(Press-News.org) The studies below will be presented at the American College of Cardiology's 64th Annual Scientific Session the afternoon of Saturday, March 14.
1. Energy Drink Shown to Raise Resting Blood Pressure
Medical reports have linked energy drink consumption to adverse cardiac events such as changes in heart rhythm, heart attacks and even deaths in otherwise healthy people. To investigate how energy drinks affect the heart, researchers alternately gave a can of commercially available energy drink or a placebo drink to 25 healthy young adults (age 19-40 years) and assessed changes in heart rate and blood pressure. Participants experienced a marked rise in blood pressure after consuming the energy drink as compared to the placebo. The effect was most dramatic in people who did not typically consume much caffeine.
The results suggest consumers should use caution when using energy drinks because they may increase the risk of cardiovascular problems, even among young people, said Anna Svatikova, M.D., Ph.D., a cardiovascular diseases fellow at Mayo Clinic and the study's lead author.
She added that the risk could be greater among people who already have heart problems.
Svatikova will present the study, "Potentiated Blood Pressure Responses to Energy Drink Intake in Caffeine Naïve Healthy Adults. A Double Blind Randomized Controlled Study," on Saturday, March 14 at 1:30 p.m. PT/4:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. UTC in Poster Hall B1.
2. Smoking May be to Blame for Broken Stents in Limb Arteries
Patients who smoke appear to be three times more likely than patients who do not to fracture stents placed in their limb arteries to open blockages. This association may be due to a loss of elasticity and increased rigidity of the vessels due to accumulation of calcium within the arterial wall of smokers, according to the authors, though further study is needed.
Stent fractures are a relatively common and significant issue in superficial femoral artery stenting, which is mostly used to treat severe blockages resulting in leg pain and ulcers. Cumulative incidence of femoropopliteal stent fracture varies from two percent to 65 percent depending on the type of stents used, length of the treated segment, number of overlapping stents, and how physically active the patient is (more activity after stenting is associated with higher risk of stent fracture). Previous studies have associated stents breaking with re-development of blockages within the stent, which can result in decreased blood supply to the affected limb.
Pawan Hari, M.D., M.P.H., of NYU Langone Medical Center, and the study's lead author, said smoking appears to be associated with increased frequency of break in stent continuity, putting patients at higher risk for developing blockages within previously placed stents in the limb arteries. His study of 97 consecutive patients with angiographically confirmed stent fracture was designed to assess the factors associated with fracture of Nitinol self-expanding stents placed in the femoral artery over a mean follow-up of 15.5 months. Approximately 10 million people in the United States suffer from peripheral arterial disease, a reduction of blood flow to the limbs due to narrowed arteries.
Being male and having larger stent width were also associated with a broken stent; however, only smoking remained significantly associated with fracture after controlling for other risk factors, including age, diabetes, high blood pressure, stent length and the number of stents placed.
Hari will present the study, "Smoking Is Strongly Associated with fracture of Nitinol Self Expanding Stents Implanted in the Superficial Femoral Artery," on Saturday, March 14 at 1:30 p.m. PT/4:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. UTC in Poster Hall B1.
3. Social Habits of Inner-City Younger Adults May Impact Recovery from Early-Onset Heart Attacks
Younger adults from low-income, urban areas who are recovering from a heart attack (specifically, ST-elevation myocardial infarction or STEMI) are more likely to be male and of a non-white race-ethnicity as compared with their middle-aged and older counterparts and are much more prone to poor lifestyle habits and related disorders, including obesity, smoking, cocaine use and HIV infection.
Although these young adults, characterized as younger than 45-years-old, were less likely to die during follow-up, hospital readmission rates were more comparable to middle-aged heart attack patients who also have more cardiovascular risk factors.
"This study highlights the contributions of behavioral risk factors to the premature onset of heart attack in a low-income urban community of predominantly black or Hispanic race-ethnicity and the health burden associated with these factors in young survivors of a heart attack in terms of repeat hospitalization," said Muhammad Shahid, M.D., of Montefiore Medical Center, Bronx, New York, and the study's lead author.
These findings underscore the need for targeted community-level interventions to promote diet and physical activity and reduce smoking, drug use and other high-risk behaviors in socioeconomically disadvantaged urban settings, Shahid said.
Researchers analyzed a prospective registry of 771 patients with acute STEMI evaluated for primary coronary intervention at Montefiore Medical Center, a health system serving a predominantly socioeconomically disadvantaged community, from 2008 to 2012. STEMI affected a similar proportion of younger adults in this population, as is seen in national registries.
Shahid will present the study, "Characterization of ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction Across the Age Spectrum in a Low-Income Urban Community: Clinical Features, Acute Care, and Long-Term Outcomes on Saturday, March 14 at 1:30 p.m. PT/4:30 p.m. ET/8:30 p.m. UTC in Poster Hall B1.
