Posted: 29 August 2011
PARIS: Eat dark chocolate, watch funny movies, avoid stressful jobs, and pedal hard when biking are all ingredients in the recipe for a healthy heart, according to experts meeting in Paris this week.
Whether one is afflicted by a heart attack, high blood pressure or constricted arteries depends in large measure on a host of lifestyle choices.
But the ideal formula for avoiding heart problems remains elusive: it is hard to tease apart the factors that impact cardiovascular health, and the right mix of things to do -- or not do -- can vary from person to person.
Even common-sense measures such as exercise or a balanced diet must be fine-tuned.
It is not, for example, how long one rides a bike but the intensity of one's effort that matters most, according to research presented Monday at a five-day gathering, ending Wednesday, of the European Society of Cardiology.
The study, led by Danish cardiologist Peter Schnohr, showed that men who regularly cycled at a fast clip survive 5.3 years longer than men who pedalled at a much slower pace. Exerting "average intensity" was enough to earn an extra 2.9 years.
For women, the gap was less striking but still significant: 2.9 and 2.2 years longer, respectively, compared to slowpokes.
"A greater part of the daily physical activity in leisure time should be vigorous, based on the individual's own perception of intensity," Schnohr said in a statement.
The old adage "laughter is the best medicine" was proven true by another study which found that a good dose of humour helps blood vessels.
Michael Miller, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, had already shown in earlier research spanning a decade that men and women with heart disease were 40 per cent less likely to see typical life events in a humorous light.
In the new study, he asked volunteers to first watch a stressful movie such as Steven Spielberg 1998 World War II film "Saving Private Ryan."
During harrowing battle scenes, their blood vessel lining developed a potentially unhealthy response called vasoconstriction, reducing blood flow.
But when the same subjects later saw a funny, heart-warming movie the blood vessel linings expanded.
Over all, there was "a 30-to-50 per cent difference in blood vessel diameter between laughter and mental stress phases," Miller said.
Acutely stressful working conditions, both physical and mental, have long been associated with poor health.
But new research unveiled Monday shows that a mix of intense pressure to produce results coupled with conditions making it hard to meet those demands is a recipe for heart disease, and even early mortality.
Finnish researchers led by Tea Lallukka of the University of Helsinki, in a review of recent academic literature, concluded that "job strain and overtime are associated with unhealthy behaviours, weight gain and obesity," according to a press release.
At the same time, they noted, "employed people are generally better off."
Perhaps the most painless path to better cardiovascular health is one that comes all-too-naturally to many people: eating chocolate.
Earlier research had established a link between cocoa-based confections and lowered blood pressure or improvement in blood flow, often attributed to antioxidants, but the scale of the impact remained obscure.
Oscar Franco and colleagues from the University of Cambridge reviewed half-a-dozen studies covering 100,000 patients, with and without heart disease, comparing the group that consumed the most and the least chocolate in each.
They found that the highest level of chocolate intake was associated with a 37 per cent reduction in cardiovascular disease, and a 20 per cent drop in strokes, when compared with the chocolate-averse cohort.
No significant reduction was reported in the incidence of heart attack.
The findings, alas, come with an important caveat: the healthful molecules are found in the bitter cacao, not in the sugar and fat with which they are routinely combined.
"Commercially available chocolate is very calorific and eating too much of it could in itself lead to weight gain, risk of diabetes and heart disease."
-AFP/ac
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Work less and eat more chocolate, say heart experts
Posted: 03 June 2011
LONDON - An entirely new strain of the drug-resistant MRSA superbug has been found in cow's milk and people in Britain and Denmark, a study published on Friday said.
The previously unseen variant "potentially poses a public health problem," said lead researcher Mark Holmes, senior lecturer in preventive veterinary medicine at Britain's Cambridge University.
There was no general threat to the safety of pasteurised milk and dairy products, but people working with animals could be at risk, said the study published in The Lancet Infectious Diseases.
Dubbed a "flesh-eating" bacteria in media reports, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) has emerged as a major threat in hospitals around the world, becoming potentially deadly when it infects wounds.
