Half a glass of wine a day may boost life expectancy by five years

The *British Medical Journal* issued the following news release about an
article appearing in one of its associated journals (*Journal of
Epidemiology and Community Health*):

Half a glass of wine a day may boost life expectancy by five years

Long-term wine consumption is related to cardiovascular mortality and
life expectancy independently of moderate alcohol intake

Drinking up to half a glass of wine a day may boost life expectancy by
five years–at least in men–suggests research published ahead of print in
the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

The Dutch authors base their findings on a total of 1,373 randomly
selected men whose cardiovascular health and life expectancy at age 50
were repeatedly monitored between 1960 and 2000.

 

Link between depression and cardiovascular disease: belly fat

Rush University Medical Center issued the following news release:

Depression linked with accumulation of visceral fat

Study explains association between depression and cardiovascular disease

Numerous studies have shown that depression is associated with an
increased risk of heart disease, but exactly how has never been clear.

Now, researchers at Rush University Medical Center have shown that
depression is linked with the accumulation of visceral fat, the kind of
fat packed between internal organs at the waistline, which has long been
known to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

 

Diet and Coronary Heart Disease

Diet and Coronary Heart Disease

High quality evidence exists that the following help to protect people from coronary heart disease:
* “Mediterranean” and other high quality dietary patterns (see below)
* Nuts
* Vegetables
* Mono-saturated fats

Strong evidence exists that the following increase the risk:
* trans-fats
* foods with a high glycemic index (see below**)

Moderately good quality evidence exists that the following are also helpful in preventing CHD:
* Fish
* Folate
* Whole grains
* Vitamins C and E in the diet
* Beta carotene
* Alcohol
* Fruit
* Fibre

There is as yet insufficient evidence about:
* Vitamin C and E supplements
* Saturated and unsaturated fat and total fat
* Linolenic acid
* Meat
* Eggs
* Milk

 

Hostility, not “Type A personality”, linked to heart disease

Don’t be mad

More research links hostility to coronary risk.

By Nadja Geipert

In 1959, cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman observed in top medical journals that competitive, deadline-driven, hypervigilant men-so-called Type A personalities-faced a significantly increased risk for coronary heart disease.

Yet ensuing large epidemiological studies failed to confirm the connection, and most health psychologists abandoned the concept in the late 1980s in favor of a component often found in Type A people: hostility.

A meta-analysis presented by German researcher Michael Myrtek, PhD, in his chapter on heart disease, Type A and hostility in the recently published APA book “Contributions Toward Evidence-based Psychocardiology: A Systematic Review of the Literature” (see “One heart-many threats”) confirms that there is no significant association between Type A personalities and heart disease, but that there is a connection between hostility and coronary heart disease.

“The consensus is really that it is not all aspects of Type A behavior, but just the hostility component,” says Redford Williams, MD, director of the behavioral medicine research center at Duke University School of Medicine.

 

Do optimists live longer?

Do optimists live longer?
By Coco Ballantyne in 60-Second Science Blog Scientific American

A perennial grump? Always see the glass as half empty instead of half full? Might want to brighten up a bit – if, that is, you’d like to live longer. A new study says that the optimists among us may have a lower risk of heart disease and early death.

Researchers led by Hilary Tindle, an internist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, analyzed eight years of data on 97,253 women, age 50 and over, participating in the Women’s Health Initiative, a 15-year study launched in 1991 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Their findings, released this week at a conference of the American Psychosomatic Society in Chicago: the women who were most cheery were 30 percent less likely to die of heart disease and 14 percent less likely than their pessimistic peers to die from all causes during the study period. The results were even more striking among black women; the optimists among them were 38 percent less likely to die of heart disease and 33 percent less likely to die from all causes.

The researchers caution that their findings only show a link, not a cause-and-effect relationship, between optimism and health outcomes. So what is it about Pollyannas that may make them live longer? It could be that optimistic people tend to be healthier in general; they are more likely to be slim and physically active and less likely to smoke, Tindle says.

“Optimistic people seem to seek medical advice and follow it,” she says, citing research showing that optimists are inclined to stick with diet programs prescribed by their docs. “They [also] have good social networks and strong social relationships,” which could help them cope with chronic stress, a risk factor for heart disease.

So are pessimists doomed to die early? Not necessarily, Tindle says. This is just one study, and more research is needed to get to the bottom of that question.

 

Marital strain affects women’s health more than men’s

Strained marriages ‘harm women’ — BBC news.

