Doctor HealthHealth Tips

If you have ever looked through the pages of a fitness magazine you could not miss all the different advertisements on diet pills. Some even look like articles as they can be two or three pages in length. I regularly buy these magazines for tips on exercises and nutrition, but there always seems to be more pages about diet pills then anything else. So this brings me to ask the question are diet pills harmful or not?

I have read different views on television, the internet and in newspapers and some say that diet pills are harmful and some say they are safe. There have even been cases of people dying or getting extremely sick from taking certain pills that say they are to help you lose weight. Here are some negative effects of diet pills:

" Most diet pills suppress appetite, which in turn helps you consume fewer calories in a day, but consuming fewer calories gives your body less energy and slows your metabolism. And a slower metabolism is usually a reason for being over weight as your body will store and not use as many calories.

" Ephedrine is used in a large number of diet pills as it increases the heart rate and metabolism rate which could lead to heart attack or stroke. This is a drug that should not be taken if you have high blood pressure, or heart and thyroid problems. This has been linked to a number of deaths and serious illness. Health Canada has even gone on the record and said that people should stop taking diet pills with this drug. Some diet pills have an "excessive amount of ephedrine," which could cause "potentially fatal adverse health effects".

" Caffeine is a common ingredient in diet pills. Always read the label and any that say they contain more then 300mg of caffeine should not be taken as this could be very harmful to your health, because like ephedrine, caffeine raises your heart rate and blood pressure and again could lead to a heart attack or stroke.

" Symptoms of diet pills can be few to severe depending on what is in them. Dependence to diet pills could occur, especially those that are stimulant-based.

Though these pills or supplements can help you lose weight always do your research before taking a diet pill or food supplement and contact your doctor to make sure that they are safe for you to take. Also make sure to exercise regularly and eat healthy as these will help improve your chances on reaching your weight loss goals.

by PATRICK TODD

Every year, an estimated 700,000 Americans have a first heart attack, with another 500,000 suffering a recurrent attack. About 40 percent of these people die as a result. However, many of these individuals might live if heart attack victims and bystanders recognize symptoms and call 911, said lead author Henraya McGruder, Ph.D., an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

In a survey of 33,059 adults, most ages 25 to 64, McGruder and co-authors found that while knowledge of heart attack symptoms is poor within the general population, it is especially poor among African-Americans and Hispanics yet heart attacks are more prevalent among these populations than among whites.

“Our research highlights the importance of targeting these groups with education, so they understand the signs of heart attack and know what to do,” she said. “The key to survival is knowledge and awareness of symptoms, because lifesaving treatments must be given within a certain time window.”

The study appears in the spring issue of the journal Ethnicity and Disease, the journal of the International Society on Hypertension in Blacks.

McGruder and CDC colleagues looked at data from the 2001 National Health Interview Survey, in which participants indicated their awareness of heart attack symptoms and the need to call 911 to get help fast.

Respondents indicated their ability to recognize the following five signs of cardiac distress: (1) chest pain or discomfort; (2) pain or discomfort in the jaw, neck or back; (3) pain or discomfort in arms and shoulders; (4) feeling weak, lightheaded, or faint; and (5) shortness of breath.

“Knowing the signs and symptoms — and knowing to call 911 — will decrease death and disability associated with heart attack,” McGruder said, noting also the importance of traveling to the hospital by ambulance.

“Research suggests that patients arriving by ambulance received quicker care and a shorter time to treatment, compared to those who arrived via personal transportation,” she said.

“This paper certainly adds ammunition to the argument that we need to build more culturally appropriate public information health campaigns,” said Brian Smedley, Ph.D., research director and co-founder of The Opportunity Agenda.

“This paper does an important service in pointing to the need for patient education,” Smedley said. “If we want to reduce the disproportionate burden of heart attack in communities of people of color, however, there are fundamental, structural issues we need to address. We also need sound public policies that can help to ensure that everyone has appropriate access to health care resources.”

One problem, Smedley said, is that many hospitals have closed in minority neighborhoods. Even with increased awareness of the symptoms of heart attack and knowing to call 911, minorities could still face longer travel times to get to an emergency room.

A recent international study of heart attacks and gender finds women differing from men on everything from symptoms to treatment in both heart attack and severe chest pain.

