AIFG Blogs

Doctors may one day be able to peek into your future stroke risk by looking at a picture of your eyes.

In a new study, patients with damaged blood vessels and mild eye blood pressure on pictures of their retina were 35 percent more likely to suffer a stroke. Those with moderate to severe eye blood pressure were 137 percent more likely to have a stroke.

Scientists need to do more research to confirm the link between eye vessels and stroke risk. But it’s good to adopt habits that reduce your blood pressure and improve your blood vessels.

Learn more about controlling your blood pressure at Heart.org/HBP.

A final autopsy report shows nationally syndicated DJ David Cradick, aka “Kidd Kraddick” died as the result of two heart conditions.

Dr. Gerry Cvitanovich, the coroner in Jefferson Parish, La., reported that “Mr. Cradick died of arteriosclerotic and hypertensive cardiovascular disease. The manner of death was determined to be natural.”

An initial report released soon after Kraddick’s July 27 death during a charity golf outing in New Orleans suggested his heart was enlarged and several arteries were blocked.

Kraddick, 53, hosted the Dallas-based radio show called “Kidd Kraddick in the Morning.” It aired on more than 75 stations across the country.

The American Heart Association offers many resources about heart disease:

• Assess your high blood pressure risks
• Watch and learn about atherosclerosis
• What is an enlarged heart and what are the risks?
• Know the signs of heart disease
• 7 ways you can prevent heart disease

Lettuce, watermelon and a fresh batch of herbs are growing at the Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club, and Lakers star Pau Gasol – as well as the American Heart Association – get an assist for making it happen.

The fruits and vegetables are part of an American Heart Association Teaching Garden that was planted at the club during the Gasol Foundation’s first annual Healthy Competition, an eight-week challenge between children in Los Angeles (where Pau plays) and Memphis (where his brother Marc stars for the Memphis Grizzlies).

The youngsters were encouraged to become healthier through physical activity and healthy eating. Planting a garden and teaching the kids the benefits of eating the harvest offers two lessons in one, which is the crux of this innovative program.

“What we’re doing is simple, elegant and fun. Kids can relate – and all the statistics show what changing eating habits can do,” said American Heart Association volunteer Kelly Meyer, the founder of the Teaching Gardens program. “We love working with athletes like Pau because they are very much a part of our message of being physically active and eating healthy foods. It’s a natural fit.”

Although the competition is over, the garden continues to grow. So will the lessons learned by the 27 children ages 6 to 15 who were part of the event – none of whom had ever even eaten a salad, said Randy Ryan, the American Heart Association’s manager of Teaching Gardens in Los Angeles.

More than 200 Teaching Gardens have been funded across the country, mostly in elementary schools. The program offers a several-pronged tool in the fight against childhood obesity.

The kids get to be active outdoors to plant the seeds. The planting is paired with garden-themed lessons that teach nutrition, math, science and other subjects. As the school year goes on, they nurture growing plants and then, ultimately, harvest and taste their produce. Studies show that students are more likely to eat fruits and vegetables they’ve grown themselves. And they are likely to take the lessons home to their families.

At the Los Angeles Boys & Girls Club, the children enjoyed an entire week of American Heart Association activities, such as demonstrations on cooking healthy meals. Military veterans and others joined Ryan in the planting of the garden.

The Gasol Foundation is dedicated to helping fight the child obesity epidemic in hopes of producing healthier adults. The organization is targeting its work toward schoolchildren in Los Angeles and Memphis.

The Atlanta-based company is planning to run newspaper advertisements that say diet drinks can help people manage their weight, while stressing that aspartame – more commonly known as NutraSweet – is safe.

The move is a response to critics who blame soda for the high rates of obesity. In January, the company released ads outlining its commitment to fighting obesity and highlighting diet options.

Sales of diet sodas are falling at a faster rate than regular sodas in the U.S., according to Beverage Digest, which tracks the industry.  For instance, sales volume for Coke fell 1 percent, compared to Diet Coke, which fell 3 percent. Pepsi dropped by 3.4 percent, while Diet Pepsi fell 6.2 percent.

The American Heart Association released a statement last year on diet sodas, saying that the current data is insufficient to determine conclusively whether they help reduce added sugar or carbohydrate intake. The statement also said it was not clear whether diet soda “benefits appetite, energy balance, body weight, or cardiometabolic risk factors.”

