Heart Attack

Study: Healthy Lifestyle Behaviors May Prevent 80 Percent of Heart Attacks

Support.Healthy.LivingFive recommended health behaviors may prevent four out of five heart attacks in men, a new study suggests.

Middle-aged and older men were much less likely to have heart attacks over an average of 11 years if they drank moderately, didn’t smoke and did everything right on the diet, exercise and weight fronts, the study found.

Only about 1 percent of men involved in the study fit into this ultra-healthy-living category. But they were 86 percent less likely to have heart attacks than those who ate poorly, were overweight, exercised too little, smoked and drank too much alcohol, the researchers said.

The healthiest men could still eventually die of a heart attack, of course, and the study didn’t say if they live longer than others.

Still, “there is a lot to gain and money to be saved if people had a healthier lifestyle,” said study lead author Agneta Akesson, an associate professor with the Institute of Environmental Medicine at Karolinska Institute in Solna, Sweden.

As for women, Akesson is the co-author of a previous study suggesting healthy living has a similar effect on females.

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Source: MedicineNet.com

How Does Stress Increase Your Risk for Stroke and Heart Attack?

Body.Disease.Heart1It is thought that persisting stress increases the risk for atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease by evoking negative emotions that, in turn, raise the levels of pro-inflammatory chemicals in the body.

Researchers have now investigated the underlying neural circuitry of this process, and report their findings in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry. “Drawing upon the observation that many of the same brain areas involved in emotion are also involved in sensing and regulating levels of inflammation in the body, we hypothesized that brain activity linked to negative emotions – specifically efforts to regulate negative emotions – would relate to physical signs of risk for heart disease,” explained Dr. Peter Gianaros, Associate Professor at the University of Pittsburgh and first author on the study.

They found that individuals who show greater brain activation when regulating their negative emotions also exhibit elevated blood levels of interleukin-6, one of the body’s pro-inflammatory cytokines, and increased thickness of the carotid artery wall, a marker of atherosclerosis.

The inflammation levels accounted for the link between signs of atherosclerosis and brain activity patterns seen during emotion regulation. Importantly, the findings were significant even after controlling for a number of different factors, like age, gender, smoking, and other conventional heart disease risk factors.

Check the full article.

Source: Medical News Today.

Heart Attack Risk Rises After Anger Outbursts

Body.Disease.Heart1Harvard researchers who analyzed decades of evidence on links between anger and cardiovascular events, concluded that in the 2 hours following an outburst of anger, there is a higher risk of heart attack, stroke or other cardiovascular event.

The systematic review and meta-analysis – thought to be the first to examine links between anger and cardiovascular outcomes – is published in the European Heart Journal.

First author Dr. Elizabeth Mostofsky and colleagues found that – compared with when they are not angry – a person’s risk of heart attack rises nearly five-fold, and the risk of stroke more than three-fold, in the 2 hours following an outburst of anger. Their risk of abnormal heartbeat or ventricular arrhythmia also goes up.

The absolute risk of heart attack, stroke or arrhythmia increased in people who already had a previous history of heart problems, and it also increased the more frequently they were angry.

Check the full article.

Source: Medical News Today.