Can Olive Oil Prevent Stroke?

Olive oil is known to benefit heart disease patients.

Some clinical trials have found that Mediterranean diet, with olive oil as key ingredient, helps control some risk factors for heart disease, including high blood pressure, abdominal obesity and elevated levels of LDL (bad) cholesterol. Besides olive oil, Mediterranean diet also includes plenty of fruits and vegetables, whole grains, fish and moderate amounts of red wine. High olive oil intake is also linked to a lower risk of heart attack, and a longer lifespan among heart attack patients.

Recently, researchers from the National Institute of Health and Medical Research in Bordeaux, France even suggested that older people who ate olive oil have a lower risk of stroke than those who did not. Their paper was published on June 15, 2011 in ‘Neurology’, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

They followed 7,625 French people who aged 65 and above from 3 cities (Bordeaux, Dijon and Montpellier) for a period of 5 years. The participants were divided into groups according to their use of olive oil, ranging from people who did not use it at all to those who used it in dressing, cooking and on bread (classified as ‘intensive’).

During the period of study, there were 148 strokes. Those intensive users suffered stroke at a rate of 0.3 percent per year, comparing with just over 0.5 percent among non-users and 0.4 percent among moderate users.

After adjusting for factors like body weight, physical activity and overall diet, the risk of stroke for ‘intensive’ olive oil users were found to have 41 percent lower than that of those who never ate olive oil.

Based on the findings, it seemed that a new set of dietary recommendation should be issued to prevent stroke in people who are 65 and above. Olive oil can be an inexpensive and easy way to help older people prevent from getting stroke.

People should choose olive oil and other unsaturated fats over saturated fats that are found largely in meats and dairy and trans fats that were found in some processed foods such as crackers, cookies and chips.

Would Meditation Help Heart Disease Patients?

Any practice in which the practitioner trains his or her minds or self-induces a mode of consciousness can be called meditation. As it is generally an inwardly oriented, personal practice, people can usually practice it by themselves. While meditation has been practiced since thousands of years ago for various reasons, it is now commonly used for relaxation and stress reduction.

Since 1960s, meditation has been the subject of scientific research. There were more than 1,000 published studies that linked various methods of meditation to changes in bodily processes including metabolism, blood pressure, and brain activation.

Meanwhile, popularity of meditation has grown steadily. A 2007 study by the United States government found that about 9.4 percent of adults (over 20 million) had practiced meditation within the past 12 years, up from 7.6 percent (more than 15 million people) in 2002.

In a paper published on June 27, 2011 in the ‘Archives of Internal Medicine’, researchers from the Institute for Natural Medicine and Prevention at Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa reported that meditation would cut the rate of death, heart attack and stroke by half.

The 9-year study on the effects of meditation of heart disease patients was funded by the National Institute of Health, and the stress-reducing technique used is Transcendental Meditation.

Trial was conducted at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee in collaboration with Schneider’s Institute. The study tracked 201 African American men and women, with an average age of 59. These participants had narrowing of arteries in their hearts. While staying on the prescribed medications, they were randomly assigned to either a meditation group or a control group that was given conventional health education classes.

A comparison of results from the 2 groups showed that those who practiced Transcendental Meditation had the risk of death, nonfatal heart attack and stroke decreased by 47 percent. Significant drops in blood pressure, stress and anger found among people in the meditation group might help explain the results.

Researchers felt that more studies should be carried out to confirm the results. They also pointed out that meditation should not be a substitute for drug therapy for heart disease patients.

The study, nevertheless, highlights a hope that health conditions of heart disease patients could be improve if these patients are taught how to effectively reduce psychosocial stress.

Is Chest Pain A Definite Sign for Heart Attack?

When someone is having a serious pain in the chest, the first thing that comes to our mind is: is he or she having a heart attack (or myocardial infarction)?

Serious pain in the chest seems to be an obvious sign of a heart attack. Researchers from the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, however, did not appear to agree.

In their paper published in August 2011 in the ‘Annals of Emergency Medicine’, they pointed out that a high degree of pain does not indicate that someone entering the emergency room with chest pains is having a heart attack.

