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Daytime naps may lower blood pressure, study

November 18th, 2007

Afternoon naps appear to help lower blood pressure, a beneficial effect that does not occur with resting but remaining awake for the same period of time, study findings show.

“It is interesting that a large decline in blood pressure occurs during the daytime sleep-onset period only when sleep is expected,” Dr. Greg Atkinson told Reuters Health. “When subjects rest in a supine position, the same reduction in blood pressure is not observed,” he said.

This blood pressure reduction may be associated with the lower coronary mortality rates seen in Mediterranean and Latin American populations where siestas are common, Atkinson, of Liverpool John Moores University, UK, and colleagues report in The Journal of Applied Physiology.

The investigators assessed cardiovascular function (blood pressure, heart rate, and measurements of blood vessel dilation) while nine healthy volunteers, 34 years of age on average, spent an hour standing quietly; reclining at rest but not sleeping; or reclining to nap. All participants were restricted to 4 hours of sleep on the night prior to each of the sleep laboratory tests.

During the three phases of daytime sleep, the researchers noted significant reductions in blood pressure and heart rate. By contrast, they did not observe changes in cardiovascular function while the participants were standing or reclining at rest.

“Findings show that the greatest decline in blood pressure occurs between lights-off and onset of daytime sleep itself,” Atkinson told Reuters Health.

During this sleep period, which lasted 9.7 minutes on average, blood pressure decreased, while blood vessel dilation increased by more than 9 percent.

“There is little change in blood pressure once a subject is actually asleep,” Atkinson noted, and the researchers found minor changes in blood vessel dilation during sleep.

Future research will examine whether siesta takers are more prone to morning activities and if this morning exercise influences subsequent blood pressure responses to an afternoon nap, Atkinson said.

SOURCE: The Journal of Applied Physiology, October 2007

Herbal Sex Pills Pose Hidden Dangers

November 14th, 2007

From Washingtonpost.com

Many of the pills marketed as safe herbal alternatives to Viagra and other prescription sex medications pose a hidden danger: For men on common heart and blood-pressure drugs, popping one could lead to a stroke, or even death.

“All-natural” products with names like Stamina-RX and Vigor-25 promise an apothecary’s delight of rare Asian ingredients, but many work because they contain unregulated versions of the very pharmaceuticals they are supposed to replace.

That dirty secret represents a special danger for the millions of men who take nitrates _ drugs prescribed to lower blood pressure and regulate heart disease. When mixed, nitrates and impotency pharmaceuticals can slow blood flow catastrophically, leading to a heart attack or stroke.An Associated Press investigation shows that spiked herbal impotency pills are emerging as a major public health concern that officials haven’t figured out how to track, much less tame.

Emergency rooms and poison control hot lines are starting to log more incidents of the long-ignored phenomenon. Sales of “natural sexual enhancers” are booming _ rising to nearly $400 million last year. And dangerous knockoffs abound.

At greatest risk are the estimated 5.5 million American men who take nitrates _ generally older and more likely to need help with erectile dysfunction.

The all-natural message can be appealing to such men, warned by their doctors and ubiquitous TV commercials not to take Viagra, Cialis or Levitra.

James Neal-Kababick, director of Oregon-based Flora Research Laboratories, said about 90 percent of the hundreds of samples he has analyzed contained forms of patented pharmaceuticals _ some with doses more than twice that of prescription erectile dysfunction medicine. Other testers report similar results, particularly among pills that promise immediate results.

While no deaths have been reported, the AP found records of emergency room visits attributed to all-natural sex pills in Georgia, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego and elsewhere.

An elderly man in a retirement community north of Los Angeles took an in-the-mail sample and landed in the hospital for four days. A Michigan man sued the maker of Spontane-ES, blaming it for the stroke he suffered 20 minutes after taking a freebie that was advertised as “extremely safe.” Tim Fulmer, a lawyer representing Spontane-ES, said the pill did not contain any pharmaceutical and was not responsible for the stroke.

Mark B. Mycyk, a Chicago emergency room doctor who directs Northwestern University’s clinical toxicology research program, said he is seeing increasing numbers of patients who unwittingly took prescription-strength doses of the alternatives, a trend he attributes to ease of purchase on the Internet and the desperation of vulnerable men. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if there’d been undetected deaths from bad herbal pills.

Some herbal labels warn off users with heart or blood-pressure problems if they have taken their medicine within six hours; some doctors say 24 hours or more would be safer.

