HEALTH LINE

• Cardiovascular diseases are number 1 killers in both developed and developing countries and with obesity now becoming an epidemic these diseases are taking the shape of an epidemic too.All of us should keep us upto date regarding news of cardiovascular diseases as almost everyone is effected by them or the loved ones during some stage of life.So here are the latest news regarding cardiovascular diseases.

• Being heavy cuts angioplasty complications
Innumerable studies have laid out the dire health consequences of obesity, but there's one situation where being overweight seems helpful: coronary angioplasty.
Analysis of data from the New York State Angioplasty Registry indicates that people who are moderately to severely obese are less likely than others to suffer major adverse events or to die after undergoing catheter-balloon procedures to open clogged coronary arteries.
At the Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, Dr. Robert M. Minutello and colleagues studied the impact of body mass index (BMI) -- a measure of weight in relation to height -- on in-hospital outcomes after angioplasty by reviewing data on more than 95,000 patients.
For the study, published in the American Journal of Cardiology, patients were classified according to BMI as being underweight, healthy weight, overweight, moderately obese, severely obese, or very severely obese.
The researchers report that a U-shaped relationship was found between body mass index and risk of major adverse coronary events. In-hospital deaths were higher among underweight and very severely obese patients than among the others.
Furthermore, underweight and severely obese patients were at greater risk for the combination of death, heart attack, or emergency surgery than patients with moderate or severe obesity.
Minutello's team suggests that the poorer outcome in underweight patients is not so surprising, but the reasons why overweight patients fare well is more puzzling. One possibility is that these patients may have larger blood vessels, making the procedure easier, but that is not proven.
All in all, the researchers call for "further studies to determine the factors responsible for the evidently protective effect of moderate and severe obesity."

• Being Downsized May Increase Stroke Risk
Losing a job is always tough, but for people nearing retirement age, it may also be harmful to their health, results of a new study suggest.
People who lost a job close to retirement age were more than twice as likely to have a stroke as people of the same age who had not lost a job, researchers report.
"Our study has established that, for workers nearing retirement, the loss of a job is a salient experience associated with negative effects on health, including increased risk of stroke," Dr. William T. Gallo at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, told Reuters Health.
"The public, in particular older workers, physicians and occupational health care providers should be aware that involuntary unemployment in the years leading up to retirement may be a credible risk factor for adverse health events," Gallo said.
This is not the first time that Gallo and his colleagues have found that job loss can have a negative impact on health.
Previously, the researchers reported an association between job loss and a decline in physical function and an increase in symptoms of depression, Gallo said. He also noted that there is some evidence of a link between job loss and the development of depression in a spouse, he said.
In the current study, Gallo and his colleagues compared 457 workers who lost their job with 3,763 people who were still working. The average age of participants in the study was 55.
During the 6-year study, people who had lost a job were not more likely to have a heart attack. But the odds of having a stroke were more than doubled in people who had lost a job, even after the researchers took into account risk factors for stroke.
The study appears in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine. It was funded by the National Institute on Aging and the Claude D. Pepper Older Americans Independence Center at Yale.
The study did not examine how being laid off may increase the risk of stroke, but Gallo and his colleagues speculate that losing a job close to retirement age leads to stress, anxiety and symptoms of depression, which may increase the risk.
Gallo and his colleagues plan to follow the participants for several more years to measure the long-term health effects of job loss.

• New Heart Imaging Aids Patient Recovery
U.S. researchers have developed a non-invasive heart imaging process that could help develop better therapies for recovering heart attack patients.
Researchers at Yale University School of Medicine have created the new process by labeling radioactively a protein present in newly-developing blood vessels, which compose a vital part of the healing process after a heart attack.
Clinicians easily cab evaluate the progression of blood vessel growth by tracking the protein using the imaging technology.
Previously, physicians had difficulty gauging the efficacy of therapies used to induce the growth of blood vessels, because there was no ability to evaluate the therapeutic effects directly.
By taking multiple, timed images of the heart, the researchers were able to detect blood vessel growth and track recovery of the damaged area.

• Sleep Apnea Treatment Improves Heart Risks
People who experience sleep apnea, or brief episodes when breathing stops, are often treated with continuous positive airway pressure, CPAP, to help them breathe properly during the night. While rather cumbersome and inconvenient, the treat treatment is worth sticking to -- especially for people who have heart disease -- new findings show.
According to a report in the European Heart Journal, treatment of obstructive sleep apnea reduces cardiovascular events such as heart attacks or the need for heart surgery among people who already have coronary heart disease.
Dr. Olivier Milleron from Ambroise Pare Teaching Hospital in Paris, France, and colleagues compared rates of new cardiovascular events over a five-year period in 25 patients with CAD whose sleep apnea was treated and in 29 who refused treatment.
CPAP was the treatment in 21 patients, while 4 underwent upper airway surgery.
Six treated patients (24 percent) and 17 in the untreated group (58 percent) had at least one cardiovascular event during follow-up, the authors report. Three heart-related deaths that occurred were all in the untreated group.
One of three treated patients who discontinued CPAP after 18 months had a coronary 13 months later, the researchers note, but the other two remained free of new cardiovascular events.
Dr. Milleron said he has found these results useful in convincing reluctant sleep apnea patients to undergo CPAP.
"One third of coronary artery disease patients have obstructive sleep apnea," Milleron added. "Moreover, sleep apnea is associated with sleepiness, depression, traffic accidents, and hypertension."
He urged doctors to be on the lookout for the problem in their heart patients. "If physicians are not convinced that treating sleep apnea is associated with better outcomes in coronary artery disease patients," Milleron said, they should still offer the treatment to such patients "because it can give them a better quality of life."