Researchers reported that all five standard hospital-based performance measures used to gauge quality-of-care for hospitalized heart-failure patients may not be the best benchmarks since none were significant predictors of patient mortality during the critical first 60 to 90 days immediately following hospital discharge.
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Dutch research institute TNO Quality of Life and Wageningen University, the Netherlands, found that, among hypertensive men, moderate alcohol consumption was associated with a decreased risk of fatal and non-fatal heart attack.
Undernourished women who take a vitamin and mineral supplement while pregnant may be less likely than women taking only iron and folic acid supplements to have babies weighing less than 2,500 grams, and their newborns may be less likely to have morbidity in the first seven days of life, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins and Yale university medical schools have found that a simple blood test to measure uric acid, a measure of kidney function, might reveal a risk factor for cognitive problems in old age. Of 96 community-dwelling adults aged 60 to 92 years, those with uric-acid levels at the high end of the normal range had the lowest scores on tests of mental processing speed, verbal memory and working memory.
A new study found that men with high blood pressure can have one or two drinks a day without increasing risk for heart attack or stroke. It is known that moderate consumption of alcohol lowers risk of heart disease.
Heart disease hits Americans who live in southern states harder than residents of other regions of the country, according to the latest annual survey of cardiovascular disease in the United States.
The presence of a spouse or partner may help reduce the physical effects of psychological stress, according to a recent study published in Psychophysiology. Subjects participated in a test designed to increase stress by irritating the cardiovascular system.
Stating that his statement on AIDS was wrongly presented in the media, yoga exponent Baba Ramdev said he will not reply to Health Ministry’s notice. “I never claimed AIDS can be cured through Yoga. It was wrongly been presented in media. I only said cancer can be cured but in case of AIDS one can get encouraging improvement by doing Yoga,” Ramdev told reporters here.
High blood pressure may seem like something that only adults get, but children can develop it too — and it can pose serious risks to their hearts, brains and lives. While medications may help some children, a new study shows that for kids with a rare but especially dangerous form of hypertension, surgery is the best option.
Recent studies show promise for significantly reducing vascular aging by inactivating TNF?, which has been linked to blood vessel dysfunction and cell death. The related report by Csiszar et al., “Vasculoprotective effects of anti-TNF? treatment in aging,” appears in the January issue of The American Journal of Pathology.