• No-Pill Ways To Reduce Blood Pressure

No-Pill Ways To Reduce Blood Pressure
By Michael Roizen, M.D., and Mehmet Oz, M.D.

You thought you were ready to roll … until you’re standing in front of the room and realize that the thing you felt rolling around by your feet on the plane was the thumb drive with your presentation on it.

Of course your blood pressure is going to go up. It even will when someone gets crazy in traffic or when you think you’ve lost your credit card. That’s what your body is designed to do when there’s stress: Run away. But that’s not always an option today (you can’t very well run away from the podium or the traffic jam). So try these YOU Docs strategies for helping you stress less and stay healthier:

1. Lose it. We mean weight. The more body fat you pack, the more trouble your body will have getting your blood pressure down after stress.

2. Work it. Build some muscle. Your blood pressure returns to normal more quickly after a stressful event if your blood vessels are toned. And the stress of building muscle (that’s good stress) through physical activity tones your blood vessels.

3. Leave it behind. When college students recalled an injustice that had been done to them, their blood pressure went up. And it stayed elevated longer in those who couldn’t muster up any forgiveness for what happened. Forgiveness is a simple way to make yourself seriously healthier without a prescription.

Published by Henry Sapiecha 7th Sept 2009

The headline means no disrespect.

Jackson’s Death Focuses Attention

on Cardiac Arrest

Robert Langreth and Matthew Herper, 06.26.09, 01:20 PM EDT

A misunderstood disease that is one of the world’s biggest killers could get new attention.

Even before an autopsy has revealed exactly why Michael Jackson’s heart apparently stopped, his death is focusing attention on one of the most mysterious and common killer diseases in America: sudden cardiac arrest.

Sudden cardiac arrest kills 200,000 to 300,000 Americans a year. It is often wrongly equated with a heart attack. In fact, what kills people who die suddenly is not the artery clogging (which destroys heart muscle but is not immediately lethal); it’s the ventricular fib, a rapid quivering of the main pumping chambers in the bottom of the heart, called the ventricles. When this occurs, little blood gets out. Brain cells die within minutes. For every minute that goes by without the heart being restored to a normal rhythm, the patient’s odds of survival drop by 10%. After 10 minutes they’re gone.

Your Heart: A User’s Guide

Heart attacks are one trigger but may account for only a minority of sudden cardiac deaths. Past heart attacks, which leave scar tissue that changes the electrical patterns of the heart, are another risk factor. Genetic disorders that cause subtle changes to the heart rhythm are a third. “The biggest bugaboo in the field is we don’t know how to predict arrest,” says Benjamin Abella, director of the Center for Resuscitation Science at the University of Pennsylvania. “The stars just align in the wrong way.” Eighty percent of those who die suddenly from heart disease have some sign of coronary trouble.

Performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) can keep a patient alive by pushing blood through the body. But there is only one treatment that halts the deadly arrhythmia: an electric shock, called defibrillation, that sets the heartbeat back into a regular rhythm. Defibrillators come in two forms: external versions used by paramedics and surgically implanted versions for patients at high risk.

Scientists developed defibrillation in the 1950s after linemen stringing electrical wires across the country were dying suddenly of cardiac arrest from electrocution. The idea emerged that maybe a counter-shock could set the heart right. In the 1960s, Harvard researcher Bernard Lown invented a device that could be used in hospitals called the cardioverter defibrillator.

Easy-to-use versions are now common in airports, casinos and other crowded public places. Studies have found they boost the cardiac arrest survival rate significantly. But a 2008 study failed to find any benefit from putting defibrillators in typical heart patients’ homes. It isn’t often that a patient suffers arrhythmia when there is someone present to help him.

Each year, 300,000 heart patients worldwide at very high risk of sudden death get automatic defibrillators surgically implanted. The gadgets reduce the death risk 25% in patients whose hearts, because of slow deterioration or scars from heart attacks, are inefficient at pumping blood. It’s a $6.4 billion market for Medtronic ( MDT – news – people )Johnson & Johnson ( JNJ – news – people ) and Boston Scientific ( BSX – news – people ), according to analysts at Wachovia. But implantable defibrillators, which cost $30,000 installed, are an expensive insurance policy for something that might never happen, and there are potential complications from surgery. Some of the devices or their associated wires have had to be recalled because of potentially catastrophic flaws.