After examining and following for 30 days more than 3,000 patients who arrived at the UPenn hospital emergency department complaining of chest pain, the researchers found that most severe chest pain was not a good predictor for identifying patients who were having heart attack or who were more prone to having one over the next month. Meanwhile, they also stressed that a patient who does not have severe chest pain does not mean that he or she is not having a heart attack.

The results of their study showed that pain that lasted more than an hour was not a useful sign of heart attack versus other conditions, and the pain of a heart attack also does not always settle in the chest area but might be in the chest, arm, jaw back or abdomen.

According to the researchers, failure to diagnose acute myocardial infarction accounted for 30 percent of malpractice claims paid out, with 2 to 5 percent of patients who were having heart attack being inappropriately discharged from emergency departments.

Though pain severity was not a good predictor, it could correctly identify people who had such symptom and arrived at the emergency department in an ambulance. This might be due to the fact that people tend to ignore chest pain until it is serious enough to call for emergency services.

While the cause of chest pain might or might not be a heart attack, people who have such experience should not ignore it because something serious must have emerged.

Heart Disease Can Be Caused By Childhood Hardship!

While a number of risk factors including diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure), overweight, smoking and high alcohol intake can lead to heart disease, childhood hardship can well be one of them.

Researchers from New Zealand's University of Otago revealed in the paper they published in August 2011 in ‘Archives of General Psychiatry’ that children who are abused, lose a parent or suffer other hardships might be at a higher risk of getting heart disease later in their life.

Among more than 18,000 adults in 10 countries, the researchers found that those who said they had faced childhood adversities such as abuse, death of a parent, or a parent’s alcohol or drug abuse had a higher chance of getting heart disease, arthritis, asthma, diabetes and other conditions. Similar pattern was seen among people who said they had suffered from depression, anxiety or other mental health conditions before the age of 21.

Though the findings did not prove that serious stresses in childhood would directly cause poor physical health later on, there were a few reasons behind the link between the two.

According to researchers, early adverse experiences could affect people’s behavior and lifestyle. Some people might just adopt smoking, drinking or over-eating as a way of dealing with the stresses. Likewise, young people with depression or other mental disorders might use smoking or drinking as a way to self-medicate. It is possible that severe childhood stress might have more direct biological effects.

Meanwhile, participants reported at least 3 childhood adversities had a higher risk of all 6 physical health problems that were assessed in the study. They had twice the risk of heart disease, compared with men and women with no adversities.

Similar results were seen among adults who said they had mental health conditions, especially depression, post-traumatic stress disorder or panic disorders, before the age of 21. Their risks of heart disease, asthma, arthritis and chronic back pain or headaches were between 43 percent and 66 percent higher than risks in adults with no early mental health disorders. Current psychological status, however, did not appear to account for the link.

Beware of Side Effects of Cardiac Medications

The modern healthcare scenario is somewhat muddled, as far as a layman is concerned, due to the claims and counterclaims made by different groups with differing opinions. The same is absolutely true to heart care medicines. Most prescription drugs claim to reduce cholesterol, clogging up of the arteries and other heart-related diseases, but in fact they have hidden but very obvious side effects which can, in the long term, can reduce the lifespan.

As an example, we shall take up the case of Simvastatin, which is a hypolipidemic that is used for treating people suffering from high cholesterol and triglycerides. The medicine, to be truthful, helps preventing cardiovascular diseases and reduces the chances of heart strokes and attacks. The medicine is arguably good for administering in diabetes patients too. Again, the drug is effective in reducing cholesterol in children and young adults too. A large number of manufacturers are selling this drug under different names, like Simvacor and Simcard, to name a few.

However, with all its unique qualities, this prescription drug has many pronounced side effects. The general negative effects include indigestion, fatigue, loss of memory, joint pains, muscle cramps, abdominal pain, headaches etc. But you need to note here that these side-effects are neither universal nor long-lasting. Some persons may experience a handful of these impacts while another group may experience most of these. In some persons, the side effects may be recurring and long drawn out while in some, they may be just fleeting experiences. Extreme and rare side effects like Myalgia, which is a severe form of muscle pain, can also be observed in some patients. Regular and uncontrolled usage of Simvastatin have also reportedly caused life-threatening situations like Myositis, Rhabdomyolysis, Cholestatic Hepatitis, Hepatic Cirrhosis etc in some patients.

