CardioCurrents
News and tips for the heart-conscious

Make midlife changes for your heart's sake
Midlife isn't too late to start making heart-smart changes, say researchers from Medical University of South Carolina after a 12-year study of nearly 16,000 people, ages 45–64. Adopting new lifestyle behaviors—eating at least five fruits and vegetables every day, exercising two and a half hours a week, not smoking and maintaining a body mass index between 18.5 and 30—resulted in 35 percent fewer cardiovascular disease incidents and a 40 percent lower mortality rate than people with less healthy behaviors.

Hypertension's other consequences

Experts say that keeping your blood pressure under control is imperative to avoid heart attack and stroke. But did you know that, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, high blood pressure, or hypertension, may also cause:

• your heart to enlarge, which may lead to heart failure
• aneurysms—small bulges—to form in arteries in the brain, legs and intestines; in blood vessels, particularly in the aorta, the heart's main artery; and in the artery leading to the spleen
• the kidneys' blood vessels to narrow, which may cause kidney failure
• arteries throughout the body to "harden" faster, especially those in the heart, brain, kidneys and legs, possibly leading to partial leg amputation; kidney failure; heart attack; and stroke
• blood vessels in the eyes to burst or bleed, potentially causing vision changes or blindness

Pumping iron improves heart health
If you have cardiovascular disease, lifting weights-or pumping iron-is no longer a banned activity.  Weight lifting can provide you with multiple benefits if you work out within guidelines, says an updated American Heart Association (AHA) statement. When undertaking a resistance training program, the AHA recommends you:

• Perform exercises rhythmically at a slow to moderate speed.
• Exhale during the exertion of lifting and inhale during relaxation instead of holding your breath and straining.
• Alternate between upper-and lower-body training.
• See your doctor before beginning a weight-training program.

Soft drinks may be hard for your heart
Enjoying a can of diet soda will help you avoid the 150 or so empty calories in 12 ounces of regular soda. However, diet or not, soda is associated with a 44 percent increased risk over four years of developing a group of cardiovascular and diabetes risk factors known as metabolic syndrome. Framingham Heart Study researchers observed more than 6,000 participants, comparing those who consumed less than one soft drink a day with those who consumed one or more. Soda drinkers paid for their pleasure with higher blood sugar, lower levels of HDL (good) cholesterol, more abdominal fat and elevated triglycerides. Authors of the study, published in the journal Circulation, emphasize that diet soft drinks don't cause an increased heart disease risk but that the link between the two needs to be explored.