Podcast: Heart attack symptoms in women - are they different?

Mayo Clinic podcast: "Heart attack symptoms in women - are they different from men? The most common symptom of a heart attack in both men and women is some type of pain, pressure or discomfort in the chest. But chest pain isn't always the most severe or even the most prominent symptom in women, and since more women than men die each year of cardiovascular disease, we thought it important to get the facts about heart attack symptoms in women..."

Quitting smoking helps after serious heart attack damage

It's never too late for smokers to do their hearts good by kicking the habit -- even after a heart attack has left them with significant damage to the organ's main pumping chamber, a new study suggests. Past studies have found that smokers who kick the habit after suffering a heart attack have a lower rate of repeat heart attacks and live longer than their counterparts who continue to smoke. But little has been known about the benefits of quitting among heart attack patients left with a complication called left ventricular (LV) dysfunction -- where damage to the heart's main pumping chamber significantly reduces its blood-pumping efficiency. So it has been unclear whether that dysfunction might "drown out" the heart benefits of smoking cessation, said Dr. Amil M. Shah, the lead researcher on the new study and a staff cardiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. But in their study, Shah and his colleagues found that heart attack survivors with LV dysfunction may stand to benefit as much from smoking cessation as other heart attack patients do - Reuters

CARG Newsletter - September 2010

The CARG Newsletter - September 2010 is now available for download or for reading below:

Study: Motor vehicles make Americans fat

European countries with high rates of walking and cycling have fewer obese people than Australia and the United States, U.S. researchers found. David Bassett Jr. of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville said "active travel" - bicycling or walking - fosters healthier communities compared with regions where cars are the favored way to get around. Bassett and colleagues conducted a study on "active travel" in the United States and 15 other countries. They linked more than half of the differences in obesity rates among countries to walking and cycling rates, finding places with the highest walking and biking rates have fewer obese people. In addition, about 30 percent of the difference in obesity rates among U.S. states and cities was also linked to walking and cycling rates. "A growing body of evidence suggests that differences in the built environment for physical activity (e.g., infrastructure for walking and cycling, availability of public transit, street connectivity, housing density and mixed land use) influence the likelihood that people will use active transport for their daily travel," the study said. "Moreover, land-use policies should foster compact, mixed-use developments that generate shorter trip distances that are more suitable for walking and biking." The findings are published in the American Journal of Public Health

The Saskatoon Health Region 2009-2010 Annual Report To The Minister of Health

The Saskatoon Health Region 2009-2010 Annual Report To The Minister of Health is now available

The professional people who look after CARG members at the Shaw Centre

Exercise Therapists: Kristin Troesch; Trent Litzenberger; Stacy Sigfusson

Dr.Y Nataraj

Dr. Witt

Dr. J. Nataraj

Dr. U. Rattan

RhinoChill Intra-Nasal Cooling System effectively chills brain after cardiac arrest

"It has been known for a while now that cooling the body after cardiac arrest improves neurological outcome, and therapeutic hypothermia has become a standard measure in many hospitals. However, in a study in this month's Circulation, a new nasopharyngeal device was used to initiate cooling during cardiac arrest. The RhinoChill Intra-Nasal Cooling System from BeneChill (San Diego, CA) uses a non-invasive nasal catheter that sprays a rapidly evaporating coolant liquid into the nasal cavity, adjacent to the major vascular structures of the brain. The system is compact, battery operated and easy and fast to insert, making it more practical in emergency situations than surface or intravascular cooling devices" - medGadget

Lack of close ties may increase heart disease risk

Women who live in neighborhoods lacking in close ties are more likely to have coronary artery calcification, a key marker for underlying heart disease, than those who live in more socially cohesive neighborhoods, according to a study led by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researcher Daniel Kim. Women who lived in the most economically deprived neighborhoods had more than double the odds of underlying heart disease. The study was published online last month in the American Journal of Epidemiology

The Heart Foundation 2011 Conference - Australia

"The Heart Foundation's 2011 Conference, "Heart to Heart: from Access to Action", will be held at the world class Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, on 17-19 March 2011. The Heart Foundation is the leading organisation in the fight against cardiovascular disease in Australia. Over more than five decades, we have achieved some great milestones in pursuit of our mission of reducing suffering and death from heart, stroke, and blood vessel disease in Australia"

