High blood sugar endangers heart
Increased blood-sugar levels signal a heightened risk of heart disease, especially among women, a new study finds. In fact, women may face a greater risk for heart disease at lower blood-sugar levels than men, according to the report in the Jan. 22 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Specifically, women whose blood sugar was at 110 to 125 milligrams per deciliter of blood had the same risk of developing heart disease as women with diabetes, according to researcher Dr. Caroline Fox, a medical officer with the Framingham Heart Study, a 50-year research project named for a Massachusetts town.
Dr. John B. Buse, president for medicine and science at the American Diabetes Association, said this study confirms what other studies have found. “Women who don’t have diabetes usually don’t have heart attacks,” Buse said. “Women with diabetes, basically, all have heart attacks.”
Fast-food neighborhoods fan obesity
People who live in neighborhoods with more fast-food restaurants are more likely to be obese than are people who live near more “full-service” restaurants, according to a study at the University of Pennsylvania.
“A lot of people have tried to understand why the obesity epidemic has come up, and some people hypothesize that eating out more might have something to do with it,” said Dr. Virginia Chang, senior author of the study. “Our findings suggest that eating out per se is not necessarily bad.”
The study authors looked at responses from more than 700,000 people participating in five years of an annual telephone survey of U.S. adults. Restaurant data came from the 2002 U.S. Economic Census.
The researchers pointed out that it’s not clear if people actually consume fewer calories at full-service restaurants or if individuals choose full-service restaurants because they offer healthier foods.
Aspirin resistance a cardiac risk
Heart patients who are resistant to aspirin are four times more likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke or to die, a new Canadian study says.
People who are aspirin-resistant have platelets — the cells in blood responsible for clotting — that aren’t affected in the same way as platelets in people who respond to aspirin.
Researchers at McMaster University Health Sciences Centre in Hamilton reviewed 20 studies that included 2,930 people with cardiovascular disease who had been prescribed aspirin to prevent formation of blood clots. About 28 percent of the patients in the studies were aspirin-resistant.
The analysis revealed that 39 percent of aspirin-resistant patients suffered some sort of cardiovascular event, compared with 16 percent of other patients.
There is still no agreed-upon method for identifying aspirin-resistant patients, and debate continues about why a person may be aspirin-resistant in the first place.