For more information on this subject:

• Sweeteners are sweeteners
• Artificial sweeteners
• Diet foods and weight control
• Coke defends aspartame
• The skinny on aspartame

As beach balls are replaced with backpacks for the new school year, the push is on to assure that everyone is up-to-date on vaccinations.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends routine vaccination for 17 vaccine-preventable diseases in infants, children, adolescents or adults and named August National Immunization Awareness Month.

Vaccinating kids not only protects them, but people around them who are more vulnerable to diseases due to health conditions or weak immune systems.

Adults also need vaccinations, especially if they suffer from a chronic condition like asthma, COPD, diabetes or heart disease.

“When you have any kind of chronic condition, such as cardiovascular disease, you don’t have the physiological reserves that healthy individuals have to fight an infection,” said Donna Arnett, chair and professor of epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

People with heart disease, especially heart failure, should be extra vigilant about keeping their vaccines up to date because they are more susceptible to pneumonia and complications of the flu.

“Research has shown us that you dramatically reduce your risk of death from pneumonia or flu with vaccination and that protection appears to occur year-round,” said Dr. Arnett, also the immediate past president of the American Heart Association.

• The flu and heart disease
• Avoiding flu and pneumonia if you have heart failure
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-Vaccines & Immunizations
• Questions to ask your doctor
• CDC vaccine recommendations
• CDC vaccines for children

Nearly twice as many people controlled their high blood pressure under a comprehensive program undertaken by medical practices, according to a study published in the Aug. 21 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. 

 Medical practices participated in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Hypertension program from 2001-2009, with the number of high blood pressure patients growing from 350,000 to 653,000 during the study period.

 “Globally, high blood pressure is the number one contributor to cardiovascular disease and stroke and controlling it is a persistent problem,” said Donna Arnett, Ph.D., immediate past-president of the American Heart Association. “This study suggests that system-wide programs can result in very high levels of blood pressure control.”

 The practices entered information into a tracking database, shared results, followed science-based guidelines and had medical assistants, not just doctors, measure blood pressure. The program also helped patients keep up with medications by recommending a once-a-day combination pill.

 The percentage of people who controlled their high blood pressure grew from 44 percent to 80 percent during the study period. Researchers reported that blood pressure control continued to improve even after the study was completed, growing to 87 percent in in 2011. Dr. Arnett said that is “very high.”

 Nearly 78 million people in the United States have high blood pressure. Also known as hypertension, high blood pressure typically has no symptoms, but can lead to deadly health consequences such as heart attack, stroke and kidney failure.

For more information, please see:

• High blood pressure resources
• High blood pressure conditions

The cardiologist who performed the stent procedure on George W. Bush said in an interview with the American Heart Association that he decides whether to advise stress tests like the one performed on the former president based on each patient’s specifics.

Since the Aug. 6 procedure on the 67-year-old Bush, many have questioned the need for annual stress tests for people with no heart disease. But in his first published interview since, Tony Das, M.D. – who did not discuss the specifics of Bush’s treatment – said risk factors and other considerations should drive an individualized stress test decision for every patient.

“If you can convince me that you have the exact same risk factor profile, and that you had testing done that suggested an abnormality that was different from an abnormality that didn’t exist previously, and you have the exact same clinical profile as President Bush, I would say by all means you should get a stress test,” Dr. Das, director of peripheral interventions at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital Dallas, told the American Heart Association on Friday.

However, if “you just want to go and see if maybe do I have coronary heart disease, and maybe is there an abnormality [on a stress test], and you don’t have previous smoking history and high cholesterol — both of which are publicly known about the president — I think that’s probably not appropriate,” he said.

Stress tests are often indicated when symptoms such as chest pain or shortness of breath with exercise have occurred.  Dr. Das said there may be other reasons to be considered in deciding whether to order a stress test, including risk factors for coronary heart disease such as high blood pressure, a family history of heart disease or new abnormalities in other testing. One common heart test, for example, is an electrocardiogram.

Stress tests are a common way to detect coronary heart disease, where plaque builds up and narrows arteries, restricting blood flow to the heart, especially with exertion. Areas of plaque, even if not severe enough to cause symptoms, can create a risk for cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease and stroke, the nation’s No. 1 and No. 4 killers.

The American Heart Association does not recommend stress tests for patients with no symptoms and no cardiac risk factors.