Women are more likely than men to suffer damage to their health from being in a strained marriage, research suggests.

US psychologists found wives in tense marriages were prone to risk factors for heart disease, stroke and diabetes.

In comparison, husbands seemed relatively immune from such problems.

Details of the study, based on 276 couples who had been married for an average of 20 years were presented to the American Psychosomatic Society.

Each couple filled out questionnaires designed to assess the good and bad aspects of married life.

They were also rated for how depressed they appeared to be, based on their self-reported symptoms.

Doctors then carried out a battery of tests to assess whether or not the volunteers were showing signs of metabolic syndrome – a collection of symptoms pointing to a raised risk of serious disease, such as heart problems.

Women in strained marriages were more likely to be depressed and to have a greater number of symptoms of metabolic syndrome.

But although husbands in unhappy marriages were also depressed, they did not show signs of physiological damage to their health.

Researcher Nancy Henry, from the University of Utah, said the team had expected to find that negative aspects of a bad marriage, such as arguing and being angry, would translate into both mental and physical problems for both sexes.

She said: “We found this was true for wives in this study, but not for husbands.

“The gender difference is important because heart disease is the number-one killer of women as well as men, and we are still learning a lot about how relationship factors and emotional distress are related to heart disease.”

Professor Tim Smith, who co-led the research, said there was good evidence that a healthy diet and regular exercise could reduce a woman’s risk of metabolic syndrome.

However, he said: “It’s a little premature to say they would lower their risk of heart disease if they improved the tone and quality of their marriages – or dumped their husbands.

“The immediate implication is that if you are interested in your cardiovascular risk – and we all should be because it is the leading killer for both genders – we should be concerned about not just traditional risk factors such as blood pressure and cholesterol but the quality of our emotional and family lives.”

Christine Northam, a counsellor for the charity Relate, said there was plenty of evidence that people in a stable, happy relationship enjoyed both good health and a longer life expectancy.

She said: “The gender difference could be partly due to the fact that women’s hormonal profile is more complex than men’s.

“Women also tend to worry more about their health than men.”
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7925360.stm>

 

Depression almost doubles the risk of developing heart disease

By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY

Depression almost doubles the risk of developing heart disease over 12 years, according to a long-term study of twins. The findings are to be reported today at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting in Chicago.

Mounting evidence has found that depression makes people more vulnerable to heart trouble. Recent studies, though, find that some genes that increase the risk of heart disease also may make people more prone to depression, which has raised the question of whether the depression-heart disease link is genetic.

But the twins study, which followed more than 1,200 middle-aged men, teases out the influence of genetics and finds that depression takes a huge toll on the heart that can’t be chalked up to a roll of the genetic dice.

Depression contributes to the risk of heart disease as much as diabetes, high cholesterol or obesity does, says study leader Jeffrey Scherrer of Washington University and the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in St. Louis. None of the men in his study – who were tracked from their early 40s to their mid-50s – had heart disease at the start, and Scherrer controlled for key factors, such as high blood pressure, that can lead to heart problems.

Twins offer a unique way to find out how much genetics influences health because identicals share 100% of their genes, and fraternal twins have 50% of genes in common. The study included both kinds of twins.

“This study tells us you can’t explain away the role of depression in heart disease by saying it’s all due to genetics,” says Jeanne McCaffery, a psychologist at Brown University Medical School who has done gene studies on the question.

There’s no evidence yet that treating depression will make adults less likely to have heart attacks, adds François Lesperance, a psychiatrist at the University of Montreal. He did the pioneering studies linking depression and cardiac problems.

But so much research has confirmed the link that it justifies more vigorous medical monitoring of heart patients with depression, Lesperance says.

He points to one study that showed a brief mental health screening could identify heart patients with depression, who turned out to be less likely to take medication.

“Clearly, they need to be checked up on more often,” he says.

One big hole in research on depression, heart disease and genetics is that study participants are overwhelmingly male, McCaffery says. “It’s very important to look at whether you’d get these effects in women, because we just don’t know.”

 

Anger really can kill you, U.S. study shows

Anger really can kill you, U.S. study shows

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO, Feb 23 (Reuters) – Anger and other strong emotions can trigger potentially deadly heart rhythms in certain vulnerable people, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

Previous studies have shown that earthquakes, war or even the loss of a World Cup Soccer match can increase rates of death from sudden cardiac arrest, in which the heart stops circulating blood.

