Blood Pressure Archive

Strengthening the muscles in your midsection may help you stay active and pain-free.

Whether you refer to it as a spare tire, a muffin top, or love handles, having a roll of fat around your waist is pretty common. But even if you're not overweight, a bulging midriff may raise your risk of heart disease.

Despite the many ads that tout "one simple trick" to lose belly fat, there's no getting around it: whittling down your waistline takes a bit of effort. One important step is strengthening your core, which includes the muscles in your abdomen, back, sides, pelvis, and buttocks. However, a strong core is only part of the picture.

Heart attacks may leave people more vulnerable to thinking and memory problems as they age.

Growing older often means slowing down, both physically and mentally. Just as people can't move quite as fast as when they were younger, their thinking and memory abilities — known as cognitive function — may also slowly wane.

Now, new research suggests that people who have a heart attack or angina (chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart) may face a faster drop in thinking skills than people who don't experience those heart-related problems.

Learn how these high-tech devices can save — and change — your life.

Defibrillators are devices that can detect — and correct — potentially deadly heart rhythms. The most common is ventricular fibrillation, which makes the heart's lower chambers (ventricles) quiver without actually squeezing and pumping. Blood stops flowing to the brain and other organs, causing the person to pass out. Death can occur within minutes.

A quick jolt of electricity can restore the heart's normal rhythm, however. The shock can be delivered from outside the chest with an automated external defibrillator (AED). Located in many public places, these portable devices can be used by medical personnel as well as untrained people, thanks to audible prompts that explain what to do. But some people are candidates for an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD), a miniature electronic device placed under the skin below the collarbone (see illustration).

When you were a kid, you may have lumped peas into the same category as broccoli, spinach, or any other green plant on the plate. But green peas aren't the same as leafy greens. In fact, their classification is a little tricky.

Mature green peas — typically sold dried and split in half — are more like beans. But fresh or frozen green peas are classified as a starchy vegetable by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines.

Research we're watching

Sitting is sometimes called "the new smoking" because of its detrimental effects on heart health. But some types of sitting may be worse than others, according to a study in the July 2 Journal of the American Heart Association.

Researchers interviewed 3,592 African American adults about their daily activities and followed them for roughly eight years. About one-third watched fewer than two hours of TV a day. Another third watched two to four hours daily, while the remaining third watched more than four hours. People in the latter group had a 49% higher risk of heart attack, stroke, and death than those in the first group. However, there was no difference in heart-related events between people who spent most or all of their day sitting at work and those who rarely or ever sat at work.

Research we're watching

Yet another study has found that most vitamin, mineral, and other nutritional supplements provide no protection against heart disease.

The new analysis, published July 8 in Annals of Internal Medicine, reviewed data from hundreds of clinical trials that pitted 16 different vitamins or other supplements against placebos. Most of them — including vitamin A, vitamin B₆, vitamin D, multivitamins, calcium, iron, and selenium — showed no association with a higher or lower risk of heart disease or death.

Research we're watching

Although people tend to focus more on the first number in a blood pressure reading, the second number is also important for predicting heart disease risk. That's according to a study based on 36 million blood pressure readings from more than 1.3 million adults, published in the July 18 New England Journal of Medicine.

Systolic pressure (the first number in a blood pressure reading) measures the force with which the heart pumps blood into the arteries. Diastolic pressure (the second, lower number) reflects the pressure in the arteries when the heart rests between beats. Over eight years, more than 44,000 people in the study had a heart attack or stroke. The risk of those events rose among people with systolic readings of 130 and higher, but also in those with diastolic readings of 80 and higher. The findings are a reminder to pay attention to both numbers in your blood pressure reading, and that for most otherwise healthy people, lower blood pressure is better.

Sodium doesn't affect everyone equally, but there's good reason to stick to moderate amounts in your diet.

On average, Americans eat too much salt — more than a teaspoon and a half a day. Most often it doesn't come out of a shaker, but is hidden in the foods you eat. But is it really bad for your heart to eat too much, or is that just a concern for people with certain risk factors? There's been some debate on this topic, even among members of the scientific community. We asked Nancy Cook, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, for her thoughts on salt — or more precisely, sodium, a mineral that makes up 40% of salt — and how it affects your health and your heart.

Is salt really bad for your heart?

"There is a fairly undisputed effect of sodium on blood pressure," says Cook. The effect is stronger in people with high blood pressure (hypertension), a sustained blood pressure reading of 120/80 or higher. The data for an effect on cardiovascular disease are somewhat more controversial, she says, but in general, the bulk of research does seem to link lower sodium intake with both lower blood pressure and a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

A recent 15-year follow-up to the Veterans Affairs Diabetes Trial found that short-term intensive blood sugar control did not lead to significant reduction of risk of cardiovascular events in the long term.