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Sleep Less, Put Your Heart at Risk

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Key to good heart?
Study shows – even an extra hour of sleep can be beneficial for coronary arteries.
Skipping sleep may promote the thickening of coronary arteries and increase the risk of heart disease, a new study suggests. Researchers at the University of Chicago Medical Centre in the US have found that people who, on an average, sleep less have a greater chance of developing thickened arteries than people who sleep longer.

The benefit from just one hour of extra sleep per day is similar to the gain available from reducing blood pressure by 16mm, according to the study, to be published tomorrow in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers detected thickened arterial deposits in 6 per cent of people who slept more than seven hours a night, in 11 per cent of people who slept between five and seven hours, and in 27 per cent of people who slept less than five hours.

“The magnitude of the difference was a surprise,” said Diane Lauderdale, associate professor at the University of Chicago Medical Centre’s department of health studies and the study’s director.

“It’s also a mystery. We can only speculate about why those with shorter average sleep duration were more likely to develop the calcification [thickening] of the arteries.”

“This is a large and dramatic effect,” said Batmanabhan Gitanjali, head of a sleep disorders laboratory at the Jawaharlal

Nehru Institute of Postgraduate Medical Education and Research, Puducherry, who was not associated with the study.

The study examined the sleep habits and coronary arteries of 495 men and women between the ages of 35 and 47 over a five-year period. None of the volunteers had any deposits in their arteries at the start of the study.

It revealed a 33 per cent lowered risk of arterial thickening even after the scientists adjusted data to cancel out the effects of other factors that could contribute to arterial thickening such as smoking, age, sex, race and education.

“But we’ll need to validate these findings through larger studies to understand what’s going on,” said Batmanabhan Gitanjali

One current idea among sleep medicine specialists is that healthy people may display a range of sleep habits. Short-sleepers could do with five hours of sleep while long-sleepers are comfortable sleeping eight hours or more.

A number of previous studies have shown that chronic lack of sleep is associated with a number of other risk factors linked to heart disease — weight gain, diabetes and even high blood pressure.

Lauderdale and her colleagues say the stress hormone called cortisol or some as yet unidentified factor may reduce sleep and increase arterial thickening.

Another possible mechanism may involve the blood pressure. Blood pressure decreases during sleep, so people who sleep less during a 24-hour cycle may have higher blood pressure which can contribute to the arterial thickening.

“This study does not prove that short sleep leads to coronary artery disease, but it is safe to recommend at least six hours of sleep a night,” said Lauderdale.

Sources: The Telegraph (Kolkata, 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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‘Circumcision Doesn’t Cut HIV Risk’

There is not enough evidence to show that circumcision reduces the risk of AIDS in sex between men, researchers are reporting, even though previous studies in Africa have shown its pronounced benefit in reducing AIDS from heterosexual sex.

……………….

“Over all, we’re not finding a protective effect associated with circumcision for gay and bisexual men,” said Gregorio A Millett of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the lead author of a report that appears Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers based their conclusions on a review of 15 studies involving 53,567 gay and bisexual men in eight countries, including the United States, where nearly half of the 1.1 million people infected with the AIDS virus are men who have sex with men.

Circumcised men were 14 percent less likely to be infected with the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, than those who were uncircumcised, but the finding was not statistically significant, the researchers said.

Sources: The Times Of India

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