“Eat your vegetables” has been heard at the dinner tables of America for a long time. Has the message gotten through? Since 1990 the Dietary Guidelines for Americans has recommended consuming at least two servings of fruits and three servings of vegetables daily. However, two studies published in the April issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine clearly show that Americans are not meeting the mark.
Patients with moderate to severe sleep apnea who have significantly higher serum levels of inflammatory markers that serve as precursors to coronary artery disease, as well as lesions associated with silent brain infarction, have an elevated risk of stroke, according to a group of Japanese medical researchers.
Apples may prove to be a winner when it comes to reducing the risk of heart disease, says a new study of more than 34,000 women. In this study, flavonoid-rich apples were found to be one of three foods (along with red wine and pears) that decrease the risk of mortality for both coronary heart disease (CHD) and cardiovascular disease (CVD) among post-menopausal women, The findings were published in the March 2007 American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center had a mystery on their hands. A 51-year-old physician colleague who looked the picture of health?no cardiovascular risks, a marathon runner who had exercised vigorously each day for 30 years?had just flunked a calcium screening scan of his heart.
Women who develop preeclampsia during pregnancy are more likely to develop certain dangerous autoantibodies than women with normal pregnancies, and these autoantibodies are still present two years after childbirth in about 20 percent of women who had the disorder, scientists from the University of Pittsburgh report in the March issue of Hypertension, the journal of the American Heart Association.
Researchers from the long-standing Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a program of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, report that people whose parents live longer were more likely to avoid developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease in middle age than their peers whose parents died younger. They also found that the risk factor advantages persisted over time.
New evidence suggests that if you could choose your parents, you could reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease. Researchers from the long-standing Framingham Heart Study (FHS), a program of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health, report that people whose parents live longer were more likely to avoid developing high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other risk factors for cardiovascular disease in middle age than their peers whose parents died younger. They also found that the risk factor advantages persisted over time.
Almost 60 percent of pacemaker patients had undiagnosed sleep apnea — possibly contributing to their heart disease — researchers reported in a small study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
Individuals with one or more parents who survive to age 85 or older may have fewer risk factors for heart disease in middle age, according to a report in the March 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.
In a supplement to the March 13 issue of CMAJ, Dr. Louise Pilote and co-authors from across Canada offer a comprehensive review of sex-specific issues related to cardiovascular disease.