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They found no heightened risk of heart disease or premature death linked to food that had been cooked in this way. But the investigators stress that their findings, from studying the typical Spanish diet in which these "healthy" oils are found in abundance, do not apply to lard or other cooking oils. So traditional fry ups should not be the order of the day, bmj.com reports.
When food is fried it becomes more calorific because the food absorbs the fat of the oils. And experts know that eating lots of fat-laden food can raise blood pressure and cause high cholesterol, which are risk factors for heart disease. For the study, the researchers at the Autonomous University of Madrid surveyed 40,757 adults about their diet.
The participants were asked about what types of food they ate in a typical week and how that food was prepared and cooked. None of the adults had any sign of heart disease at the start of the 11-year study, but by the end of it 606 heart disease events and 1,134 deaths had occurred. When the researchers looked at these heart events in detail, they could find no link with fried food in the diet. This, they believe, is down to the type of oil the food is cooked in.
The Med diet
Grief raises heart attack risk...
Bereavement raises heart attack risk, says study
9 January 2012 - The first seven days following bereavement appear to be the most risky in terms of heart health
Doctors generally check their patients' blood pressure during office visits, but a new study says many are not doing it the right way - and that by doing it incorrectly, the doctors could be putting their patients' lives at risk. Cardiologist Oscar Garfein takes blood pressure readings from both of his patients' arms. That technique saved the life of one of his patients. "I found that in one arm, it was very, very low, and in the other one, it was normal," says Garfein. "And it helped me arrive at a diagnosis of a potentially-lethal condition."
Garfein's routine is supported by a new study showing that different readings in the right and left arms could be a sign of heart disease or blood vessel problems. If the two readings of systolic blood pressure - the pressure of blood in arteries when the heart is contracting - differ by 15 or more, it could indicate a narrowing of arteries to the legs, decreased blood flow to the brain, heart disease and a 70 percent increased risk of dying from either heart attack or stroke.
If heart or blood vessel disease is diagnosed at an early stage, changing risky behavior or taking statin drugs can reduce death rates. "You want to search for the risk factors that are associated with this," says Garfein, "such as high blood pressure or cigarette smoking or high cholesterol, and treat them very aggressively."
Many cardiologists routinely check blood pressure in both arms, but the practice is much less common on a routine doctor's visit. This study, published in The Lancet, confirms a double reading could flag an underlying vascular problem in someone who otherwise seems to be healthy. The study shows it doesn't matter what the systolic number was, it's the difference between the two readings that matters. "All it takes is about a minute and you can find something that really, most of the time, points to the fact that this patient has established vascular disease," says Garfein.
Source
Grief raises heart attack risk...
Bereavement raises heart attack risk, says study
9 January 2012 - The first seven days following bereavement appear to be the most risky in terms of heart health
So you're saying people could die of a broken heart?
What we perceive as the beating of our heart is actually the co-ordinated action of more than a billion muscle cells. Most of the time, only the muscle cells from the larger heart chambers contract and relax. However, when the heart needs to work harder it relies on backup from the atrial muscle cells deep within the smaller chambers (atria) of the heart.
The health of these 'high-performance' atrial cells relies on specific concentrations of cellular calcium. Now, for the first time, scientists at The University of Nottingham have produced a mathematical model of calcium activity within the atrial heart cell which will significantly improve our chances of treating heart disease and stroke.
Their findings have just been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Mathematical model of calcium activity within heart cells found
In a heart attack, the heart muscle itself loses some of its blood supply. The affected tissue dies, and the heart becomes less able to pump blood to the rest of the body. If a patient reaches an advanced medical center quickly enough, doctors can open the blocked artery before the damage is done. But the director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, Eduardo Marbán, had a more ambitious plan. "The idea was to take patients who had suffered a heart attack, in which part of the heart muscle turns to scar, and to challenge the dogma that scar, once formed, is permanent, and that healthy tissue, once lost, is lost forever."
To do that, Marbán's team biopsied small pieces of heart tissue from recent heart attack victims and used them to grow stem cells in the laboratory. Millions of cardiac stem cells were then injected back into the affected part of the heart. "So it was the same area of the heart that had sustained injury," he says, "and cells were being infused into the coronary artery that had been blocked by the clot to cause the heart attack in the first place." Marbán reports the results of the small study, using just 25 patients, in The Lancet. The stem cell treatment cut the amount of scar tissue in half - from an average of about 24 percent of the heart to just 12 percent as measured by MRI scans a year after treatment. By comparison, a control group that didn't get stem cells had virtually no reduction in scar tissue.
Nevertheless, the stem cell patients did not register a corresponding increase in overall heart function, though they did show improvements in the particular area where new heart tissue grew back. "And when we looked at the function at the area of the heart attack, it was pumping much better and contracting much better than in the subjects who did not receive cell therapy," Marbán says. "So by that measure, it seemed to be working, and working well." Marbán admits this is just a "proof-of-concept" study. Further research may evaluate different ways of introducing the stem cells into patients' hearts, as well as using stem cells taken from cadaver hearts. If the stem cell therapy proves effective, he says, the treatment could be available to heart attack patients in about four years.
