How Depression affects Coronary Heart Disease

Depression is now considered a major health problem, particularly those health problems related to heart disease. It is now important to recognize that depression is directly linked with heart disease. Depression is an illness that can affect anyone at any time.

Research shows that depression is extremely common with people who have coronary heart disease. Depression is known to increase the risk of further heart problems in people with coronary disease. Depression is a risk factor for coronary

Vitamins For A Healthy Heart

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.

Vulnerable Plaque in Heart Disease

Swelling (inflammation) is the body's natural reaction to an injury. Inflammation can happen anywhere on the skin, within the body, and even inside the arteries. Scientists are now learning inflammation may play a part in many of the diseases that come with aging, including coronary artery disease.

For many years, doctors have thought that the main cause of a heart attack or stroke or was the buildup of fatty plaque within an artery, leading to the heart or brain. In time, the plaque buildup would narrow the artery so much, that the artery would close off or become clogged by a blood clot. The lack of oxygen-rich blood to the heart would then lead to a heart attack. However these types of blockages cause only about 3 out of 10 heart attacks.

Researchers are finding people who that heart attacks do not have arteries severely narrowed by plaque! Vulnerable plaque may be buried inside the artery wall, and not bulge out and block the blood flow through the artery. This is why researchers began to look at how inflammation affects the arteries, and to see if inflammation could lead to a heart attack.

What they found was that inflammation leads to the development of "soft" or vulnerable plaque. They also found that vulnerable plaque was more than just debris, clogging an artery, that it was filled with different cell types that help with blood clotting.

When this inflammation is combined with other stresses, like high blood pressure, it can cause the thin covering over the plaque to crack and bleed, spilling the entire contents of the vulnerable plaque into the bloodstream. The sticky cytokines on the artery wall capture blood cells (mainly platelets) that rush to the site of injury. When these cells clump together, they can form a clot large enough to block the artery

Eye And Heart Disease

Eye disease is very common with Golden Retrievers. Most Golden’s will generally have hereditary cataracts, which is a common eye problem. At an early age, with affected Golden’s, one type of hereditary cataract will appear. Even though it may not cause interference with the vision of the Golden Retriever, some dogs will progress into total and quite possibly severe loss of vision.

Sometimes, Golden Retrievers can get affected by non hereditary cataracts, although an examination by a board certified veterinarian can determine just how bad the cataracts really are. If cataracts are indeed suspected with a Golden Retriever, then breeding won’t be recommended. Breeding a Golden who has this condition can lead to serious problems, such as passing it on to the pups.

Several families of the Golden Retriever breed have been known to carry genes for CPRA (Central Progressive Retinal Atrophy), which affects the retina, and can result in permanent blindness for Golden’s at a young age. There are other types of eye defects as well, such as retinal dysplasia, which prevents a Golden from breeding.

Trouble with both the eyelid and eyelashes are also a possibility with Golden Retrievers, with some being the result of hereditary factors. The eyelids rotating in or out, or the eyelashes rubbing on or in the eye are both common problems with the breed. Even though surgery can help to fix these types of problems, dogs that are experiencing this type of problem shouldn’t be allowed to breed nor compete in shows under any type of AKC rules.

You should always have your Golden Retriever checked annually for eye disease, as it can develop during any age. When you take your Golden to have him examined for eye disease, you should have a veterinary ophthalmologist do the exam. He has all of the necessary equipment, and the proper training needed to make sure that your dog gets the best examination possible.

Heart disease

SAS (Subvalvular Aortic Stenosis) is the most common and widespread form of heart disease within the entire Golden Retriever species. Before you breed your Golden Retriever, you should always have him examined for heart disease by a certified veterinary cardiologist. If the cardiologist detects a heart murmur, he will recommend additional tests for your dog.

In the event that the results prove negative, it doesn’t necessarily rule heart disease out, as some milder forms may still be present, although undetectable. If a Golden Retriever is diagnosed to have any type of heart disease, he should not breed. Breeding Golden Retrievers who have heart disease can lead to serious and sometimes fatal results. To be on the safe side, you should always have your Golden tested for his disease before you plan on breeding.

Women and Heart Disease

Heart diseases are common among the women population just as is the case in male population. In fact, it is estimated that 8.6 million women succumb to the illness annually in the United States alone. This means that the disease is responsible for a third of all women deaths in the country. Women heart disease is currently affecting eight million women, with 35,000 of these being under 65 years of age. Another four million are angina sufferers.

The prevalence of women heart disease is evident in the 435,000 heart attacks registered annually in the different parts of the country. Statistics indicate that 42 percent of the heart attack suffers die within a year of the attack. This means that women who suffer heart attacks die at a faster rate than men. Statistics in the trend of heart ailments in men indicate that only 24 percent of men die a year after suffering an initial heart attack.

Women heart diseases first presents with mild symptoms which feel like flu to most women. According to health professionals, at least 71 percent of women with heart conditions experience these mild symptoms, which usually manifest as extreme weakness. At this early stage, most women do not have pains in the chest. In fact, health statistics indicate that about two-thirds of heart related deaths occur in women who have never had chest pains before.