One of the most striking findings was that women were twice as likely as men to have “normal” or “mild” results on an exam of their heart’s blood vessels, with no single blockage taking up more than 50 percent of any one blood vessel.  This was despite the fact that their other test results showed they were definitely having a heart attack, or a form of chest pain called unstable angina.
The study is being published online today in the journal Heart by a team led by researchers from the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center. It’s based on data from 25,755 men and women in 14 countries who had a heart attack or chest pain episode between 1999 and 2006, and are included in the Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events.

All of the patients had an angiogram, which allows doctors to see blockages in the heart’s blood vessels – a major cause of heart attacks and chest pain. The lack of serious blockages may have something to do with other differences the researchers found: differences in how women were treated and how well they fared.

In all, among patients with the same level of coronary artery disease, women were significantly less likely than men to receive drugs called beta blockers, statins and ACE inhibitors — all of which are considered crucial to preventing further heart episodes. And no matter how serious their blockages, women were less likely to receive an angioplasty or a stent to open up their blood vessels.

By six months after their heart attack or angina attack, women with more advanced coronary artery disease were more likely than men to have died, or to have suffered another heart attack, a stroke or another problem that sent them to the hospital.

The researchers also found that the symptoms women reported when they first reached the hospital were often different from those the men complained of. While 94 percent of men and 92 percent of women reported they felt chest pain, women patients who didn’t cite chest pain were more likely to experience “atypical” symptoms such as nausea and jaw pain.

“We’ve made great strides in treating women with heart disease, but these data show there’s still much to be done – and that we need to find out whether women might have blockages that are ‘invisible’ on angiograms,” says senior author Kim Eagle, M.D., FACC, the Albion Walter Hewlett Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine.

Eagle, a director of the U-M Cardiovascular Center, is co-chair of the publication committee for GRACE, which was launched in 1999 and funded by unrestricted funds from Sanofi-Aventis. The company has no role in the collection, analysis or publication of data from the GRACE registry, which includes patients from hospitals in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.

Says study co-author Lisa Jackson, M.D., MPH, an assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine at U-M, “We have two education challenges ahead, based on these data: educating women that they should seek immediate attention for both the classic heart attack symptoms and atypical sudden symptoms, and educating physicians that non-obstructive coronary artery disease is still disease and needs to be treated seriously.”

The findings echo data from earlier studies, which have found differences in the symptoms women experience during a heart attack, and the tests and treatments they receive during or after an attack.

The lack of serious blockages, or obstructions, on the angiograms of many women heart attack patients has led experts to suspect that women may have blockages in smaller blood vessels that can’t be seen on conventional angiograms. Or, their blockages may have been fleeting, disappearing before the images can be made.

Either way, these women still have issues serious enough to cause a heart attack or unstable angina, and those issues need to be addressed through preventive treatment, the authors say.

The under-treatment of women – and men – with non-obstructive coronary artery disease may set patients up for more heart attacks and other problems in the future, say Jackson and Eagle. In fact, both women and men with mild obstructions had similar outcomes six months after their heart attack or angina episode.

Part of the problem is that many patients and physicians don’t yet see coronary artery disease for what science has shown it to be: a whole-body problem that must be prevented or managed through lifestyle changes as well as medications and, for emergency cases, treatments such as angioplasty or bypass surgery.

Only through improvements in diet and exercise habits, quitting smoking, controlling blood pressure and blood sugar, and using medication when needed, will people with non-obstructive disease keep themselves from progressing to worse problems, says Jackson, who is part of the Women’s Heart Program at U-M. “We need a more comprehensive, whole-body approach to prevention,” she says.

GRACE, headquartered at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, is now completing two-year follow-up on patients. Analysis of further results will likely yield more insights into differences between men and women in cardiovascular disease. At the same time, Eagle and Jackson are now looking to data from a U-M registry of patients with heart attacks and chest pains to find more clues.

In addition to Eagle and Jackson, the new study’s authors include first author Sujoya Dey, M.D., a clinical lecturer in cardiovascular medicine at U-M, Marcus Flather of the Royal Brompton Hospital in London, Gerard Devlin of the Waikato Hospital in New Zealand, David Brieger of Concord Hospital in Australia, Enrique Gurfinkel of the ICYCC Favaloro Foundation in Argentina, Phillippe Gabriel Steg of Hopital Bichat in Paris, and Gordon FitzGerald of the University of Massachusetts.