“It’s definitely been shown in all different ways that when you put a whole population under a stressor that sudden death will increase,” said Dr. Rachel Lampert of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, whose study appears in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“Our study starts to look at how does this really affect the electrical system of the heart,” Lampert said.

She and colleagues studied 62 patients with heart disease and implantable heart defibrillators or ICDs that can detect dangerous heart rhythms or arrhythmias and deliver an electrical shock to restore a normal heart beat.

“These were people we know already had some vulnerability to arrhythmia,” Lampert said in a telephone interview.

Patients in the study took part in an exercise in which they recounted a recent angry episode while Lampert’s team did a test called T-Wave Alternans that measures electrical instability in the heart.

Lampert said the team specifically asked questions to get people to relive the angry episode. “We found in the lab setting that yes, anger did increase this electrical instability in these patients,” she said.

Next, they followed patients for three years to see which patients later had a cardiac arrest and needed a shock from their implantable defibrillator.

“The people who had the highest anger-induced electrical instability were 10 times more likely than everyone else to have an arrhythmia in follow-up,” she said.

Lampert said the study suggests that anger can be deadly, at least for people who are already vulnerable to this type of electrical disturbance in the heart.

“It says yes, anger really does impact the heart’s electrical system in very specific ways that can lead to sudden death,” she said.

But she cautioned against extrapolating the results to people with normal hearts. “How anger and stress may impact people whose hearts are normal is likely very different from how it may impact the heart which has structural abnormalities,” she said.

Lampert is now conducting a study to see if anger management classes can help decrease the risk of arrhythmia in this group of at-risk patients.

Sudden cardiac death accounts for more than 400,000 deaths each year in the United States, according to the American College of Cardiology. (Editing by Maggie Fox and Vicki Allen)

 

If you think aging is bad, it will be for you – research

The Association for Psychological Science’s journal *Psychological
Science* has scheduled for publication in a future issue an article:
“Age Stereotypes Held Earlier in Life Predict Cardiovascular Events in
Later Life.”

The authors are Becca R. Levy, Alan B. Zonderman, Martin D. Slade, &
Luigi Ferrucci.

Here’s how the article begins: “When older individuals apply negative
age stereotypes to themselves, they can adversely influence a wide range
of outcomes (Levy, Slade, Kunkel, & Kasl, 2002). These outcomes include
a greater cardiovascular response to stress and worse health behaviors,
such as higher tobacco use (Levy, Hausdorff, Hencke, & Wei, 2000; Levy &
Myers, 2004), both of which have been linked to the risk of
cardiovascular events (Jiang et al., 1996). We consider here for the
first time whether negative stereotypes held earlier in life have
consequences for health in later life. We predicted that younger
individuals who held more negative age stereotypes would have a greater
likelihood of experiencing cardiovascular events up to 38 years later
than individuals with more positive age stereotypes.”

Here’s how the Discussion section starts: “As predicted, among
participants age 49 and under, those who held negative age stereotypes
were significantly more likely to experience a cardiovascular event in
the following 38 years than those with positive age stereotypes, after
adjusting for a number of relevant variables. A similar effect occurred
in a subgroup of participants under age 40 who experienced
cardiovascular events after turning 60–an interval of more than two decades.”

Here’s how the article ends: “The strength of the association between
negative age stereotypes and risk of cardiovascular events in the final
model is notable. If an individual’s age stereotypes became more
negative by one point, the risk of experiencing a cardiovascular event
would increase by 11%. Conversely, if an individual’s age stereotypes
increased in positivity by two standard deviations on the age-stereotype
scale, this would lead to an 80% reduction in the risk of experiencing a
cardiovascular event. The study suggests that age stereotypes
internalized earlier in life can have a far-reaching effect on health.
In turn, this finding suggests that programs aimed at reducing the
negative age stereotypes of younger individuals could benefit their
cardiovascular health when they become older individuals.”

The author note provides the following info: Becca R. Levy, Yale School
of Public Health, 60 College St., New Haven, CT 06520-8034, e-mail:
<becca.levy@yale.edu>.

Courtesy of Ken Pope

 

A healthy lifestyle halves the risk of premature death in women

The *British Medical Journal* issued the following announcement:

A healthy lifestyle halves the risk of premature death in women

Research paper: Combined impact of lifestyle factors on mortality: a
prospective cohort study in US women

Over half of deaths in women from chronic diseases such as cancer and
heart disease could be avoided if they never smoke, keep their weight in
check, take exercise and eat a healthy diet low in red meat and trans-
fats, according to a study published on bmj.com today.