Showing posts with label
Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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Showing posts with label
Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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Is this good news or what?!
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Posted: 12 October 2011
STOCKHOLM: Have a sweet tooth? It could protect you from a stroke, according to a large Swedish study published on Tuesday on women chocolate-lovers.
"We followed 33,000 women over the course of 10 years, and we found that those who ate most chocolate had a much lower risk - 20 percent lower - of suffering a stroke," said Susanna Larsson, one of three researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm who carried out the study.
The study, published this week in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, began in 1997 when the researchers asked 33,372 women in Sweden between the ages of 49 and 83 to fill out a questionnaire on their eating habits.
The women were asked to indicate how often they on average had consumed chocolate and 95 other foods during the previous year.
Over the following decade, a total of about 1,600 strokes were registered in the group.
After taking into account all the known risk factors for stroke, the researchers discovered that the women who ate the least chocolate - between eight grammes (0.3 ounces) a week and none - "were the ones who suffered most strokes," Larsson told AFP.
The women who ate the most chocolate - on average 66 grammes (2.3 ounces) per week - were the least likely to suffer a stroke, she said.
While the women were not asked to distinguish between light and dark chocolate, she points out that in the 1990s, about 90 percent of all chocolate eaten in Sweden was milk chocolate.
"If we had been able to separate light and dark chocolate we think that the connection would have been clearer with dark, since it's cocoa that is the protective substance," Larsson said.
She said she and her colleagues had found what they had expected to find.
"We weren't really surprised, because our hypothesis was that chocolate would help protect against strokes," she said, pointing out that it had already been shown that "chocolate reduces blood pressure, and high blood pressure is a high risk factor."
Other studies have also shown that antioxidants in chocolate "can reduce oxidation of the bad (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol, and has been shown to improve insulin resistance," she pointed out.
A few smaller studies have previously hinted that eating chocolate could help protect against strokes, but the Karolinska Institute team's decade-long study of such a large number of test subjects is the first to reach a clear connection.
Larsson said she and her colleagues now planned to check if they could find the same connection in men.
"We expect we will see the same connection," she said.
- AFP/de
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Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Women chocoholics run smaller risk of strokes
And I thought that TV is bad only for kids?
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Posted: 11 January 2011
WASHINGTON: People who spend more than two hours per day of leisure time watching television or sitting in front of a screen face double the risk of heart disease and higher risk of dying, said a study on Monday.
Researchers said the effect was seen regardless of how much people exercised, indicating that how we choose to spend our free time away from work has a huge impact on our overall health.
"It is all a matter of habit. Many of us have learned to go back home, turn the TV set on and sit down for several hours - it's convenient and easy to do," said Emmanuel Stamatakis, expert in epidemiology and public health at University College London.
"But doing so is bad for the heart and our health in general," said Stamatakis, who along with the other study authors is advocating public health guidelines to warn of the risks of being inactive during non-work hours.
Such warnings are urgent, "especially as a majority of working age adults spend long periods being inactive while commuting or being slouched over a desk or computer," said the study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Researchers studied data from 4,512 adults who took part in the Scottish Health Survey of households.
The information on screen time came from self-reported data about TV or DVD watching, leisure time computer use and playing video games.
When scientists compared people who reported spending less than two hours a day in front of screen-based entertainment to those who spent four or more hours per day, they found a 48 percent higher risk of death from any cause.
In those spending just two or more hours per day in front of screen after work, they also found a 125 percent higher risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attack.
"These associations were independent of traditional risk factors such as smoking, hypertension, BMI (body mass index), social class, as well as exercise," the study noted.
However researchers were able to make associations between the levels of inflammation and cholesterol in sedentary people.
"One fourth of the association between screen time and cardiovascular events was explained collectively by C-reactive protein (CRP), body mass index, and high-density lipoprotein cholesterol," said the study.
CRP, an indicator of low-grade inflammation, was about twice as high in people who spent more than four hours of free time daily in front of a screen compared to people who spent less than two hours a day.
Stamatakis said he intends to continue to study how prolonged sitting impacts human health and how lifestyle changes could be advocated to reduce the amount of time people spend inactive.
- AFP/de
Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below: Two hours of TV-watching boosts heart risk
