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Potassium to Sodium Ratio Affects the Heart

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Consuming twice as much potassium as sodium might halve your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.

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Ate too many nachos? Consider a banana chaser — your heart might thank you for it.

A new study suggests that consuming twice as much potassium as sodium can halve your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. The study is the first to show that the ratio of these nutrients in your diet matters more than exactly how much you get of either one.

The best strategy for good health, experts are quick to stress, is to eat less sodium and more potassium. But the new research suggests that simply upping your intake of potassium can at least soften the blow of a high-sodium diet.

“Potassium and sodium are like peas in a pod, except they’re in opposite pods,” says epidemiologist Paul Whelton, president and chief executive of the Loyola University Health System in Chicago and one of the authors of the study. “This is the first study to show that the two together give you a benefit over and above what you can get with either one.”

Between processed foods and restaurant meals, most Americans eat far too much sodium — significantly above the 2,300 milligrams the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend as a maximum daily intake for adults. Excess sodium, according to plenty of large, well-designed studies, causes the body to retain fluids, which raises blood pressure and ups the risk of dying from heart disease.

Just as strong — albeit less commonly known — is the link between heart health and potassium. In 1997, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Assn. compiled the results of 33 clinical trials and found that people who took potassium supplements lowered their blood pressure by 3/2 mm Hg. (Blood pressure is measured as two numbers that indicate how hard it is for the heart to pump blood through the blood vessels. Ideally, it should be 120/80 or less.) High blood pressure is a major risk factor for heart attacks and strokes.

That study was pivotal in influencing current dietary guidelines, which recommend that Americans get at least 4,700 mg of potassium daily — about double the recommended maximum for sodium. Yet, according to nationwide nutritional surveys, the average American gets just 2,600 mg of potassium a day and 4,000 mg or more of sodium — far more sodium than potassium, even though guidelines suggest we do the opposite.

Scientists have long suspected that the ratio of the two nutrients in our diets is important, but there hasn’t been strong enough evidence to say for sure. In the new study, Nancy Cook, a statistician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and associate professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston, and colleagues were able to test the idea with data from two large trials originally designed to see how blood pressure responds to a variety of factors, such as diet and weight loss.

The studies involved thousands of people and took place in the late 1980s and early ’90s. For either 18 months or three years, some participants were assigned to cut sodium intake by up to 35%. Others went along eating like they always did. A handful of times over the course of the study, participants provided all their urine over a 24-hour period. Then, by analyzing the urine, scientists could accurately determine what nutrients each person was eating. (Prior studies relied on people reporting everything they ate — a method that is notoriously inaccurate.)

One earlier report from this project, published in the British Medical Journal in 2007, found that participants who had been instructed to reduce sodium intake, even for just a few years, were 25% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease 10 to 15 years later than were those who kept eating larger amounts of sodium.

In the current study, the researchers looked at the other group — those who had continued to eat as they normally would. They found that people who ate more potassium tended to have a slightly lower long-term risk of death from heart disease.

But they also found that people who had consumed the highest levels of potassium and the lowest levels of sodium (about twice as much potassium as sodium) were 50% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease than those who ate the most sodium and the least potassium (about four times as much sodium as potassium).

The ratio of the two nutrients mattered more than the amount of either one when it came to predicting cardiovascular disease, the study found.

Scientists aren’t sure how potassium dampens the heart-damaging effects of salt. One possibility, Cook says, is that potassium may prevent the body from absorbing as much sodium. But regardless of the mechanism, trying to boost your ratio is pretty much guaranteed to improve your health because you’ll eat more fruits and vegetables, says Edgar Miller III, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Medical University in Baltimore.

A banana has more than 400 mg of potassium, for example. There are more than 900 mg in a potato, nearly 950 mg in a cup of spinach, 600 mg in half a cup of raisins and 500 mg in an 8-ounce cup of orange juice.

A diet rich in fruits and vegetables delivers other health-enhancing properties, Miller says, including fiber and antioxidants. And filling up on fresh, whole foods may reduce the reliance on sodium-packed processed meals.

In that way, the new study supports the results of the landmark DASH trials, which in the 1990s found that even when people ate plenty of sodium they were able to lower their blood pressure by eating lots of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and low-fat dairy foods, and not a lot of red meat, sweets or saturated fats. “This provides further proof,” says Eva Obarzanek, a registered dietitian and research nutritionist at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, and one of the authors of the new study, “that sodium is bad and potassium is good.”

Sources: Los Angeles Times

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A Big Bottom Can Cut Diabetes Risk

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Here’s some good news for women who find it hard to squeeze into their skinny jeans, courtesy their big bottoms: a generously proportioned derriere could be good for health, say scientists.
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Accord to research, the fat in buttocks and hips may protect against type 2 diabetes.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School in America reckon that the type of fat that accumulates around the hips and bottom may offer some protection against developing the condition.

Fat found commonly around the lower areas, known as subcutaneous fat, or fat that collects under the skin, helps to improve the sensitivity of the hormone insulin. Insulin is responsible for regulating blood sugar and therefore a big bottom might offer some protection against diabetes.

The boffins said that fat which collects around the stomach can raise a person’s risk of diabetes and heart disease. But, people with pear-shaped bodies, with fat deposits in the buttocks and hips, are less prone to these disorders.

Lead researcher Dr Ronald Kahn said that the research on mice had shown that not all fat was bad and could help to prevent the onset of Type 2 diabetes.

The team is trying to find the substances produced in subcutaneous fat that provide the benefit because they could lead to the development of drugs, reports the Daily Express.

The study was published in the journal Cell Metabolism.

Sources:The Times Of India

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Fish-Eating Moms’ Diet Affects Kids, Study Shows

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Since the current guidelines on fish consumption were issued, Dr. Emily Oken, a physician and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, has led studies to examine the sum effect of eating fish.

