Healthy habits can mean 14 extra years
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:48:07 GMTBy MARIA CHENG, AP Medical Writer
LONDON - To get an extra 14 years of life, don't smoke, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise regularly and drink alcohol in moderation. That's the finding of a study that tracked about 20,000 people in the United Kingdom.
Kay-Tee Khaw of the University of Cambridge and colleagues calculated that people who adopted these four healthy habits lived an average of 14 years longer than those who didn't.
"We've known for a long time that these behaviors are good things to do, but we've never seen these additive benefits before," said Susan Jebb, head of Nutrition and Health at Britain's Medical Research Council, which helped pay for the study.
"Just doing one of these behaviors helps, but every step you make to improve your health seems to have an added benefit," said Jebb, who was not involved in the study.
The benefits were also seen regardless of whether or not people were fat and what social class they came from. The findings were published online Monday in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal.
The study included healthy adults aged 45 to 79. Participants filled in a health questionnaire between 1993 and 1997 and nurses conducted a medical exam at a clinic. Participants scored a point each for not smoking, regular physical activity, eating five servings of fruits and vegetables a day and moderate alcohol intake.
Until 2006, the researchers tracked deaths from all causes, including cardiovascular disease, cancer and respiratory diseases. People who scored four points were four times less likely to die than those who scored zero, the research showed.
Khaw said that the study should convince people that improving their health does not always require extreme changes to their lifestyles.
"We didn't ask these people to do anything exceptional," Khaw said. "We measured normal behaviors that were entirely feasible within people's normal, everyday lives."
Public health experts said they hoped the study would inspire governments to help people adopt these changes.
"This research is an important piece of work which emphasizes how modifying just a few risk factors can add years to your life," said Dr. Tim Armstrong, a physical activity expert at the World Health Organization.
But because the study only observed people rather than testing specific changes, experts said that it would be impossible to conclude that people who suddenly adopted these healthy behaviors would automatically gain 14 years.
"We can't say that any one person could gain 14 years by doing these things," said Armstrong. "The 14 years is an average across the population of what's theoretically possible."
But experts worry that the new findings may still not be enough to persuade people to change their unhealthy ways.
"Most people know that things like a good diet matter and that smoking is not good for you," Jebb said. "We need to work on providing people with much more practical support to help them change."
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NYC death rate hit alltime low in 06
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:50:10 GMTNEW YORK - The city's overall death rate dropped to an all-time low in 2006 due in part to declines in mortality from HIV and smoking-related illness, the health commissioner said Tuesday.
The number of deaths fell to 55,391 in 2006 from 57,068 a year earlier, according to the city's Health Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The only leading killer that increased significantly was substance use, up 8 percent.
Heart disease and cancer remained the most deadly, claiming 21,844 and 13,116 lives, respectively.
Between 2005 and 2006, death from HIV fell almost 15 percent, from 1,419 to 1,209, reflecting the lowest numbers since 1984 when 952 deaths from AIDS were recorded citywide.
Researchers attributed the decline to lower infection rates because of syringe exchange programs, expanded HIV testing, and slower disease progression.
HIV mortality remains concentrated among the city's minority populations, with roughly 34 percent of deaths among black men; 21 percent among black women; 11 percent among white men; and 3 percent among white women.
New HIV diagnoses have recently increased among young men who have sex with men, but the trend has yet to affect mortality rates.
All smoking-related deaths dropped 11.2 percent between 2002 and 2006, from 8,722 to 7,744. The figures do not include deaths from exposure to second-hand smoke.
The report also showed that life expectancy for women between 2004 and 2005 rose by 2.5 months to 81.3 years, while male life expectancy remained unchanged at 75.7 years. Overall life expectancy rose to 78.7 years from 78.6 years.
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Study Anxiety may be bad for your heart
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:52:38 GMTBy LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
WASHINGTON - Those Type A go-getters aren't the only ones stressing their hearts. Nervous Nelsons seem to be, too. Researchers reported Monday that chronic anxiety can significantly increase the risk of a heart attack, at least in men. The findings add another trait to a growing list of psychological profiles linked to heart disease, including anger or hostility, Type A behavior, and depression.
"There's a connection between the heart and head," said Dr. Nieca Goldberg of the New York University School of Medicine, a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association who wasn't involved in the study.
