The black population, at twice the risk for stroke compared with white Americans, needs a big heads-up on prevention, a new Chicago study has found. A report looking at 1,086 black men and women who had been out of the hospital for only about six weeks after having strokes found that even those people were not effectively treating the risk factors for stroke, particularly high blood pressure.
“They had seen doctors in the hospital and had one or two follow-up visits afterward, yet even despite this, a lot of the patients were unaware of the risk factors in their profile, particularly high blood pressure,” said study author Sean Ruland, a neurologist at the Rush Medical College in Chicago.
“This study is particularly distressing because these are men and women who have been treated, and they are already under scrutiny. Further, they have significant risks of having another stroke. One-quarter of all strokes are recurrent strokes,” said Dr. Stanley Tuhrim, director of the stroke program at New York’s Mt. Sinai Hospital. Yet, he added, the results are probably typical of the general African-American population.
The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, appears in the Jan. 14 issue of Neurology.
Fatter food labels
Now that most Americans are finally learning to sort out the nutrition labels that appear on all processed foods, the Food and Drug Administration is about to add another term to the back of your favorite box of cookies or package of lunch meat.
That term is “trans fatty acid,” and some time in early 2003 the FDA is expected to start requiring that manufacturers include these levels along with the listings for other types of fat content already mandated on food labels.
“This is a good thing, because it will provide consumers with more information about the foods they are consuming so that they can make better food choices,” said American Dietetic Association spokeswoman Cindy Moore, director of nutritional therapy at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation.
Trans fatty acids, or TFAs, are a type of saturated fat that occurs naturally in small amounts in foods such as beef and dairy products. But trans fatty acids also can be the result of a manufacturing process that turns healthy liquid fats, such as vegetable oil, into the unhealthy solid fats needed to produce many foods, particularly baked goods and snacks. As such, they show up in a wide variety of everyday products, often in large amounts.
“If you eat any commercially prepared foods, particularly baked goods, chances are you are getting a fair amount of TFAs in your diet,” Moore said.
“The higher your intake of trans fatty acids,” Moore said, “the higher your ratio of LDL [bad] cholesterol to HDL [good] cholesterol, and that plays out in terms of the risk for heart disease.”
Apnea aid stops reflux
A commonly used bedside treatment for obstructive sleep apnea does more than help sufferers get a good night’s rest: It also reduces the symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux.
Researchers from Duke University found that as many as 62 percent of people with sleep apnea also suffered nighttime reflux symptoms and that treatment with a continuous positive airway pressure, or CPAP, device reduced apnea symptoms. Surprisingly, it also cut reflux symptoms nearly in half.
“It appears that [CPAP] works by raising the pressure in the chest,” said study author Dr. J. Barry O’Connor, an assistant professor of medicine in the division of gastroenterology at Duke University Medical Center. “CPAP elevates the pressure on the esophagus and keeps acid from coming back up.”