INFORMATION:
Scientists of the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory have taken to kites that they fly above lava flows blanketing the Hawaiian landscape to unravel the past mysteries that shaped Mars.
A kite, equipped with off-the-shelf instruments such as a camera, a GPS, and orientation sensors, scans the terrain from high above. The team then employs parallel computing and powerful software algorithms to assemble tens of thousands of images into extremely detailed and accurate 3D digital terrain models.
In terms of studying volcanic landscapes, the project is ...
SAN DIEGO, Calif. (March 16, 2015)-- As the nation's headlines turn more and more to issues of tolerance -- race, religion, free speech, same sex marriage -- research by San Diego State University Psychology Professor Jean M. Twenge shows that Americans are actually more tolerant than ever before.
In a paper released this month by the journal Social Forces, Twenge, along with Nathan T. Carter and Keith Campbell from the University of Georgia, found that Americans are now more likely to believe that people with different views and lifestyles can and should have the same ...
ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Some of social media's greatest stars aren't even old enough to tweet: Pictures of kids playing dress up, having meltdowns and even in the bathtub adorn Facebook walls. Diaper-donning toddlers dancing to the likes of Beyonce and Taylor Swift rack up YouTube views. Countless blogs share stories about everything from potty training to preschool struggles.
Today's University of Michigan C.S. Mott Children's Hospital National Poll on Children's Health finds that this so-called "sharenting" isn't going anywhere anytime soon, with more than half of mothers ...
After many years of speculation, it has finally been established that hydrazine is not a prevalent contaminant in contemporary smokeless tobacco products (STPs).
The presence of hydrazine has only been reported once in a limited sample of cigarette tobacco and tobacco smoke some 40 years ago1. But this study has been cited many times as evidence that hydrazine is present in smokeless tobacco products. To date, no one has examined STPs for its presence.
Hydrazine is found in maleic hydrazine, which is used as a sucker growth inhibitor on tobacco crops - suckers are ...
ROCHESTER, Minn. - Increasingly high prices for cancer drugs are affecting patient care in the U.S. and the American health care system overall, say the authors of a special article published online in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
"Americans with cancer pay 50 percent to 100 percent more for the same patented drug than patients in other countries," says S. Vincent Rajkumar, M.D., of Mayo Clinic Cancer Center, who is one of the authors. "As oncologists we have a moral obligation to advocate for affordable cancer drugs for our patients."
Dr. Rajkumar and his colleague, ...
In a world first, a research team including James Cook University scientists has discovered how geckos manage to stay clean, even in dusty deserts.
The process, described in Interface, the prestigious journal of the Royal Society, may also turn out to have important human applications.
JCU's Professor Lin Schwarzkopf said the group found that tiny droplets of water on geckos, for instance from condensing dew, come into contact with hundreds of thousands of extremely small hair-like spines that cover the animals' bodies.
"If you have seen how drops of water roll ...
A rare and threatened Caribbean coral species has for the first time been successfully bred and raised in the lab, according to research published in the open access journal BMC Ecology.
The study provides the first photos and documentation of juveniles of this species, and could provide information to help bolster local coral reef conservation. The team also plans to 'out-plant' these lab-grown juveniles in the wild which could help populations become more resilient to climate change.
The findings will be presented in a talk at the annual TED Conference in Vancouver ...
New research has discredited the popular belief that street lighting is attractive to common bats. The study, carried out by scientists from the University of Exeter and Bat Conservation Ireland, found that bat activity was generally lower in street-lit areas than in dark locations with similar habitat. The findings have important implications for conservation, overturning the previous assumption that common bats benefited from street-lights because they could feed on the insects that congregated around them.
The research, published in the journal Philosophical Transactions ...
Sunday, March 15, 2015, San Diego: Elderly patients once considered too frail or tool sick for aortic valve replacement surgery are living longer, with better quality of life, following a minimally invasive surgery, compared to patients who did not undergo surgery, according a study published in The Lancet today.
Researchers at 21 medical centers followed 358 patients with severe aortic stenosis for five years. The patients, with a mean age of 83, were evenly divided into two study groups - one that underwent minimally invasive transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) ...
New Haven, Conn. -- In the first multicenter trial of its kind, Yale researchers tested a new device that lowers the risk of stroke and cognitive decline in patients undergoing heart-valve replacement.
The preliminary findings of the DEFLECT III trial were presented by Alexandra Lansky, M.D., associate professor of medicine (cardiology) at Yale School of Medicine, on March 15 at the American College of Cardiology's 64th Annual Scientific Session in San Diego, CA.
Stroke is a devastating complication of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), a minimally invasive ...