"This is very important research because we really are focused very much on prescribing medicine for cholesterol and lowering blood pressure and treating diabetes, but we don't look at the psychological aspect of a patient's care," she added. Doctors "need to be aggressive about not only taking care of the traditional risk factors ... but also really getting into their patients' heads."
The research was published Monday by the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Everybody's anxious every now and then. At issue here is not the understandable sweaty palms before a big speech or nervousness at a party, but longstanding anxiety — people who are socially withdrawn, fearful, chronic worriers. It's a glass-half-empty personality.
University of Southern California psychologist Biing-Jiun Shen used data from a national aging study to estimate the impact of this trait on the heart.
The Normative Aging Study has tracked 735 men since 1986. They were heart-healthy at the study's start, have completed extensive psychological testing, and undergo medical exams every three years. By 2004, there had been 75 heart attacks among the participants.
Shen tracked men who scored in the top 15 percent of anxiety scales that measure such things as excessive doubts, social insecurity, phobias and stress.
Those men deemed chronically anxious were 30 percent to 40 percent more likely to have had a heart attack than their more easygoing counterparts.
The link remained even when Shen took into account standard heart risk factors such as cholesterol problems, as well as other heart-negative personality traits.
Why? After all, a hostile person and an anxious one appear very different, one outgoing and one timid.
"Although the behavior is quite different ... if you look at the physiological response of these people, they're quite similar," Shen said. "All have raised blood pressure, heart rate, they produce more stress hormones."
So, would treating anxiety lower the risk? No one knows, cautioned NYU's Goldberg. That's why these personality traits are considered "markers" for heart disease, not outright "risk factors" like cholesterol or blood pressure.
Girls who feel unpopular may gain weight
Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:53:08 GMTBy CARLA K. JOHNSON, Associated Press Writer
CHICAGO - Where a teenage girl sees herself on her school's social ladder may sway her future weight, a study of more than 4,000 girls finds. Those who believed they were unpopular gained more weight over a two-year period than girls who viewed themselves as more popular. Researchers said the study showed how a girl's view of her social status has broader health consequences.
The girls in the study were still growing — their average age was 15 — and all of them gained some weight. However, those who rated themselves low in popularity were 69 percent more likely than other girls to increase their body mass index by two units, the equivalent of gaining about 11 excess pounds.
Girls who put themselves on the higher rungs of popularity also gained some excess weight, but less — about 6 1/2 pounds.
Both groups, on average, fell within ranges considered normal. But a gain of two BMI units over two years is more than the typical weight gain for adolescent girls, the researchers said.
"How girls feel about themselves should be part of all obesity prevention strategies," said the study's lead author, Adina Lemeshow, who began the study as a Harvard School of Public Health graduate student. She now works at the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
The research, appearing in January's Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, used data from an ongoing study used frequently by scientists studying childhood obesity.
Weight and height data were reported by the girls themselves rather than getting weighed and measured by doctors; that's a weakness in the study that the researchers acknowledged.
The researchers took into account the girls' weight and BMI at the start of the study, along with their diet, household income, race/ethnicity and whether they'd reached puberty — and still found the link.
In the study, perceived popularity was measured in 1999 by how the girls reacted to a question next to a picture of a 10-rung ladder: "At the top of the ladder are the people in your school with the most respect and the highest standing. At the bottom are the people who no one respects and no one wants to hang around with. Where would you place yourself on the ladder?"
The researchers put the girls into two groups: the 4,264 who said they were on rung 5 or above, and the 182 who said they were on rung 4 or below. The weight gain link was based on those two groups.
Clea McNeely of Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health called the study strong. She said she wanted to know more about the 4 percent of girls who rated themselves below average in popularity, particularly whether they already were gaining weight faster before they rated themselves as unpopular.
"The reason this paper is so important is it has broader implications beyond weight gain," said McNeely, who was not involved in the research but wrote an accompanying editorial. "Subjective social status is not just an uncomfortable experience you grow out of, but can have important health consequences."
Experts know little about how to intervene in teenagers' peer groups to improve health, McNeely said, but when adults set standards in schools, students treat one another with more respect.
Teenagers may give grown-ups "bored looks," she said, but "adults are still the most important influential figures in their lives."
The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health.
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