Just like in the male population, the most profound women heart disease risk factors include tobacco smoking, abnormal amounts of lipids in the blood and diabetes. Previous researches indicate that women smokers increase their risk by 19 years compared to non smokers. Hypertension, which is common in people using the oral contraceptive, also increases the chance of women developing heart disease. Diabetes on the other hand places women sufferers on twice the risk of suffering from women heart disease when compared to the non-diabetics. More so, diabetes places women at double the risk of repeat heart attacks.

The diagnosis for women heart disease is not as straight forward as is the case with men. This is attributed to the even distribution of plaque in women’s arteries, which passes as normal in angiographic studies. In men however, the plaque clumps in different areas of the artery walls thus leading to easy diagnosis.

However, it is not all doom for women heart disease sufferers. Studies have shown that the female heart is able to respond better to lifestyle changes than does the male heart. As such, women can easily adopt lifestyle changes related preventive measures to keep the disease at bay.

Heart disease : Facts

Heart disease is a term that applies to a large number of medical conditions relating to the heart. These medical conditions relate to the abnormal health conditions that directly affect the heart and all its components. Heart disease is a major health problem within some cultures.

One theory for heart disease is the radical changes within our lifestyles. People are often less active and eat diets high in fats. Takeaway food is abundant today and often people will eat it due to the increased availability. Some takeaway outlets are now helping cater to a healthier lifestyle by offering a variety of healthy dishes such as salads. People are becoming more aware of the risk of heart disease and choosing to change their diets.

Exercise is extremely important in order to avoid heart disease. Exercise helps to keep the heart in peak performance. By using a combination of exercise and a balanced diet, the risk of heart disease is greatly decreased.

The term Cardiovascular Disease covers a large number of diseases that directly affect the heart and the blood vessel system. It especially affects the veins and arteries that lead to and from the heart. Research has suggested that women who suffer with cardiovascular disease usually suffer from forms that affect the blood vessels. While men usually suffer from forms that affect the heart muscle itself. Other known or associated causes of cardiovascular disease include diabetes mellitus, hypertension and hypercholesterolemia.

Heart disease and strokes are other common cardiovascular diseases. Two independent risk factors that have a major impact for heart diseases, cardiovascular diseases, are high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol.

Now day’s heart disease does not have to be a death sentence. There are healthy lifestyle choices that can be made and science has come a long way in the early detection of heart disease.

A study finds that HIV-Infected Men at Increased Risk for Heart Disease

NIH-supported research also identifies predictors of heart disease risk in this group

The buildup of soft plaque in arteries that nourish the heart is more common and extensive in HIV-infected men than HIV-uninfected men, independent of established cardiovascular disease risk factors, according to a new study by National Institutes of Health grantees. The findings suggest that HIV-infected men are at greater risk for a heart attack than their HIV-uninfected peers, the researchers write in Annals of Internal Medicine.

In addition, blockage in a coronary artery was most common among HIV-infected men whose immune health had declined the most over the course of their infection and who had taken anti-HIV drugs the longest, the scientists found, placing these men at even higher risk for a heart attack.
“These findings from the largest study of its kind tell us that men with HIV infection are at increased risk for the development of coronary artery disease and should discuss with a care provider the potential need for cardiovascular risk factor screening and appropriate risk reduction strategies,” said Gary H. Gibbons, M.D., director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of NIH.

“Thanks to effective treatments, many people with HIV infection are living into their 50s and well beyond and are dying of non-AIDS-related causes—frequently, heart disease,” said Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), also part of NIH. “Consequently, the prevention and treatment of non-infectious chronic diseases in people with HIV infection has become an increasingly important focus of our research.”

NIAID and NHLBI funded the study with additional support from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, part of NIH.

Past studies of the association between heart disease and HIV infection have reached inconsistent conclusions. To help clarify whether an association exists, the current investigation drew participants from the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study (MACS), a study of HIV/AIDS in gay and bisexual men established by NIAID nearly 30 years ago.

“One advantage of the MACS is that it includes HIV-uninfected men who are similar to the HIV-infected men in the study in their sexual orientation, lifestyle, socioeconomic status and risk behavior, which makes for a good comparison group,” said Wendy S. Post, M.D., who led the study. Dr. Post is a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore.

Another advantage was the MACS’ size, with nearly 7,000 men cumulatively enrolled, 1,001 of whom participated in the new study. The participants included 618 men who were HIV-infected and 383 who were not. All were 40 to 70 years of age, weighed less than 200 pounds, and had had no prior surgery to restore blood flow to the coronary arteries.

Dr. Post and colleagues investigated whether the prevalence and extent of plaque buildup in coronary arteries, a condition called coronary atherosclerosis, is greater in HIV-infected men than HIV-uninfected men and whether that plaque is soft or hard. Coronary atherosclerosis, especially soft plaque, is more likely to be a precursor of heart attack than hard plaque.

The scientists found coronary atherosclerosis due to soft plaque in 63 percent of the HIV-infected men and 53 percent of the HIV-uninfected men. After adjusting for cardiovascular disease risk factors, including high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, high body mass index and smoking, the presence of soft plaque and the cumulative size of individual soft plaques were significantly greater in men with HIV infection.