But sudden deaths often occur in people without known heart problems, so scientists are racing to find other risk factors. One clue to pinpointing who is at risk is a genetic disorder called long QT syndrome, named after an unusual reading on an electrocardiogram. In this condition, the heart is just a little slow to recover between beats. This and related disorders hit one in several thousand people and may account for 5% of sudden-death cases.

Common gene variations may alter the heart rhythm in slight ways that don’t cause problems under normal conditions but may predispose people to sudden death during a heart attack or if they take certain drugs that affect heart rhythm. Two recent studies in Nature Genetics found 10 gene variations that slightly alter heart rhythm and could be involved in sudden cardiac death. “What we are beginning to understand is why one person who has a heart attack dies suddenly whereas another person who has a heart attack doesn’t,” says Duke University cardiac electrophysiologist Patrick Hranitzky. “A lot of it has to do with genetics.”

Cardiologist Sumeet Chugh hopes he can uncover more conditions like weakened hearts or long QT that identify which patients will have sudden cardiac arrest. As a medical resident in Minneapolis in 1992, a beautiful 19-year-old woman was rushed into the emergency room after collapsing while dancing. Her heart had suddenly stopped. Chugh and his colleagues worked for almost an hour but couldn’t save her. An autopsy found nothing. The only clue was her mother, who had also died abruptly at a young age.

“It was devastating to me,” says Chugh, now associate director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles. He dedicated his career to solving the biggest mystery of heart disease, why many healthy people suddenly keel over and die. He runs a study that has tracked every sudden cardiac death in Portland, Ore. since 2002 to find some answers. “It’s like a Rubik’s cube,” he says. “You have to put it together piece by piece.”

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 28th June 2009

SOOTHING ANGINA IS EASY

One million Americans suffer heart attacks every year. Quickly getting their arteries propped open with stents saves lives, studies have found. But millions more develop heart symptoms gradually. Usually it comes in the form of angina, a squeezing pain in the chest or arms caused by clogged arteries that starve the heart muscle of oxygen. The pain comes with exercise or stress, and then goes away.

People often assume they need a stent to get that artery opened up right away–or else. But new results from two big trials are unambiguous: The high-tech procedures don’t save lives or prevent heart attacks for most patients with stable symptoms. “It doesn’t do anything to lower risk of subsequent death or heart attack,” says William Boden, a cardiologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo who led one of the trials. Drug treatment alone is just as effective.

The reason for this counterintuitive result is that most heart attacks don’t occur at the locations that appear most clogged on an angiogram. Instead, heart attacks happen when lesser narrowings become inflamed and suddenly rupture, spewing a clot into the bloodstream. The blockage that bursts isn’t necessarily the one that causes symptoms. People think heart disease “is just a plumbing issue, that clogged pipes mean an impending heart attack,” says James Stein of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “A stent is just a local therapy for a systemic problem.”

Stents are installed during angioplasty, in which a balloon is used to unclog an artery. They are necessary if drugs cannot produce enough pain relief, say cardiologists. One of the two trials found that 66 out of 100 patients who received a stent were angina free after a year versus 58 out of 100 who received only drugs; that difference faded after five years.

Another study published in June comparing stents to drugs in diabetic heart patients found no difference in the risk of death or heart attacks, and only a little over 40% of those assigned drugs later got a stent. A more clogged-up group received either drugs or cardiac bypass surgery, in which veins are used to bypass blocked arteries. The bypass patients didn’t live longer but did have fewer nonfatal heart attacks. “I think physicians will be more likely to consider bypass for their diabetic patients and steer away from angioplasty,” says study author Sheryl Kelsey of the University of Pittsburgh.

One diabetic patient who did well without a stent is Earl Anderson of Old Bridge, N.J. The 62-year-old retired FBI agent first felt chest pains while rushing to catch a plane in 2002. An angiogram revealed a narrowing in one artery, and doctors gave him drugs. His angina soon went away and hasn’t come back. Now his cholesterol and blood sugar are down; he plays tennis weekly with his 14-year-old son

• A User’s Guide to Your Heart

• The Mystery of Sudden Cardiac Arrest

• Fighting Heart Failure

• Soothing Angina

• Your Heart: An Interactive Graphic

• Heart Disorder Afflicts Millions

• Thousands Of Children Suffer Cardiac Death

Cardiologists who install stents say that these relieve pain better than drugs and that most patients have more symptoms than Anderson. “Patients with a lot of symptoms don’t do well with drug therapy,” says Gregg Stone of New York-Presbyterian Hospital.

