Posts Tagged ‘Angina’

Eat veggies to lower your blood pressure

Monday, July 20th, 2009

I am a vegetarian.

Often people are surprised and they ask me – “How do you get your proteins (i.e. without eating meat)?”

My answer – “Vegetables also contain proteins.”

451px-Arcimboldo_Vegetables.jpg
Image Source: Wikipedia

Now a new study published in Circulation compared the blood pressure between individuals who ate vegetable protein (specifically glutamic acid along with 4 other amino acids which are relatively higher in vegetable than animal protein) with people who ate non-vegetable protein (read animal meat).

They found a difference of about -2.7/-2.0 mm Hg in blood pressure in people eating more vegetables. Although that may sound small, individual results may be different (and maybe higher for you).

Reference: Glutamic Acid, the Main Dietary Amino Acid, and Blood Pressure (The INTERMAP Study)

The best blood pressure medicine!

Wednesday, May 20th, 2009

A recent meta-analysis published in the British Medical Journal compared the efficacy of different classes of blood pressure medications in preventing coronary artery disease (CAD) and stroke.

The investigators found that all blood pressure medicines are equally effective in preventing CAD and stroke.

Beta Blockers (e.g. metoprolol, carvedilol) were more effective in preventing future episodes of heart attacks in people who already had one. For primary prevention of CAD beta blockers were no more effective than other blood pressure lowering medications.

For 10mm reduction in systolic BP and 5mm diastolic BP:-

Risk reduction in CAD = 22%

Risk reduction in stroke = 41%

Calcium channel blockers (e.g. amlodipine) were slightly more effective in preventing stroke than other classes of medicines.

Reference: Use of blood pressure lowering drugs in the prevention of cardiovascular disease: meta-analysis of 147 randomised trials in the context of expectations from prospective epidemiological studies

High Blood Pressure Education Videos

Regenerating heart muscles to treat heart failure

Saturday, April 4th, 2009

Traditional medical teaching is that humans die with the heart muscles that they are born with.

Therefore, heart muscles that die when a person has a heart attack, will never regenerate and result in permanent injury akin to formation of scar tissue on skin (although skin does have a limited capacity to regenerate which is why scars do not form after minor skin trauma).

An article published in the Journal, Science seeks to overthrow this concept.

The researchers in their article have demonstrated that there is limited regeneration of heart muscle after birth.

“We have taken advantage of the integration of carbon-14, generated by nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War, into DNA to establish the age of cardiomyocytes in humans. We report that cardiomyocytes renew, with a gradual decrease from 1% turning over annually at the age of 25 to 0.45% at the age of 75. Fewer than 50% of cardiomyocytes are exchanged during a normal life span.”

This finding opens up possibilities of targeting medications to regenerating the heart muscle that is destroyed in a heart attack, thereby preventing a host of complications including heart failure (post myocardial infarction congestive heart failure is the number one cause of heart failure in the United States and is the major contributer of morbidity & mortality after heart attack).

Reference: Science, US News

Cholesterol education videos

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

Cholesterol is a normal constituent of the human body. However excess cholesterol (hypercholesterolemia or sometimes called dyslipidemia) is one of the most important risk factors for developing heart attack and stroke.

Here are a couple of videos on cholesterol explaining why is cholesterol important to the body, how it causes disease and what lifestyle changes are required to decrease excess cholesterol.

What does high cholesterol do? (Time 4:11 min)


Lifestyle changes for high cholesterol (Time 7:40 min)


Angioplasty and Bypass Surgery education videos

Thursday, November 13th, 2008

Animated video explaining how coronary angioplasty with stent insertion is performed. Also called percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), it is the procedure of choice for most cases of heart attack.

Coronary artery bypass grafting is performed for severe disease as in involvement of all 3 coronary vessels or left main coronary artery.