In addition, by examining a subgroup of HIV-infected men, the scientists discovered two predictors of advanced atherosclerosis in this population. The first predictor deals with white blood cells called CD4+ T cells, which are the primary target of HIV and whose level, or count, is a measure of immune health. The researchers found that for every 100 cells per cubic millimeter decrease in a man’s lowest CD4+ T cell count, his risk of coronary artery blockage rose by 20 percent. The scientists also found that for every year a man had taken anti-HIV drugs, his risk of coronary artery blockage rose by 9 percent.

Because the investigators examined coronary artery plaque at a single point in time, further research is needed to determine whether coronary artery plaque in HIV-infected men is less likely to harden over time, or whether these men simply develop greater amounts of soft plaque, according to Dr. Post. In addition, she said, studies on therapies and behavioral changes to reduce risk for cardiovascular disease in men and women infected with HIV are needed to determine how best to prevent progression of atherosclerosis in this population.

The study was funded by NIH through grant numbers RO1-HL-095129, UL1-RR-025005, UO1-AI-35042, UL1-RR-025005, UM1-AI-35043, UO1-AI-35039, UO1-AI-35040, and UO1-AI-35041. The National Cancer Institute co-funds the MACS.

For more information about HIV/AIDS, please visit http://aids.gov .

NIAID conducts and supports research—at NIH, throughout the United States, and worldwide—to study the causes of infectious and immune-mediated diseases, and to develop better means of preventing, diagnosing and treating these illnesses. News releases, fact sheets and other NIAID-related materials are available on the NIAID Web site at http://www.niaid.nih.gov.

Exercise, Diet May Help ' Pre-Diabetics ' Dodge Heart Disease Death

By Steven Reinberg

For people with high blood sugar at risk of type 2 diabetes, losing weight and exercising may lessen their chances of dying from heart disease or other conditions, a new long-term study suggests.

People enrolled in the study on diabetes prevention in China followed a diet and exercise program for six years, then were followed by researchers for another 23 years.

Over that time, there was a significant reduction in their risk of death from cardiovascular diseases--such as coronary heart disease and stroke--and death from other causes, the researchers found.

"This reduction in mortality appears to be due in part to the delay in the onset of diabetes resulting from the lifestyle interventions," said lead researcher Dr. Guangwei Li, of the department of endocrinology at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital, in Beijing.

For the study, Li's group randomly assigned 438 patients to the diet and exercise program, and another 138 patients to maintain their regular lifestyle.

Diets were designed to produce weight loss in obese or overweight participants, and to reduce carbs and alcohol intake in people of normal weight, the study authors explained.

The exercise segment of the program focused on increasing how much physical activity participants did during their leisure time.

After more than two decades of follow-up, the incidence of death from cardiovascular disease among those in the diet and exercise program was about 12 percent, compared with nearly 20 percent among those who did not change their lifestyles, the study found.

Moreover, the incidence of death from any cause was about 28 percent among those in the lifestyle-change group versus over 38 percent among the others, the researchers added.

Previous research has shown that for people with type 2 diabetes, the risk of dying from heart conditions and stroke is more than twice that of people without diabetes, Li noted.

"These [new] findings provide yet further justification to implement lifestyle interventions in people with high blood sugar, as clinical and public health measures to control the long-term consequences of diabetes," Li said.

The report was published April 3 in the online edition of The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology.

Dr. David Katz, director of the Yale University Prevention Research Center, said that "lifestyle is the best medicine has been established by an impressively consistent array of research findings spanning populations and decades."

Careful attention to eating well, being active, controlling weight and avoiding tobacco has been shown to reduce the lifetime risk of all major chronic disease by 80 percent, he said.

"This study shows first, that an intervention focused particularly on diabetes prevention has generalized benefits," Katz said. "This is not very surprising, since the causal and protective factors for all of the prevalent chronic diseases are interrelated. The same diet and activity pattern that helps prevent diabetes does the same for cardiovascular disease, "he added.

"Second, and more surprising, this study suggests that a robust lifestyle intervention program of sufficient duration is a gift that keeps on giving, conferring benefit for years after it concludes," Katz said. "This offers important promise with regard to the cost-effectiveness of such interventions."

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Women Face Delays in Heart Attack Care Compared to Men

Among young and middle-aged adults, men tend to receive faster hospital care than women for heart attacks and chest pains, a new study finds.

Anxiety appeared to be a key factor -- women who appeared anxious upon admittance to the hospital tended to have delays in crucial care, the study authors found.

Take Heart: Mediterranean Diet Combats Diabetes, Study Says

Adhering to a so-called Mediterranean diet may reduce your risk of diabetes, especially if you're at high risk for heart disease.

That's the finding of researchers who reviewed 19 studies that included more than 162,000 people in different countries for an average of 5.5 years.

Link between Depression and Heart Failure

Depression may increase the risk of heart failure, a new study suggests.

Researchers looked at nearly 63,000 people in Norway who underwent physical and mental health assessments.