Fibonacci (CC)

Yup, that’s right, a figurative broken heart is now positively linked to increased risk of a physical heart attack. Alice Park reports for Time:

Grief is a powerful emotion, and the latest research shows just how damaging it can be, especially for the heart.

The sobering results, appearing in the journal Circulation, is the first to compare how grief affects an individual’s heart disease risk within a period of time. Previous studies have documented that people losing loved ones tend to have more heart problems than those who aren’t bereaved. In the current analysis, lead author Elizabeth Mostofsky and her colleagues took a unique approach by calculating an individual’s “average loss” of loved ones over a year, by asking how many people study participants had lost in the past year, and comparing that figure to the number of loved ones that same person lost during the study period in question, which included the most recent day and week preceding a heart attack. Because all of the participants were heart attack patients, that allowed her to calculate the effect that losing a loved one had on each individual’s heart attack risk.

“We compared these patients’ losses in the recent past of the last day or week before their heart attack, to the loss we would have expected to see based on their loss [pattern] over the past six months,” says Mostofsky. “People who have a heart attack are more likely to have lost a person in the recent past than would have been expected based on the number they lost over the past six months to a year.”…

[continues at Time]

Obese children as young as three years old show signs of future heart disease, say US researchers.

A study of 16,000 children and teenagers showed the most obese had signs of an inflammatory marker which can predict future heart disease.

In all, 40% of obese three-to-five-year olds had raised levels of C-reactive protein compared with 17% of healthy weight children, Pediatrics reported. But more work is needed to prove the link with heart disease in later life. The study, carried out by a team at the University of North Carolina (UNC), looked at children aged one to 17.

Overall, nearly 70% were a healthy weight, 15% were overweight, 11% were obese and 3.5% were very obese. In the older age groups, the proportion of those in the very obese category with high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP) increased even further.

By age 15-17, 83% of the very obese had increased CRP compared with 18% of the healthy weight children…

[continues at the BBC]

Here are the seven secrets to a long life: Stay away from cigarettes. Keep a slender physique. Get some exercise. Eat a healthful diet and keep your cholesterol, blood pressure and blood sugar in check.

Research shows that most 50-year-olds who do that can live an additional 40 years free of stroke and heart disease, two of the most common killers, said Dr. Clyde Yancy, president of the American Heart Association. The heart association published the advice online Wednesday in the journal Circulation.

The group also introduced an online quiz to help people gauge how close they are to the ideal. Tips are offered for those who fall short.

“These seven factors — if you can keep them ideal or control them — end up being the fountain of youth for your heart,” said Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, a cardiologist who was lead author of the statement.

Specifically, those with ideal cardiovascular health can answer yes to the following seven questions:

• Never smoked or quit more than one year ago.

• Body mass index under 25.

• Get at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise each week.

• Meet at least four of these dietary recommendations: eat 4 1/2 cups of fruit and vegetables a day; eat two or more 3.5-ounce servings a week of fish; drink no more than 36 ounces of sugar-sweetened beverages a week; eat three or more 1-ounce servings of fiber-rich whole grains a day; consume less than 1,500 milligrams a day of salt.

• Total cholesterol of less than 200.

• Blood pressure below 120/80.

• Fasting blood glucose less than 100.

Hardening of the arteries may have more of a family history — the human family tree — than was once thought.

Modern-day imaging techniques have unearthed hardening of the arteries — or atherosclerosis, which causes heart attacks and stroke — in mummies up to 3,500 years old.

Experts have long believed that atherosclerosis is a scourge of modern society, caused by meals snatched at fast-food restaurants and eaten in front of high-definition TVs.

“Perhaps atherosclerosis has been around a lot longer than we think. It might have been a malady affecting man long-term,” said Dr. Clyde Yancy, president of the American Heart Association. “It doesn’t necessarily change anything we know or do now, but perhaps some of the accoutrements of civilization are not only unhealthy now, they were also unhealthy then.”

The unusual findings were presented Tuesday at the American Heart Association’s annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., and published simultaneously in the Nov. 18 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“We can’t say that atherosclerosis was the cause of death, but the simple fact that they had it was a great surprise to us,” said study co-author Dr. Samuel Wann, chairman of the department of cardiovascular medicine at the Wisconsin Heart Hospital in Wauwatosa. “We thought it was a disease of McDonald’s. We had this vision of people 3,000 and 4,000 years ago being more pure, free-living and not subject to the evils of modern civilization, but this has been going on for a long time.”

[continues at U.S. News & World Report]