen The results showed that the current marijuana users had 16 percent lower fasting insulin levels than nonusers, and 17 percent lower insulin-resistance levels. Additionally, the regular users of marijuana had smaller average waist sizes, and higher levels of high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, aka “good cholesterol.” “These are indeed remarkable observations that are supported by basic science experiments that came to similar conclusions,” Dr. Joseph Alpert, professor of medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, Tucson, said in a statement. Interestingly, only the current users of marijuana (not the former users) experienced the positive results, suggesting that the effects of marijuana use on insulin and insulin resistance only occur after recent use. To test their results, which were published in the latest issue of The American Journal of Medicine, the researchers also adjusted for participants who had been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. Much more research needed “After we excluded those subjects with a diagnosis of diabetes the associations between marijuana use and insulin levels, [insulin resistance], waist circumference and HDL-C were similar and remained statistically significant,” Dr. Elizabeth Penner, a co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Is it possible that THC will be commonly prescribed in the future for patients with diabetes or metabolic syndrome alongside antidiabetic oral agents or insulin for improved management of this chronic illness? Only time will answer this question for us,” Alpert said in an editorial accompanying the article in the journal. “We desperately need a great deal more basic and clinical research into the short- and long-term effects of marijuana in a variety of clinical settings such as cancer, diabetes and frailty of the elderly,” Alpert wrote. Copyright 2013 LiveScience, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/16/could-marijuana-reduce-diabetes-risk/

Small restaurants serving big calories, salt, studies find

Despite public health progress in cutting calories, as well as salt and fat from fast foods and supermarket products, neighborhood restaurants are still packing big helpings of each into their meals, a trio of studies suggests. Small independent eateries are not required to display nutritional information for consumers - if they did, the researchers report, patrons would routinely see single meals containing nearly a full day's worth of calories and fat plus one and half times the daily recommended intake for salt. “It's really a disgrace. Every day the newspapers say things about the obesity epidemic… To a large extent, you can trace that to too many calories,” said Susan Roberts, director of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Energy Metabolism Lab and professor of nutrition at Tufts University, in Boston. About two thirds of Americans are considered overweight or obese, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. And as American waistlines continue to expand, public health policy has focused on the quality of food available in supermarkets and restaurants. President Barack Obama's 2010 Affordable Care Act, for example, contains a requirement that restaurants with at least 20 outlets in the U.S. make their nutritional information available to customers. But one of three new studies published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday points out that policy only applies to about half of the nation's restaurants. The other half is made up of smaller chains or independent restaurants exempt from the requirement. For their analysis, Roberts and her colleagues measured the calories in 157 meals at small Mexican, American, Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Thai restaurants in and near Boston between June and August 2011. Overall, the researchers found the average meal at those restaurants contained 1,327 calories. That's about 66 percent of the 2,000 daily calories recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. About 8 percent of the meals exceeded 2,000 calories. The meals from small restaurants also contained up to 18 percent more calories than comparable dishes from larger chains - suggesting the requirement to display nutritional information is keeping the large-chain restaurant meals healthier, according to the researchers. In another of the studies published Monday, Canadian researchers led by Mary Scourboutakos from the University of Toronto found similarly high calorie counts in more than 3,500 meals from Ontario restaurants they analyzed. What's more, Scourboutakos and her fellow researchers found that individual meals contained an average of 89 percent of the daily recommended amount of fat and 151 percent of the daily recommended amount of salt. A third study also zeroed-in on salt as a major area of concern. Several organizations, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, the American Medical Association, the American Heart Association and the World Health Organization have all called for reductions in the amount of sodium people consume. The Institute of Medicine recommends that most healthy people get 1,500 milligrams (mg) of sodium per day, with an upper limit of 2,300 mg. But the average American eats closer to 3,600 mg each day, largely in processed foods. For their new study, Dr. Stephen Havas of the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago and his colleagues analyzed 402 processed foods and 78 fast-food products to see if their salt content had changed between 2005 and 2011. They found a small decrease in the amount of salt in processed foods over that period but also a similarly-sized increase in the amount of salt in fast-food products. The differences in each category, however, were small enough that they could have been due to chance. Havas said the results show that the calls for voluntary reductions in salt have been a “total failure.” “The only thing that will solve this problem is for the amount of salt in our food to be regulated,” he added. But regulating food and what goes into it has been a controversial topic, according to Dr. Mitchell Katz, from the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services in California. Instead, he suggests in a commentary accompanying the three studies that doctors should advocate for their patients' right to know what they're eating. “As we debate the controversial role of government in stemming the interrelated endemics of obesity, diabetes mellitus, and heart disease, we must insist on the right of our patients (as well as ourselves) to know what we are eating, whether fast food or slow, whether large chain, small chain, or individual restaurant,” he wrote. One encouraging finding from the study of Toronto restaurant meals highlighted by Scourboutakos and her colleagues is that entrees identified on the restaurant menus as “healthy” were generally at least healthier - with about 474 calories, 20 percent of the day's value of fat and 50 percent of the recommended daily intake of sodium. Roberts told Reuters Health she'd like to see restaurants add a few healthy choice options to their menu to at least give people an alternative. “That would mean the restaurant doesn't have to calculate the whole menu and that would give people choices,” she said.source : http://www.foxnews.com/health/2013/05/14/small-restaurants-serving-big-calories-salt-studies-find/

Some prostate cancer patients more likely to die after weekend ER visits

The new study focused on metastatic prostate cancer in examining the so-called "weekend effect" of higher patient mortality, subject of numerous studies for about a decade. Results from the study will be presented May 5 at the annual meeting of the American Urological Association in San Diego. Khurshid R. …