Posted in Blood Pressure High/Low, Drugs & Prescriptions, Heart Attack, Nutritional Supplements, Stroke, Toxins & Harmful Ingredients | 3 Comments »

Salt linked to higher blood pressure in kids
September 9th, 2007

Children and adolescents consuming higher levels of salt in their diets have higher blood pressure

From FoodNavigator.com

The new study, based on data collected in the 1997 National Diet and Nutrition Survey for young people in Great Britain (NDNS), will add further urgency to food industry efforts to reduce the salt content of their products.“Currently, salt intake in young people is unnecessarily high due, in most countries, to hidden salt added to food by the food industry,” wrote the authors in The Journal of Human Hypertension. The researchers examined the salt intake and blood pressure of 1,658 children aged between 4 and 18, with salt intake assessed by a seven-day dietary record.

The researchers examined the salt intake and

of 1,658 children aged between 4 and 18, with salt intake assessed by a seven-day dietary record.The average salt intake, which did not include salt added in cooking or at the table, was 4.7g/day at the age of 4 years. With increasing age, there was an increase in salt intake, and by the age of 18 years, salt intake was 6.8g/day.

The findings revealed that for each extra 1g of salt eaten by the participants, there was a related 0.4mmHg increase in systolic blood pressure.

“This is an important finding which confirms that eating more salt increases blood pressure in childhood and also adds extra weight to the current public health campaign to reduce salt in the UK diet,” said Professor Malcolm Law, professor of epidemiology and preventive medicine at the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine.

“The differences in systolic blood pressure between children with higher and lower salt diets may appear small, but making reductions of this order in childhood is likely to translate into lower levels of blood pressure in adult life, with reduced risk of developing heart disease and stroke and potentially huge gains in public health being possible.” Although increased blood pressure is uncommon in children, blood pressure follows a tracking pattern, which means that individuals who have a higher blood pressure in early life are more likely to develop high blood pressure when they grow older.

Although increased blood pressure is uncommon in children, blood pressure follows a tracking pattern, which means that individuals who have a higher blood pressure in early life are more likely to develop high blood pressure when they grow older.High blood pressure (hypertension) – a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease – has been repeatedly linked to an increased salt intake, spurring global campaigns to reduce the sodium levels in processed foods.

In the UK, Ireland and the USA, over 80 per cent of salt intake comes from processed food, with 20 per cent of salt intake coming from meat and meat products, and about 35 per cent from cereal and cereal products.

The new findings, which are consistent with the findings from a recent meta-analysis of controlled salt reduction trials in children and adolescents, suggest that anything that lowers blood pressure in children is likely to reduce the number of people developing high blood pressure in later life.

“The message for parents is to check labels, especially on foods such as breakfast cereals and snack products, which they may not expect to contain high levels of salt, and choose the lower salt options. 1.5g of salt may not sound much, but parents need to know that it is half a six year-old’s maximum recommended upper limit of salt for a whole day (3g) and 30 per cent of a ten year-old’s (5g),” said Jo Butten, nutritionist for Consensus Action on Salt and Health.

According to the researchers, the strengths of their study are that the data were from a large nationally representative sample of British young people, and that salt intake was estimated from a 7-day dietary record, which could characterize individuals’ usual intake more accurately than a dietary record taken over 1-2 days.

Limitations include that the NDNS is a cross-sectional study, and no cause-effect relationship can be drawn from such a study. In addition, the salt intake estimated from the NDNS underestimated the actual amount of salt consumed by children as it did not include salt added in cooking or at the table.

Posted in Blood Pressure High/Low, Children & Pregnancy, Health & Nutrition, Teens | No Comments »

Kids’ High Blood Pressure Goes Untreated -
August 26th, 2007

From Forbes.com

More than 1 million U.S. youngsters have undiagnosed high blood pressure, leaving them at risk for developing organ damage down the road, a study suggests.

Calculating elevated blood pressure in children is trickier than in adults, and many doctors may not bother evaluating kids’ numbers because they assume hypertension is an adult problem. But the study highlights that many children are affected, too, said lead author Dr. David Kaelber of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and Harvard Medical School.

Roughly 2 million U.S. youngsters have been estimated to have high blood pressure; the study suggests that three-quarters of them have it but don’t know it. The numbers are driven at least partly by rising rates of obesity, which is strongly linked with high blood pressure.