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One of those was published in May in the American Journal of Epidemiology. Researchers asked 341 pregnant women in Massachusetts about their diet and tested their blood mercury levels during the second trimester. Then, when their children were 3, they were tested in a range of thinking and movement tasks.

Children of mothers who ate more than two servings of fish per week had higher scores than kids of non-fish-eating moms, even when other influences of early childhood development, such as birth weight and breast-feeding duration, were factored out. No measurable benefit was seen in kids born to women who ate fewer than two servings of fish per week, which corresponds to the current FDA/EPA advice.

The improvements in kids were even more striking in kids of moms with lower mercury levels, suggesting that choosing low-mercury fish is key. Researchers did ask about broad categories of fish, but, Oken says, it’s a big uncertainty in this kind of research. “We don’t really know a lot of detail about the kind of fish that women are eating.”

On the flip side, children of mothers with the highest mercury levels in their blood scored poorly, and if their moms ate less fish, the detriments were greater.

In short, Oken was able to demonstrate both the benefits of fish eating and the risks of mercury intake. When both fish and mercury are taken together, Oken’s study suggests that the good may outweigh the bad, at least in the fish-eating habits of her subjects.

Sources: The Times Of India

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Generics Are as Good as Branded Drugs’

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There is no evidence that brand-name drugs given to treat heart and other cardiovascular conditions work any better than their cheaper generic counterparts, US researchers said.
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The findings run counter to the perception by some doctors and patients that pricier brand-name drugs are clinically superior, said Aaron Kesselheim of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, who led the study.

Kesselheim and colleagues combined the results of 30 studies done since 1984 comparing nine sub-classes of cardiovascular drugs to generic counterparts.

The brand-name drugs did not offer any advantage for patients’ clinical outcomes in those studies, they wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“Brand-name drugs for cardiovascular disease can be as much as a few dollars a pill, whereas generic drugs might be as little as a few cents a pill,” Kesselheim said.

“If a patient is prescribed a generic drug because that’s what’s appropriate for their condition, then they should feel confident taking that drug. And physicians themselves should also feel confident prescribing generic drugs where appropriate,” Kesselheim said. He said rising costs of brand-name prescription drugs strain the budgets of patients as well as public and private health insurers. Overall US prescription drug sales hit $286.5 billion in 2007.

Pharmaceutical companies retain exclusive rights to drugs they develop for a certain number of years, after which others can sell generic versions that are chemically equivalent. The active ingredient is the same, but the colour and shape may differ and they may have different inert binders and fillers.

In the US, the Food and Drug Administration must approve a generic version of a drug before it can be sold. Kesselheim said cardiovascular drugs to treat conditions of the heart and blood vessels are the most commonly prescribed category.

The study covered beta-blockers, diuretics, calcium-channel blockers, statins, antiplatelet agents, ACE inhibitors, alpha-blockers, anti-arrhythmic agents and warfarin.

Sources: The Times Of India

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New Drug May Put Jet Lag to Rest

The experimental medication, called tasimelteon, works like melatonin and restores normal sleep patterns, researchers say.
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An experimental drug that mimics the effects of the hormone melatonin can reset the body’s circadian rhythms, bringing relief to jet-lagged travelers and night-shift workers, researchers reported Monday.

In a study of 450 people who were subjected to simulated jet lag in a sleep laboratory, a team from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston found that the drug restored near normal sleep the first night it was used.

There were no aftereffects from the drug, minimal side effects, and people who took it performed normally the next day, said Dr. Elizabeth B. Klerman, one of the co-authors of the study published online in the journal Lancet.

And unlike conventional sleeping aids such as Ambien or Lunesta, she added, the new drug, called tasimelteon, has no potential for addiction or abuse.

The main limitations of the study were the relatively small size and the researchers’ inability to measure performance and mood after the drug was used, experts said.

The study was designed and funded by Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. of Rockville, Md., which developed tasimelteon, and all of the researchers reported receiving funds from Vanda or other pharmaceutical companies.

“This is a very promising first step,” said Dr. Jay Udani, who runs the integrative medicine program at Northridge Hospital Medical Center and who was not involved in the study. But the research “does not prove that it works for jet lag or shift workers,” he added. “That needs controlled studies in the field.”

The body’s sleep-wake cycle is controlled by melatonin, which is produced by the pineal gland in response to patterns of light and darkness. Higher concentrations of melatonin in the blood are associated with greater sleepiness.

Some research has shown that administering melatonin can adjust sleep cycles in travelers and workers, but the results have been mixed.

Because melatonin can’t be patented, drug companies have been interested in developing melatonin mimics, such as tasimelteon, which can be patented.

In the first part of the study, 39 patients’ normal sleep habits were monitored for three nights in the laboratory before they were sent to bed five hours early.

They were then given one of four different doses of tasimelteon or a placebo 30 minutes before bedtime.

Researchers monitored their sleep efficiency — the percentage of time in bed they actually slept — and the amount of time required for them to fall asleep.

Although all the subjects benefited from the drug, those receiving the highest dose had a sleep efficiency of 89% the first night, virtually the same as the 90% efficiency before the trail started. Those receiving a placebo had an efficiency of 71%.

Patients taking the highest doses slept for an average of about 428 minutes, compared with 430 minutes before the trial and 324 minutes for those taking a placebo. It took an average of seven minutes for them to go to sleep, compared with 11 minutes before the trial and 22 minutes for those receiving a placebo.

Blood analysis showed that the melatonin cycle of those receiving the drug was altered to match the new conditions.

“They would be expected to sleep better because their internal clock is on the right time,” Klerman said.

Sources Los Angles Times

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