Gentle exercise can cut the danger of early heart disease, Britain’s biggest killer, according to reports of a scientific study.

As little as half an hour of aerobic exercise such as walking, rowing or jogging three times a week can make patients 60 per cent less likely to die, the research found.

The results of the study, carried out by the Department of Cardiology in New Orleans, Louisiana and reported in the American Journal of Medicine, have be welcomed by the British Heart Foundation.

More than 200,000 die each year from conditions related to circulation, including strokes and heart attacks.

One in five men and one in seven women die from heart disease in the UK.

The American study offered patients 12 weeks of exercise classes of 30 or 40 minutes of walking, rowing or jogging and were given advice on diet and lifestyle improvements.

A follow-up with the patients over six years found those who got fitter through the exercise regime were 60 per cent less likely to have died.

Exercise also helped to reduce levels of stress, according to a report of the study in the Daily Express.

The British Heart Foundation told the newspaper: “This study proves once again that exercise has both psychological and physical benefits for patients with heart disease.”
Many British patients with heart problems are put on drugs to lower cholesterol and reduce blood pressure.

The news
Scientists have grown a piece of heart muscle — and then watched it beat — by using stem cells from a mouse embryo.
This is a big step toward repairing damage from heart attacks .
Dr. Kenneth Chien and his team from the Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital researchers said “We’re making a heart part and (eventually) we’re going to put the part in”.
Lots of work remains before trying that experiment in people but regenerating damaged heart muscle is a holy grail in cardiac care.

Why is this important?
Doctors today have lots of treatments to prevent a heart attack. But once it strikes, there’s no way to restore the heart muscle it kills. Gradually the weakened heart quits pumping properly, leading to deadly heart failure .
Hence the focus on embryonic stem cells, master cells that can give rise to any tissue in the body. Until now, scientists haven’t known how to turn master cells into producing pure cardiac muscle .

Previous attempts were a failure
Up to now, researchers have tried injecting heart attack survivors with mixes of different kinds of stem cells, next-generation types like those found in bone marrow. The idea was that perhaps once those cells were inside a damaged heart, ones capable of growing cardiac muscle would receive a “get to work” signal and take root. But that was not successful.
The new research , published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, is a more targeted approach.

How did they do it
The team genetically engineered mice so that certain cells in the embryos’ developing hearts would light either fluorescent red or green. As they watched the embryos grow, an overlapping of colors signaled developing heart muscle. When the team plucked out those cells, they were pure ventricle generators, which is not enough.
Next the team cultivated the stem cells and a thin strip of mouse heart muscle grew on the top of the cell. What happened next is that the muscle started to beat by itself. The best thing about this is “This looks like the kind of work a normal heart tissue strip would do,” said Dr Chien “We went from embryonic stem cells to an organ.”

Is it portable to humans?
Yes because what the team has done is to use a mice stem cell that is present in both human and mouse embryos.

What’s next
This was not a fully developed piece of heart muscle but only a thin strip.
To be usable, it would have to be thicker, more three-dimensional, for more beating strength. It also needs a nourishing blood supply. So a next big challenge is pinpoint which one of those master heart stem cells can grow into blood vessels.

Opportunities
The experiment offers a possible new opportunity for cell therapy.
The team will now develop two approaches. Either they can try and develop cells outside of a body to a full heart and them implement that in a human body or they can try to inject the cells onto the heart once a muscle has developed and see if that helps.

Simply, many men and women are not aware of the risk factors for heart disease, especially when it comes to cholesterol.

About the risks

To put it bluntly, high cholesterol will cause your heart to fail. As an example  high cholesterol can cause anything from Diabetes to Heart failure.

For women, if you’re a middle-aged, 40 to 60, high cholesterol is the single most important risk factor for heart disease and heart attacks.

Evidence strongly indicates that high cholesterol levels can cause narrowing of the arteries (atherosclerosis), heart attacks and strokes. The risk of coronary heart disease also rises as the blood’s cholesterol level increases. If other risk factors, such as high blood pressure and smoking, are present, the risk increases even more.