Untreated high blood pressure can cause health problems in adults, including heart disease, strokes, artery damage and kidney disease, problems that usually take years to develop. Its effects in children are less certain, although there is some evidence that it might contribute to early artery and heart damage in young patients, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“We can’t wait until they’ve had a stroke to figure this is a problem,” said Dr. Reginald Washington, a Denver pediatrician and member of the academy obesity task force, who was not involved in the research.

Washington said diagnosing high blood pressure in children is just the first step.

“Then you’ve got to sit down and go over family history, talk about diet, exercise,” and other potential treatments including medicine, although weight loss and exercise alone often do the trick in children, he said.

“To ignore it doesn’t make any sense to me,” Washington said.

The study appears in Wednesday’s Journal of the American Medical Association.

The researchers analyzed medical records for 14,187 healthy children aged 3 to 18 who had at least three doctor checkups in northeast Ohio between June 1999 and last September. Kaelber said similar results likely would be found in other U.S. children.

Participants had blood pressure, height and weight measured at each visit. Using those variables, the researchers calculated that 507 study children had high blood pressure, or 3.6 percent, which is within estimates for the nationwide prevalence of high blood pressure in children. But only 131 of them, or 26 percent, had a documented high blood pressure diagnosis.

Extrapolating the results to the U.S. population suggests that 1.5 million children have undiagnosed high blood pressure, Kaelber said.

Kaelber said he decided to study the issue after working as medical director of a weight management clinic in Ohio. Many children referred there had high blood pressure but didn’t know it.

“It was a very uncomfortable situation of telling parents, not only is your child overweight, but also your child has high blood pressure,” he said. “They would get angry about this and say, ‘How come other doctors I’ve been seeing have never told me about this?’”

In adults, readings higher than 140 over 90 are considered high blood pressure. The cutoff varies in children, depending on gender, age, weight and height. Children generally aren’t considered to have high blood pressure unless they have elevated readings during at least three visits.

While American Academy of Pediatrics guidelines recommend measuring blood pressure at every doctor visit, some doctors may not take the next step to calculate if it’s too high, especially if the child otherwise looks healthy, said Dr. Michael Wasserman, a pediatrician with the Ochsner Clinic in Metairie, La., who was not involved in the study.

Posted in Blood Pressure High/Low, Children & Pregnancy, Teens | No Comments »

Increased Risk of High Blood Pressure in Men and Use of Common Pain Relievers Linked
March 13th, 2007

From Medical News Today

Men who regularly take commonly available and widely used pain relievers may have an increased risk of high blood pressure compared with those who do not use these medications, according to a report in the Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.Acetaminophen, ibuprofen and aspirin are among the most commonly used drugs in the United States, according to background information in the article. Two large studies have recently suggested that pain-relieving medications (analgesics) may be associated with an increased risk of hypertension (high blood pressure) in women. However, the association has not been extensively studied in men.

John P. Forman, M.Sc., M.D., of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, and colleagues followed a total of 16,031 male health professionals (average age 64.6 years) who did not have a history of high blood pressure. The men were asked in 2000 and again in 2002 about whether and how often they used three types of pain relievers: acetaminophen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs, which include ibuprofen and naproxen) and aspirin. They were also asked to report if their physician had diagnosed them with hypertension.

Over four years of follow-up, 1,968 men developed hypertension. Compared with men who did not take analgesics, those who took acetaminophen six or seven days a week had a 34 percent higher risk of hypertension. Those who took NSAIDs six or seven days a week had a 38 percent higher risk and those who took aspirin six or seven days a week had a 26 percent higher risk. The researchers also looked at the total number of pain-relieving pills men took each week, regardless of type. Compared with men who took no pills, those who took 15 or more pills each week had a 48 percent higher risk of hypertension.

All three types of analgesics may inhibit the effects of chemicals that relax the blood vessels, decreasing blood pressure, the authors suggest. Acetaminophen also may impair cell functioning through high levels of oxygen (oxidative stress) or reduce the proper functioning of blood vessel lining.

“These data add further support to the hypothesis that non-narcotic analgesics independently elevate the risk of hypertension,” the authors write. “Given their common consumption and the high prevalence of hypertension, our results may have substantial public health implications and suggest that these agents be used with greater caution. The contribution of non-narcotic analgesics to the hypertension disease burden merits further study.”

Posted in Blood Pressure High/Low, Drugs & Prescriptions | No Comments »

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