Dr. Das, an interventional cardiologist with Cardiology and Interventional Vascular Associates, inserted a stent — a tiny metal mesh tube—into a coronary artery supplying Bush’s heart a day after a stress test performed at the Dallas-based Cooper Clinic suggested a problem.

The procedure used to insert a stent into the artery is called angioplasty. One of several percutaneous coronary interventions, it is non-surgical. Stenting, which is not always recommended, is also not always necessary, Dr. Das said.

During the stenting procedure, a coronary artery stent is threaded through a catheter and into one of the coronary arteries supplying the heart muscle. Once in position, a balloon placed inside the stent is inflated to open the stent in the narrowed section of the artery. The stent works by holding open a narrowed segment of the artery that has been widened by the angioplasty so blood can flow freely to the heart muscle.

Although recent research has shown heart stents are not more effective than the optimal medical treatment for patients with stable coronary artery disease, they remain an option. About 492,000 PCI procedures were performed in the United States in 2010, 67 percent on men. Of the total, about 51 percent were performed on people age 65 and older.

For more information from the American Heart Association:

• American Heart Association scientific statement on stress tests
• American Heart Association interview with Dr. Das
• Learn more about stress tests
• Watch how a coronary heart stent works
• Watch how an angioplasty works
• Learn about coronary angioplasty and stenting

People who ate more than two servings of fruit daily had a 25 percent lower risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm than those who ate the least fruit, according to a study released Monday.

While no association was found for vegetables, researchers stress that vegetables also remain important for health,  according to the new research in the American Heart Association journal Circulation.  

“A high consumption of fruits may help to prevent many vascular diseases, and our study suggests that a lower risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm will be among the benefits,” said Otto Stackelberg, M.D., lead author and a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Environmental Medicine’s Nutritional Epidemiology Unit at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm.

• What is an aneurysm? 
• Types of aneurysms 

Better access to healthy foods and more opportunities to stay active in low-income communities are among the new policy recommendations issued Tuesday by leading health advocacy groups working to reverse the nation’s obesity epidemic.

After three decades of increases, adult obesity rates have leveled off in every state except for Arkansas, according to “F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2013,” a report issued by the Trust for America’s Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Nancy Brown, chief executive officer of the American Heart Association, endorsed the report’s findings, saying local efforts are critical to reducing obesity rates.

“With strong community leadership and parents committed to raising healthy kids, we can see the trends in obesity reversed,” she said. “It takes a great amount of willpower to create a culture of health throughout each community, but where there’s a will, there’s a way.”

The American Heart Association and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently partnered on a program called Voices for Healthy Kids to improve the health of communities and reverse childhood obesity.

“We are nowhere near success, but it looks like we are finally stalling the rise in obesity rates,” said Brown. “Progress is possible. This report outlines several recommendations to move the needle in the right direction and we are focusing our efforts on those strategies that will impact children the most.”

Obesity is considered a major risk factor for stroke and heart diseases, the nation’s No. 4 and No. 1 killers, respectively.

The report found that 13 states now have adult obesity rates above 30 percent, 41 states have rates of at least 25 percent and every state is above 20 percent. In 1980, no state was above 15 percent; in 1991, no state was above 20 percent; in 2000, no state was above 25 percent; and, in 2007, only Mississippi was above 30 percent.

For more details:

• Trust for America’s Health report
• News release
• Weight management

The prolific writer had published 45 books, including such well-known titles as “Get Shorty,” and “Freaky Deaky.”

When he first started out as a writer, he concentrated on western novels. After publishing several, he changed genres to crime fiction.

Over the decades, many of his books and short stories were adapted to the screen, including “Hombre,” “3:10 to Yuma” and “Out of Sight.” Most recently, the television series “Justified” was adapted from his novella “Fire in the Hole.”

Known for his realistic dialogue, Leonard’s rules for writing have long circulated. He said his most important rule is that, “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”

Leonard suffered a stroke in late July. While there are an estimated 3 million male stroke survivors alive today, stroke is the leading cause of adult disability in the United States. It’s also the No. 4 cause of death in the nation, killing more than 137,000 Americans per year. About 795,000 Americans each year suffer a new or recurrent stroke—meaning a stroke occurs every 40 seconds, on average.

For more information about stroke:

• Stroke
• Stroke warning signs
• Downloadable fact sheet on stroke
• Learn the types of stroke

 Photo courtesy of  www.elmoreleonard.com.