The influence of globalization isn’t limited to economics, a study from India has found; it also extends to health.
Coronary-artery disease, once considered low in countries outside the industrial Western nations, is on the rise in developing countries, a report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology finds.
“Several studies have forecast that the bulk of cardiovascular disease in the 21st Century would actually be from developing countries,” said the report, headed by Dr. Viswanath Mohan of the Madras Diabetes Research Foundation in Chenna, India. “The prevalence of cardiovascular disease in India has risen almost tenfold during the last 40 years.”
Dr. William Kannel, who headed the Framingham Heart Study, which followed coronary health of residents of the Massachusetts town of Framingham, said that India and other countries should pay close attention to this trend.
“Industrialization of developing countries leads to greater economic prosperity but at a price,” Kannel said. “It will be imperative to keep India’s ecology favorable to cardiovascular health by resisting the Westernization of the traditional Indian diet, curbing weight gain, discouraging smoking and keeping physical activity a part of daily life.”
Tomato sauce as medicine?
New evidence suggesting that tomato sauce may be beneficial to men with prostate cancer was presented at the recent meeting in Chicago of the American Chemical Society.
In the study, which focused on black men, 32 volunteers recently diagnosed with prostate cancer were given three-fourths of a cup of tomato sauce daily for three weeks. Researchers at the University of Illinois in Chicago measured several aspects of the volunteers’ health before and after the high-sauce diet. They found a reduction in damage to genetic material in prostate cancer cells and in white blood cells in the volunteers. They also found that blood levels of prostate-specific antigen (PSA) dropped as tomato-sauce consumption rose.
“This study doesn’t say that tomato sauce reduces cancer,” cautioned Phyllis Bowen, a nutritionist who led the study. “It says that [tomato sauce] reduces DNA damage that we think is associated with cancer.”
Evidence of stress-stroke link arrives
Although it may seem obvious that stress can increase the risk of stroke, there has been little scientific evidence to confirm the link.
Now an 11-year study of more than 2,000 white men showed that those whose blood pressure increased as a result of stress had a 72 percent greater risk of stroke than men whose blood pressure remained low, said Susan A. Everson of the University of Michigan.
“The more we know about factors that might increase the risk of stroke, the greater the likelihood that we can work towards prevention,” she reported in Stroke, a journal of the American Heart Association.