"Although there is circumstantial evidence that dairy cows are providing a reservoir of infection, it is still not known for certain if cows are infecting people, or people are infecting cows. This is one of the many things we will be looking into next," Holmes told a news conference on Thursday.
"Drinking milk or eating meat is not a health issue, as long as the milk is pasteurized," he said, adding that the process of making cheese also "generally kills most of the bacteria".
Holmes said the main worry was that the new strain would be wrongly identified by traditional genetic screening tests as being drug-susceptible, meaning people could therefore be given the wrong antibiotics.
Colleague Laura Garcia-Alvarez, also from Cambridge University, said it was "certainly worrying" to find the new strain in both cows and humans but said the pasteurisation of milk would keep it out of the food chain.
"Workers on dairy farms may be at higher risk of carrying MRSA, but we do not yet know if this translates into a higher risk of infection," Garcia-Alvarez added.
The team stumbled on the new MRSA bug while investigating mastitis, a serious disease which affects dairy cows.
They found MRSA bacteria with the same mutated gene in 13 of 940 samples from 450 dairy herds in southwest England.
Tests on people treated for MRSA revealed the same new strain in 12 instances in Scotland, 15 from England and 24 from Denmark.
The scientists also spotted a "clustering" of human and cow samples containing exactly the same new strain, suggesting transmission between cattle and humans.
Separately another study released on Friday showed another new form of MRSA in hospitals in Ireland that is closely related to the previously unseen one found in Britain.
Like the British one, it is not detected by current genetic tests and is also found in cows, said the research published in the journal Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy.
"The results of our study and the independent United Kingdom study indicate that new types of MRSA that can colonise and infect humans are currently emerging from animal reservoirs in Ireland and Europe and it is difficult to correctly identify them as MRSA," said David Coleman of Dublin University.
"This knowledge will enable us to rapidly adapt existing genetic MRSA detection tests, but has also provided invaluable insights into the evolution and origins of MRSA," he added.
The announcement of the new types of MRSA comes a day after the World Health Organisation said a lethal E.coli bacteria that has killed 18 people in Europe is "extremely rare" and had never been seen in an outbreak form before.
-AFP/rt
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Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
New MRSA 'superbug' found in cow's milk
If this is another attempt to 'play God', hopefully it will be for the better of mankind, not simply some experimentation the effects of which, short-term or long-term, is not known... left to chance.
Flu-less or clue-less?
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WASHINGTON: European scientists have found a way to genetically modify chickens so that they don't transmit bird flu, according to research published on Thursday in the journal Science.
Bird flu, also known as H5N1 avian influenza, usually afflicts poultry but can cross over to humans and cause lethal respiratory problems and other complications.
The first cases detected in humans were in Hong Kong in 1997. A wider global outbreak took hold in 2004 and cases have flared across parts of the world ever since.
Scientists from the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh said the modified chickens could get bird flu but could not pass it on to other chickens.
"Chickens are potential bridging hosts that can enable new strains of flu to be transmitted to humans," said Laurence Tiley, of the University of Cambridge's Department of Veterinary Medicine.
"Preventing virus transmission in chickens should reduce the economic impact of the disease and reduce the risk posed to people exposed to the infected birds."
However, Tiley noted that the research still in its early stages, and the birds they developed are not intended to be eaten by people.
"The genetic modification we describe is a significant first step along the path to developing chickens that are completely resistant to avian flu," Tiley said.
"These particular birds are only intended for research purposes, not for consumption."
The birds were altered by a new gene that makes a "decoy" molecule that imitates an element of bird flu virus.
Then the virus is "tricked into recognising the decoy molecule instead of the viral genome and this interferes with the replication cycle of the virus," the study said.
When scientists infected the genetically modified chickens with avian influenza, the birds fell ill but did not spread the flu to other birds, whether those birds were genetically modified or not.
"The results achieved in this study are very encouraging," said researcher Helen Sang of the University of Edinburgh.
"Using genetic modification to introduce genetic changes that cannot be achieved by animal breeding demonstrates the potential of GM to improve animal welfare in the poultry industry," she said.
"This work could also form the basis for improving economic and food security in many regions of the world where bird flu is a significant problem."
- AFP/de
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:Scientists 'make' chickens that don't spread bird flu
