heart

Lower Your Risk of Cancer and Heart Disease by Cycling to Work

- Adam Clare

Bicycle

We all know that encouraging bicycles as daily transportation is good for cities, economies, and traffic flow. Cycling is really good for you too and the evidence that you should bike more is more prevalent than ever. The most recent contribution to why riding a bike to work is good for you comes from Glasgow. Researchers there found that over the course of five years people who biked regularly had lower instances of cancer and heart disease!

But, during the course of the study, regular cycling cut the risk of death from any cause by 41%, the incidence of cancer by 45% and heart disease by 46%.
The cyclists clocked an average of 30 miles per week, but the further they cycled the greater the health boon.
Walking cut the odds of developing heart disease but the benefit was mostly for people walking more than six miles per week.
“This is really clear evidence that people who commute in an active way, particularly by cycling, were at lower risk,” Dr Jason Gill, from the University of Glasgow, told the BBC News website.

Read more.

Dogs and Cats are Great for Your Health

- Adam Clare

Having a pet cat or dog is beneficial for your health, with dog owners seeing huge decreases of heart problems. A pet can lower blood pressure and cholesterol by their very being. There’s no word yet on if pets are magical 😉

If you’re thinking of getting a pet make sure to check your local rescue shelter for a match.

“There was enough data to make us believe that there probably was some relationship between pet ownership and decreased cardiovascular risk,” Dr. Glenn Levine, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, said in an interview this week.

In particular, dog ownership may help reduce cardiovascular risk, the group said.

People with dogs often get more physical activity by walking them, agreed Dr. Chi-Ming Chow, a cardiologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto and a former dog owner.

Read more at the CBC.

Cuff the Heart

- Adam Clare

A new cuff can help save heart attack victims by limiting blood flow.

Ischemic preconditioning involves using the device to interrupt blood flow in the arm, off and on over a period of 35 to 40 minutes: the cuff is inflated for five minutes, then deflated for five minutes, with the procedure being repeated consecutively four times.

Once at the hospital, the patient receives routine heart attack treatment, including cardiac angioplasty. Preconditioning using the cuff may still be going on throughout this procedure, which uses a tiny inflatable balloon to open up narrowed or blocked blood vessels to the heart.

Researchers, whose paper appears in Friday’s issue of The Lancet, found that those heart attack patients randomly assigned to have preconditioning had an overall reduction in heart muscle damage of 30 per cent, compared to those not treated with the cuff.

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Grow a Heart

- Adam Clare

A team of international scientists have successfully grown heart tissue from embryonic stem cells. This is great news for people who have had all sorts of heart problems. Except perhaps a broken heart, for them perhaps a hug would work best.

More on the stem cell derived heart:

The researchers created the cells by supplying embryonic stem cell cultures with a cocktail of growth factors and other molecules involved in development.
By supplying the right growth factors at the right time, they encouraged the cells to grow into immature versions of three different types of cardiac cell.
The three cell types they created – cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells and vascular smooth muscle cells are each important constituents of heart muscle.

Cats Help Your Heart

- Adam Clare

Humorous Pictures 

I like cats! Now there is another reason to love those cute balls of fur: they’re good for keeping a healthy heart.

A U.S. study suggests having a cat at home could cut your risk of a heart attack by almost a third.

The finding suggests that the stress relief pets provide to humans is heart-healthy.
Researchers analyzed data on more than 4,400 Americans, age 30 to 75, who took part in the U.S. government’s second National Health and Nutrition Examination Study, which ran from 1976 to 1980.

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