One reason so many stents are implanted is money. “Hospitals are paid handsomely if the patient has bypass surgery or has a stent. But they are not paid [so much] if a patient has drugs,” says cardiologist David Hillis of the UT Health Science Center in San Antonio. While generally safe, stent procedures can cause heart attacks, bleeding or even death.

Another misconception is that getting a procedure will obviate the need for drugs. “People have this impression that ‘If I get a stent, then I am not going to have to take medicine,’ and that is wrong,” says Mayo Clinic cardiologist Raymond Gibbons. “Everybody is going to get medicines. The real question: Is stenting or surgery going to bring enough benefit in addition?” Patients who get drug-coated stents often must take more drugs; they need to stay on the blood thinner Plavix for at least a year to prevent rare cases of clots forming in the stent.

One key test that is often skipped: stress tests to determine if your heart is getting enough oxygen during exercise. The problem, says Scripps Research Institute cardiologist Eric Topol: Without stress tests, doctors don’t know whether narrowings seen on an angiogram are causing problems.

Heart patients with stable symptoms have choices–and time to consider their decisions. For many of them drug therapy alone, drug therapy and stents, or drug therapy with angioplasty are all reasonable options. If you are not sure which you want, you can ask the doctor doing your angiogram to hold off on the stent if nothing alarming is found. This will give you time to discuss the result with your primary care doctor or referring cardiologist.

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Angina
A lack of blood flow to the heart causes chest discomfort but doesn’t kill the muscle. Most angina comes on only during exertion and stops afterward. Unstable angina that happens at rest is treated as a medical emergency.

Prevention
Eat a healthy diet and exercise to prevent the buildup of artery plaque.

Take statins and blood pressure drugs if your doctor dictates.

Treatment
For most patients, drug therapy can reduce the risk of heart attack and treat chest pain.

A stent/angioplasty procedure can reduce chest pain but has no proved impact on survival in those with stable symptoms.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 28th June 2009

New Research Uncovers Amazing Brain Saver!

Clogged arteries prevent blood supply to the brain. Oxygen-deprived brain cells become damaged or even die.

But when scientists induced strokes in laboratory rats and treated them with an amazingly simple nutrient—a remarkable discovery was made. Here’s what happened…

In one experiment, strokes were induced in laboratory rats by blocking the carotid artery for 30 minutes. Once blood flow and oxygen were restored, there was a burst in the production of free radicals. This overwhelmed the brain’s antioxidant defenses and killed 80% of the rats within 24 hours.

In a follow-up experiment, everything was the same, except this time, researchers injected a powerful antioxidant into the rats before blood and oxygen was restored. After a 24 hour period—only 25% of the rats died. The remaining 75% made a full recovery. Further study concluded the brain of the antioxidant-treated rats showed no signs of a stroke at all!

The name of this stellar brain saver?
It’s alpha lipoic acid!

This research and many more demonstrate alpha lipoic acid can deliver remarkable protection to your brain to help prevent damage—and even help restore healthy brain function in the event of a blockage of blood flow to the brain.

That’s why you get the optimum dosage of alpha lipoic acid in every serving of Advanced Artery Solution™. It’s the ultimate insurance for brain health!

Malic Acid—the critical partner of the EDTA chelation Dynamic Duo!

Studies have shown that EDTA is highly effective at removing most heavy metals from your body. But for optimal chelation therapy—getting rid of most of the toxic metals is just not good enough. That’s why Advanced Artery Solution™ also gives you optimum doses of malic acid—a powerful, complementary chelator that picks up where EDTA leaves off!

With malic acid, you can remove dangerous aluminum from your blood. Research shows aluminum can cause memory loss, brain decay and even unexplainable fatigue.

In one clinical test, fibromyalgia patients were given malic acid along with magnesium for eight weeks. All the patients reported significant reduction of muscular pain within 48 hours of starting the supplement!

For the #1 source of in-home, oral chelation—there’s nothing better than Advanced Artery Solution™! Now you can sample this heart supporting nutrient completely RISK FREE during this special introductory offer.