Some background
Millions of British people get a diagnosis of high cholesterol every year. Cholesterol comes from two sources: your body and your food. Your liver (and to a smaller degree, your cells) makes about 75 percent of blood cholesterol. The remaining 25 percent comes from the foods you eat.

Cholesterol is divided into two main types. HDL, or high-density lipoprotein, is the “good” cholesterol because it helps to clear excess fats from the arteries. LDL, or low-density lipoprotein, is the bad cholesterol because it clogs the arteries, increasing a person’s risk for heart attack and stroke.

Women are particularly at risk in the premenopausal period. At First etrogen tends to raise HDL (good) cholesterol, but as estrogen drops during menopause, HDL levels drop too, and LDL levels rise. That’s why women need to know their cholesterol level.

In some people, improving diet and adding exercise can lower the overall number, but when lifestyle remains the same or people have a genetic predisposition for high cholesterol, medication is usually prescribed.

Cardiologists say many people think that because they are taking medication, they’re protected and don’t need to worry about their cholesterol level. That’s just not the case.

Know your cholesterol levels
So what are good cholesterol levels? Your overall cholesterol number should be under 200. If you have other risk factors — like smoking, high blood pressure or a family history of heart disease — your doctor may want it lower.

A good HDL level of 60 mg or greater is considered protective. LDL should be under 100 mg for those with no risk factors for heart disease and 70 mg for those at higher risk. But again, depending on your health and family history, your doctor may want different readings.

Natural recommendations to help lowering cholesterol
1. Keep your weight down, and cut down on calories, especially from saturated and trans fats, carbohydrates and alcohol. Even small amounts of alcohol can lead to large changes in triglyceride levels (although red wine may slightly bump up good cholesterol).
2. Eat plenty of fruits, vegetables and nonfat or low-fat dairy products. And add fish to your diet. Fish oil helps reduce cholesterol.
3. Get off the couch and get active. Even 30 minutes of moderate exercise, five days a week or more, can make a difference.

What you can do
The first step in fighting high cholesterol is simple: Get a blood test.
It is recommended that that everyone age 20 and older gets a reading of the “lipoprotein profile” every five years. It gives your doctor information about total cholesterol, LDL, HDL and triglycerides, which are the main type of fat in blood.
If your numbers are unhealthy, your doctor can advise you on treatment. If you want to avoid medication and try to achieve healthy cholesterol numbers naturally.

Tomorrow i will follow up with a post of Cholesterol related illnesses…

Today, a few newspapers reported that the smoking ban had been successful and the success has been measured in terms of reducing the number of heart attacks.
The biggest surprise in this announcement is how much decline there has been in heart attacks since the ban. It was originally expected that there would be a decrease by 10% in heart attacks but in fact heart attacks decreased by nearly a 1/3 since the ban.

Hence my rule number 1 : If you are a smoker, the single biggest thing you can do to avoid a heart attack is to give up, which could also protect the heart health of friends and family.

Heart attacks in the UK alone affect an estimated 275,000 people and kill 146,000 each year.

Big impact!
On reason for this surprise may well be second hand smoking : Second-hand smoke is thought to increase the chances of a heart attack by making the blood more prone to clotting, reducing levels of beneficial “good” cholesterol, and raising the risk of dangerous heart rhythms. The scientists leading the study found that heart attack rates across Europe and North America started to drop immediately following implementation of anti-smoking laws, reaching 17% after one year, then continuing to decline over time, with a 36% drop three years after enacting the restrictions.

Overall these findings give us evidence that in the short-to-medium-term, smoking bans will prevent a lot of heart attacks.

Another interesting piece of news was that the Latest figures show at least 70,000 lives have been saved by NHS Stop Smoking Services in the 10 years since they were established in England.

Go smoke free ! If you feel you can’t at least try e-cigarettes