Cardio Currents

News and Tips for the Heart-Conscious

All in the family

The health of your parents plays a role in your heart disease risk, and now a new study says other branches of your family tree—your brothers and sisters—are key factors, too. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University used electron-beam tomography to look for calcium deposits (which can grow to block an artery) in more than 8,500 people with no heart disease symptoms. As expected, people with a parent who suffered a heart attack were twice as likely to have the calcium deposits. However, anyone with a sibling who had an early heart attack was three times as likely to show calcium deposits. If you have a sibling with heart woes, you may want to take aggressive screening and preventive measures. You can’t change your family, but you can eat better, quit smoking and exercise.

Juicy news for people with diabetes

For people with type 2 diabetes, a cup of tomato juice a day may keep a heart attack away. In a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers asked 20 participants with diabetes to drink about one cup of tomato juice or a tomato-flavored placebo beverage daily for three weeks. Those who drank the real tomato juice enjoyed a significant reduction in the stickiness of their blood’s platelets. Researchers believe tomato juice may have a blood-thinning effect in people with diabetes, who tend to have excessively sticky platelets that can lead to blood clots, strokes and heart attacks. Advice to those with diabetes: If you enjoy drinking tomato juice, don’t go overboard with it since it does contain some sugar.

Go vegan? No problem

It may be easier than you think to give up meat. In a recent study, 64 overweight, postmenopausal women followed low-fat diets for 14 weeks. Half the participants followed a regimen that excluded animal and dairy products, nuts, avocados and other fatty foods. The others ate a standard low-fat diet. Both groups lost weight, but those who gave up meat entirely seemed to like the diet, according to the report in the Journal of Cardiopulmonary Rehabilitation. Among the women who followed the vegan diet, nearly 90 percent planned to continue it.

New bonus for old heart drug

If you’re taking a beta-blocker drug to help keep your blood pressure down, you may also be boosting your bone health. After comparing the bone fracture rates of more than 150,000 heart patients ages 30 to 79, researchers found those who took the beta-blocker propranolol had a 23 percent lower risk for fractures than patients not taking the drug. What’s more, those who also took another type of heart drug, thiazide diuretics, saw their fracture risk drop even more—29 percent. A cardiologist favorite because they block the effect of epinephrine to help slow heart rate and lower blood pressure, beta-blockers may be particularly beneficial for heart patients with low bone density. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Did you know?

• In a recent Harvard survey of about 1,000 people, only 9 percent of respondents thought their weight was a problem even though more than half of them were overweight.

• After surviving a heart attack, the heart muscle begins to heal quickly, forming scar tissue like that over a skin wound. Healing takes about eight weeks, although new scar tissue does not contract or pump as well as healthy tissue.

• Cardiovascular diseases account for more than 40 percent of all deaths in American women, more than any other disease.