Facts about U.S. women and heart disease:

• Every year, 459,000 women die of cardiovascular disease; it’s the leading cause of death for women.
• Every year in the U.S., 365,000 women have a heart attack, and another 180,000 suffer the chest pain of unstable angina. Heart attacks kill 64,200 women each year.
• Previous studies, and the new study published in Heart, have shown differences in how women experience heart disease symptoms, and how they are diagnosed and treated.

Written by: Kara Gavin, University of Michigan Health System

Being resistant to aspirin makes patients four times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke or even die from a pre-existing heart condition, according to a recent study. The study relates to patients who are prescribed aspirin long term as a way of preventing clots from forming in the blood.

Patients who are labelled “aspirin resistant” have blood cells (platelets) that are not affected in the same way as those of patients who are responsive to the drug, ie people who are “aspirin sensitive.”

There is currently no agreed method of accurately determining who is and isn’t aspirin resistant and the reasons why someone might be aspirin resistant are currently a cause of controversy.

Relatively few studies have looked at whether aspirin resistance has any impact on clinical outcome so the Canadian authors carried out a review of all the available data to better understand the relationship between the two.

They identified 20 studies, involving 2,930 patients with cardiovascular disease, all of whom had been prescribed aspirin as a way of preventing clots from forming in the blood. 28% were classified as aspirin resistant.

They found that all aspirin resistant patients, regardless of their underlying clinical condition, were at greater risk of suffering a heart attack, stroke or even dying. In particular they found that 39% of aspirin resistant patients compared to 16% of aspirin sensitive patients suffered some sort of cardiovascular event.

They also found that taking other drugs to thin the blood, such as Clopidogrel or Tirofiban, did not provide any benefit to these patients.

The authors conclude that there needs to be further studies on aspirin resistance to identify the most useful test to determine the condition. They also say aspirin resistance: “is a biological entity that should be considered when recommending aspirin as antiplatelet therapy.”

The study was published in the online edition of British Medical Journal.

In a recent study, mice implanted with living embryonic cardiac cells became resistant to cardiac arrhythmias, which are one of the most dangerous and fatal consequences of heart attacks. The discovery, reported in this week’s issue of Nature, has profound implications for using cell-transplant therapies to restore damaged heart tissue.

The researchers discovered that a protein called connexin43, expressed by the transplanted embryonic heart cells, improved electrical connections to other heart cells. The researchers showed that the improved connections helped activate the transplanted cells deep within the damaged section of the heart tissue. The technique reversed the risk of developing ventricular arrhythmias after a heart attack, the number one cause of sudden death in the Western world.

In the past, scientists have transplanted a variety of cell types into failing hearts with modest improvement of function, although transplanting skeletal muscle cells made things worse and led to more arrhythmias. Surprisingly, when co-author Bernd Fleischmann at the University of Bonn and colleagues transplanted embryonic cardiac cells, the hearts’ electrical stability and function returned to normal.

Scientists recognize the untapped potential of using cell-based therapies to counter many debilitating diseases, but they have not had tools to assess the function of the cells once transferred. In Kotlikoff’s laboratory, the researchers determined that the transplanted embryonic cells were making electrical connections with normal heart cells. Using genetically modified heart cells that express a fluorescent sensor, they established that transplanted heart cells were activated during normal heart contractions.

“For the first time we were able to see how cells used in therapy are working with other cells in a complex organ within a living animal, establishing the mechanism of the therapeutic effect,” Kotlikoff said.

Professor Guy Salama at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine was also able to map voltage signals across the surface of the hearts, establishing that the implanted cells improve conduction of electrical signals within the damaged heart tissue.

While doctors could never use cells from a human embryonic heart for transplantation, researchers at the University of Bonn engineered skeletal muscle to express connexin43 and achieved the same restorative results as they did with the embryonic heart cells.

“These results have important implications for therapy, although they must be verified in the context of naturally occurring heart damage,” Kotlikoff said. “One can envision using a patient’s own cells by deriving heart cells from stem cells to improve heart function and decrease arrhythmia risk.”

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany, and the European Commission, Bonn Forschung.

Source: Cornell University

TWO tablespoonfuls of dark chocolate a day is good for your health, a new study has found.
The sweet treat has a similar biochemical effect to aspirin and can reduce the likelihood of blood clotting.
Researchers at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health made the discovery when 139 people were disqualified from a larger study looking at the effects of aspirin on blood platelets.