Binge drinking, high blood pressure a lethal combo

"It's no secret that high blood pressure increases your risk of heart disease and stroke. Nor should it come as a surprise that binge drinking isn't the healthiest habit. But a new study suggests that combining the two may add up to double the trouble - and much more, in some cases. Compared to teetotalers with normal blood pressure, men with high blood pressure (hypertension) who even occasionally down more than six drinks in one sitting have nearly double the risk of dying from a stroke or heart attack, according to the study, which followed 6,100 South Koreans age 55 and up for two decades. If men with high blood pressure have 12 drinks or more at one time, their risk is nearly five times higher, the study found. 'Somehow the binge drinking compounds [high blood pressure] - and more than just a little bit,' says Brian Silver, MD, a neurologist at Henry Ford Hospital, in Detroit, and a spokesman for the American Heart Association"

Sleep hours could cause heart disease

The amount of sleep a person gets could increase risk for heart disease, a recent study by a West Virginia University professor found. Anoop Shankar, associate professor in the Department of Community Medicine, examined 30,397 adults who participated in the 2005 National Health Interview Survey to see if there was a correlation between sleeping habits and heart disease. His study, published in the August journal issue of SLEEP, found sleeping fewer than five hours a night or more than nine hours a night could increase the risk of heart disease. "We asked a question: On an average how many hours did you sleep in 24-hour period?," Shankar said. "The adults answered that question and we then did a diagnostic on heart disease." They examined this association between heart disease and sleep to establish the percentage of people with heart disease and all cardiovascular diseases, such as angina, coronary heart disease, heart attack or stroke, he said.

Antagonistic people may increase heart attack, stroke risk

Antagonistic people, particularly those who are competitive and aggressive, may be increasing their risk of heart attack or stroke, researchers report in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association. Researchers for the U.S. National Institute on Aging (NIA), a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), studied 5,614 Italians in four villages and found that those who scored high for antagonistic traits on a standard personality test had greater thickening of the neck (carotid) arteries compared to people who were more agreeable. Thickness of neck artery walls is a risk factor for heart attack and stroke. Three years later, those who scored higher on antagonism or low agreeableness - especially those who were manipulative and quick to express anger - continued to have thickening of their artery walls. These traits also predicted greater progression of arterial thickening. Those who scored in the bottom 10 percent of agreeableness and were the most antagonistic had about a 40 percent increased risk for elevated intima-media thickness, a measure of arterial wall thickness. The effect on artery walls was similar to having metabolic syndrome - a known risk factor for cardiovascular disease

More smokers quit using NHS help (UK)

National Health Service smoking services helped a record number of people quit last year, figures show. The NHS Information Centre said 373,964 had successfully given up, an 11% rise from the 337,054 who gave up in in 2008/09. The figures are for people in England who successfully stopped when they were followed up after four-weeks. A separate report from the centre shows around one in 20 hospital admissions for over-35s were linked to smoking. It brought together data from a wide range of previously published material and said smoking accounted for 462,900 admissions. - BBC

Physical activity and cardiovascular health (UK)

In 1953, Morris et al published the findings from a study showing that bus conductors in London, who spent their working hours walking the length of the buses as well as climbing up and down the stairs of the English double-decker buses to collect fares, experienced half the coronary heart disease (CHD) mortality rates of their driver counterparts, who spent their day sitting behind the wheel. Investigators hypothesized that it was the physical activity of work that protected the conductors from developing CHD, at the same time realizing that other factors may also play a role because the conductors were smaller in size, as evidenced by their smaller uniform sizes. Thus was born the field of "physical activity epidemiology": formal epidemiological investigations into the associations of physical activity with many health outcomes...more in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association

Expensive new blood pressure meds no better than generics

"Expensive brand-name medications to lower blood pressure are no better at preventing cardiovascular disease than older, generic diuretics, according to new long-term data from a landmark study. Paul Whelton, MB, MD, MSc, reported the results on Aug. 13 at the plenary session of the China Heart Congress and International Heart Forum in Beijing. Whelton is president and CEO of Loyola University Health System and chairman of the Antihypertensive and Lipid-Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heat Attack Trial (ALLHAT), which has examined the comparative value of different blood pressure-lowering medications. More than 33,000 patients with high blood pressure were randomly assigned to take either a diuretic (chlorthalidone) or one of two newer drugs, a calcium channel blocker (amlodipine) or an ACE inhibitor (lisinopril)"