Source
A new blood test may identify people at risk of an imminent heart attack. Scientists have found that certain cells in the bloodstream can give advance warning of a heart attack, even when other test results are normal. Doctors are pretty good at telling when a patient is at above-average risk of a heart attack. High blood pressure, family history, and a lack of exercise can all point to high risk - in general, at some point in the future. But those warning signs don't help predict whether the danger lies 15 years from now, or next week.
Now, researchers in California think they have found a way of telling whether that heart attack is imminent by determining whether a certain kind of cell called a CEC is circulating in the blood. Lead investigator Paddy Barrett, of the Scripps Translational Science Institute explains that "a CEC is a circulating endothelial cell, which lines the inside of a patient's artery. And when you have a heart attack, this artery cracks, releases this cell, and with a simple blood test we can identify this particular cell type." The blood test found that heart attack patients had significantly more CECs in their blood - four times more, on average.
Although this study focused on heart attack patients, the scientists say the endothelial cells can enter the bloodstream before a full-blown heart attack, typically one to two weeks earlier. "And we believe, when we refine this test, that we will be able to predict, in the future, who was about to have a heart attack or on the cusp of having a heart attack," Barrett said. Using automated equipment to analyze the blood for the presence of CECs, the Scripps researchers say the process could potentially be done at the patient's bedside, and might take only 20 or 30 minutes. The test could become available in a year or two.
Source
Could be available in a couple of years...
Blood Test Warns of Impending Heart Attack
March 26, 2012 - Might signal danger up to 2 weeks before event
When I die of old age I can think of no better situation than dying because of a pleasing sex experience with my wife thank you.....
The survey by the Better Sleep Council found that nearly half of Americans fall asleep somewhere other than their bed at least once a week, and about 11 percent fall asleep somewhere other than their bed every day -- some in dangerous places.
"We were stunned by some of the survey responses," Karin Mahoney, director of communications for the Better Sleep Council, said in a statement. "One man fell asleep on a rooftop. Another man fell asleep while interviewing a job candidate. There was a teacher who fell asleep at the podium in front of her class. Clearly, people are sleeping just about everywhere except where they should be -- in their own beds."
However, 77 percent of people surveyed said they'd give up something to get a better night's sleep. Thirty-one percent said they would give up watching TV, 23 percent would give up time spent on computers and social media, while16 percent would give up either exercise or going to church. "People who don't get enough sleep can suffer from poor performance at work or school to depression, diabetes, heart disease and other ailments," Mahoney said. No survey details were provided.
Read more: Most in U.S. would prefer sleep over sex - UPI.com
But, is there a better way to die?
It may sound difficult, but the results could be lifesaving, says Tomaselli, president of the American Heart Association (AHA) and director of the division of cardiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore. Heart disease or cardiovascular disease are umbrella terms used to describe disease processes of the heart. Although the rate of death from cardiovascular disease declined by 31% from 1998 to 2008, the disease is still the leading cause of death in the USA. One in every three deaths are from heart disease and stroke, according to the heart association and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Men often develop and die from heart disease at a younger age than women, says Russell Luepker, Mayo professor of public health at the University of Minnesota and a spokesman for the American Heart Association. "While more women die of heart disease, they die at a later age from it than men."
Why men are vulnerable
Men suffer from the disease at a younger age because they "tend to have higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, and they are more likely to be smokers than women," says Luepker, program director of the Minnesota Heart Survey, a population-based study that tracks trends in heart disease. And men are less likely to be treated for high blood pressure than women, he says. "Men are not seekers of care. We did a study a couple of years ago, and we autopsied people who were under 60 who died a premature, sudden death 95% of them were men. Practically all of them had heart disease. They all had physicians and medical insurance but rarely went to the doctor. "They may have gone to the doctor because they cut their finger with a hedge trimmer, but they weren't going in and being evaluated for heart disease."
One big problem for men is a lot of them don't manage their blood pressure as well as women do, he says. "It's better than it was 10 years ago, but women still do better." High blood pressure is the most significant risk factor for heart disease, Tomaselli says. It means the blood running through your arteries flows with too much force and puts pressure on your arteries, stretching them past their healthy limit and causing microscopic tears, the heart association says. Unfortunately, the scar tissue that forms to repair those tears traps plaque and white blood cells, which can lead to blockages, blood clots and hardened, weakened arteries, the heart association says.
One in three adults have high blood pressure, but many people don't even know they have it, the heart group says. The risk can be reduced by following a healthful diet, including cutting back on salt; exercising; keeping a healthy weight; managing stress; limiting alcohol; and avoiding smoking, Tomaselli says. But some people who do those things may still need medication, he says. If one prescription medication for hypertension doesn't work, you usually can find another that is going to cause you few or no side effects, Luepker says.
Maintain your plumbing
Probably. But it was a crossover study done by comparing several different studies. Review in JAMA...
Ok.... So they spent money for someone to review other people's studies and compare the results on a topic that is so ridiculously obvious that even a moron like myself can figure it out?
Let's see.... How about I do a study on the results of all the NFL games in the last 50 years to compare and see how often the team with the most points WON the game? Can I get some grant money for that, please?