People who are undergoing Simvastatin usage also need to stay away from foods like grapefruits. The juice of the fruit has the capability to interfere with the cholesterol-reducing agentsin the drug while obstructing the metabolism process. The enzymes contained in the fruit work negatively with the ingredients in Simvastatin, but this does not mean that all citrus fruits are out of bounds for those undergoing heart treatments.

Why People Have Hypertension?

Hypertension, more commonly known as high blood pressure, could lead to hardening of arteries (atherosclerosis) and development of heart failure. That is why it has long been regarded as a major risk factor for heart disease. According to World Health Organization (WHO), around a billion people worldwide, including more than 200 million Chinese, suffer from hypertension.

When the cause of hypertension can be identified, the condition is called secondary hypertension. Kidney disease is the highest risk factor for this type of hypertension. For majority of the hypertensive patients, the causes are not known, though several factors including smoking, high salt intake, stress, sedentary lifestyle, overweight or obese, high alcohol consumption, aging and genetics are believed to play an important role. This kind of hypertension is known as essential hypertension.

Recently, researchers from Beijing Chaoyang Hospital’s Cardiology Center identified a common virus known as human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) that could be responsible for causing hypertension. HCMV infects most adults but is repressed by the body’s immune system and rarely causes any symptoms. Their findings, which linked HCMV to essential hypertension, were published in August 2011 in the medical journal ‘Circulation’.

Such findings might present a new strategy for preventing and treating cardiovascular disease. However, the researchers pointed out that their research was still in its early stage and more tests with a wider scope of patients should be carried out. Once conclusive evidence of the relationship is obtained, better medical vaccines and remedies for hypertension could then be made available to treat millions of patients around the world.

Another recent study conducted by the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans found that hypertension plays a part in 2.3 million cardiovascular deaths in China each year. Among these victims, 1.3 million were premature deaths. This means that victims died before the age of 72 in men and 75 in women, the average lifespan in China in 2005.

What Is the Link Between Westernization and Heart Disease?

As a result of ‘Westernization’, the number of South Koreans with multiple risk factors for heart disease and diabetes has steadily increased. Westernization is the conversation to or adoption of western cultures including technology, politics, economics, lifestyle, diet, language and values.

A study published online on April 19, 2011 in the journal ‘Diabetes Care’ reported that one-third of Korean adults have risk factors associated with diabetes and heart disease. Since the late-1990s, Korea has become more westernized. Researchers from Gil Medical Center in Incheon intended to look at Korea's changing rate of metabolic syndrome, a collection of risk factors for Type-2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Based on a periodic government health study on Korean adults aged 20 and above, the researchers found that 25 percent of Korean adults had metabolic syndrome in 1998. But by 2007, the figure had risen beyond 31 percent, which was closed to the rate of 34 percent seen in the United States at that time.

Such hike was seen amid a period of fast economic growth in Korea, together with the adoption of the less-than-healthy lifestyle often accompanying with it. Korean are eating more ‘Western’ food, watching more TV and having less exercise than a decade ago.

This is not the first study to link Westernization to health problems in Asian countries undergoing rapid economic growth. A recent study in urban Indian also found steadily increasing rate of obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes among young adults who were followed for 7 years. The researchers who conducted the study accused declining levels of physical activity and high smoking rate as the culprits for causing such health problems.

Meanwhile, several other recent studies in South and Southeastern Asia have also highlighted heart disease and diabetes as growing problems. A World Bank study on India and other South Asian countries had warned that people in the region get their first heart attack at the age of 53, which is 6 years earlier than people anywhere else.

To prevent from ending up with such health problems, people must change their lifestyle. For instance, they should perform regular exercise and adopt a healthy diet with low sodium (salt), carbohydrates and fat.