The skin disorder psoriasis is not only painful and hard to treat, but a new study suggests that psoriasis may be an independent risk factor for heart attack, particularly in young individuals with severe psoriasis.

But not just young individuals with psoriasis are at risk. Researchers studied medical records for more than 680,000 British patients, and found that people in their 40s with severe psoriasis were more than twice as likely to have a heart attack than people without the skin disease.

The study involved over 127,000 patients with mild psoriasis, 3,837 with severe psoriasis, and 556,995 controls. The patients all had a follow-up period of just under 5.5 years. Over that time, the heart attack rate in the control group was 2.0 percent, while the rates in the mild and severe psoriasis groups were 1.8 percent and 2.9 percent, respectively.

Researchers said, “Our findings are novel and therefore it is important that additional studies be performed to confirm these results and determine their therapeutic implications.” They added, “In the meantime, as part of good medical care, patients with psoriasis should be encouraged to aggressively address their modifiable cardiovascular risk factors.”

Although current research supports a link between psoriasis and cardiovascular disease, all the research thus far has come from hospital-based studies that did not control for known cardiovascular risk factors. The researchers of the current study addressed these non-controlled issues by conducting a population-based cohort study to examine the risk of heart attack in patients with and without psoriasis. They also adjusted the study to exclude high blood pressure, diabetes, lipid abnormalities, and other heart risk factors.

“The unstated implication in all of this is that if psoriasis is linked to heart attacks, consumers can reduce their heart attack risk by treating their psoriasis with drugs. But this logic is absurd,” explained Mike Adams, a holistic nutritionist. “Both conditions may, indeed, have a common cause, but that cause is certainly not a lack of medication. The real cause common to both conditions is a variety of nutritional imbalances and deficiencies, including a lack of omega-3 oils, zinc and other nutrients.”

by: Jerome Douglas

As we all know, vitamins are very important when it comes to keeping your heart healthy.You need to eat the right foods of course, although you also need to supplement the food you eat with the necessary vitamins your body needs to stay in shape and keep your heart working healthy for a long time to come. If you don’t consume the right nutrients, you won’t be doing your heart any favors - and may end up having problems later on in life.

The first vitamin that comes to mind for most people is vitamin E, a vitamin that is essential to improving the overall health of your heart. When taken correctly, vitamin E will stop the cholesterol in the body from harming the arteries that surround the heart. Anytime cholesterol oxidizes, it sticks to the sides of the arteries and can lead to blockages which can cause heart attacks or other serious problems with the heart.

To help you keep your heart healthy, most doctors recommend that you take additional supplements that contain vitamin E. They may also suggest that you eat foods that are naturally rich in vitamin E, such as nuts. Nuts have high amounts of vitamin E, and most of them taste great. You can find other foods that contain vitamin E as well, although nuts have the highest amounts.

In the past, research has shown Vitamin E to help those who have already suffered the wrath of a heart attack. This vitamin helps to prevent heart attacks in the future by opening up the arteries and eliminate blockage. Those who have had a heart attack in the past are always encouraged to add more vitamin E to their diet.

What many aren’t aware of, is the fact that you can use vitamin C to boost the effects of vitamin E. Vitamin C is known as an antioxidant, which prevents the damaging effects that cholesterol has on the body. Along with preventing cholesterol from damaging the body, vitamin C also helps vitamin E with it’s functions - such as protecting your arteries and your heart.

By taking both vitamin C and E as a combination, you’ll be well on your way to a healthier heart. Overall, this is the easiest way that you can be sure you aren’t damaging your heart, especially if you have had a heart attack in the past. If you have a history of heart disease or heart problems in your family, these vitamins are essential to your diet. Even if you are just concerned about the health of your heart, these vitamins will give you the peace of mind in knowing that you are eating for a healthy heart.

As far as your dosage goes, it will vary from person to person, although 400 international units of vitamin E and C are the recommended amounts for most people. On it’s own, vitamin C can be tolerated in large doses, without imposing any harmful effects. You can take around 500 mg of it twice a day, and ensure that your heart remains healthy.

To be on the safe side, you should always make sure that you get the proper amount of vitamins in your daily diet. Taking additional vitamins and supplements isn’t a bad idea either, especially if you are trying to boost the health of your heart. Your heart is one of the most important organs in your body, which is why you should always take care of it. If you eat the proper diet and take the necessary vitamins - you’ll be well on your way to keeping your heart healthy.