MyHealthNewsDaily

America's progress in the fight against heart disease could be slowed by unhealthy habits, according to a new report.

The American Heart Association's current goal is to reduce the rate of death from heart disease by 20 percent by 2020, but if current trends continue, the rate may improve only by 6 percent, the AHA said in its report.

Between 1999 and 2009, the rate fell about 33 percent, the AHA noted.

Although rates of smoking, high cholesterol and high blood pressure are expected to decline, these improvements may be offset by increases in obesity and diabetes, coupled with only small changes in diet and exercise, the report said.

"Americans need to move a lot more, eat healthier and less, and manage risk factors as soon as they develop,” said Dr. Alan Go, chairman of the report's writing committee. “If not, we’ll quickly lose the momentum we’ve gained in reducing heart attack and stroke rates and improving survival over the last few decades." In 2009, cardiovascular disease accounted for about one in three deaths in the U.S.

Currently, 68.2 percent of adults are overweight, and more adults are obese than are either normal weight or underweight (34.6 percent compared with 31.8 percent), the report said. Twenty-two percent of adults do not exercise at all. Among high school students, 17 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys said they exercised for less than an hour during the past week.

The AHA said it is working to help build healthier communities by improving access to healthy foods and parks.

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By MyHealthNewsDaily Staff

Some drugs that treat high blood pressure may increase the risk of lip cancer, a new study suggests. 

In the study, people who took the high blood pressure drug hydrochlorothiazide for five years or more were four times more likely to develop lip cancer, compared with those who did not take the drug. The study included only Caucasian people. 

Hydrochlorothiazide is a photosensitizing drug, meaning it can increase a person's sensitivity to sunlight. People who take photosensitizing drugs may burn more easily, or develop rashes upon sunlight exposure. Previous studies have linked hydrochlorothiazide and an increased risk of certainskin cancers. 

Other photosensitizing drugs examined in the study, including one called nifedipine, increased the risk of lip cancer more than twofold in whites. 

The findings held even after the researchers took into account study participants' smoking, a factor that increases the risk of lip cancer. 

Lip cancer is rare (there are about 0.7 cases per 100,000 people per year in the United States), and the benefits of high blood pressure drugs generally outweigh the increased risk of this particular cancer, the researchers said. 

"However, physicians prescribing photosensitizing drugs should ascertain whether patients are at high risk of lip cancer because of their fair skin and long-term sun exposure, and discuss lip protection with them," the researchers said. 

Ways to prevent lip cancer include wearing a hat with a sufficiently wide brim to shade the lips, and wearing lip sunscreens, the researchers said. 

The findings are based on a study of 712 patients in Northern California diagnosed with lip cancer between 1994 and 2008, and nearly 23,000 people, of a similar age and gender and living in the same region, who did not have lip cancer. 

The drug atenolol, which is prescribed for high blood pressure but is not photosensitizing, did not increase the risk of lip cancer. This suggests the condition of high blood pressure itself is not to blame for the link, the researchers said. 

The researchers did not take into account how much time participants spent in the sun. However, it is not likely that participants who took photosensitizing high blood pressure drugs spent significantly more time in the sun compared with those who took atenolol, which was not found to increase lip cancer risk, the researchers said. 

The study, conducted by researchers at the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program in Oakland, Calif., is published today (Sept. 10) in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine. It was published online Aug. 6. 

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For those red wine drinkers who’ve been feeling morally superior about all the health benefits of the relaxing glass or two sipped during dinner, there’s some bad news on the horizon. Turns out, those glasses of wine would be a lot healthier if they were non-alcoholic, a new study shows. 

Spanish researchers led by Gemma Chiva-Blanch of the University of Barcelona found that non-alcoholic red wine reduced blood pressure in men at high risk for heart disease better than standard red wine or gin, according to the study published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation Research.

Although the reduction in both systolic and diastolic blood pressure was modest, decreases of just 4 and 2 mm Hg have been associated with a 14 to 20 percent reduction in heart disease and stroke, the researchers pointed out. “The daily consumption of dealcoholized red wine could be useful for the prevention of low to moderate hypertension,” they concluded.  

Although there have been many studies on the impact of moderate drinking on health, the findings have been mixed, with some studies showing a benefit and others suggesting none. The new study found that 3 ounces of gin a day had no impact on blood pressure, while consumption of regular red wine led to a small, but not statistically significant, improvement.

The new study suggests that if you’re going to have a drink, red wine would be the healthiest choice, said Dr. Kelly Anne Spratt, a heart disease prevention specialist and a clinical associate professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Still, Spratt said, “while there are those of us in cardiology who believe in the benefits of red wine, we want to be wary. We’re not going like gangbusters recommending people go out and start drinking. There are a lot of problems associated with drinking, like weight gain, cardiomyopathy, alcoholism, an increased breast cancer risk in women who consume two or more drinks a day.”

Chiva-Blanch and her colleagues suspect that blood pressure improvements were due to the impact of polyphenols, a red wine component, on nitric oxide. The theory is that nitric oxide molecules help blood vessels relax, which allows better flow and more blood to reach the heart and other organs.

For the new study, Chiva-Blanch and her colleagues followed 67 men with diabetes or three or more cardiovascular risk factors. During the study, the men were all required to consume the same foods along with one of three drinks: 10 ounces of red wine, 10 ounces of non-alcoholic red wine or 3 ounces of gin. During the 12 week study, the men tried each diet/beverage combination for four weeks at a time.

The researchers determined that the standard red wine and its nonalcoholic counterpart contained equal amounts of polyphenols, an antioxidant which has been shown to decrease blood pressure.

Men who drank regular red wine saw minor reductions in blood pressure – too small, in fact, to be statistically significant. Those who drank gin with their meals saw no change in blood pressure. But men who drank non-alcoholic red wine saw a blood pressure decrease of about 6 mm Hg in systolic and 2 mm Hg in diastolic blood pressure.

Chiva-Blanch and her colleagues concluded that their findings show that the alcohol in red wine actually weakens its ability to lower blood pressure.

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New Zealand Herald via AP

Natasha Harris, stay-at-home mother of eight, died of a heart attack in February 2010. Experts say the New Zealand woman's two-gallon-a-day Coca-Cola habit probably contributed to her death, a conclusion that led the soft-drink giant to note that even water can be deadly in excessive amounts.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand -- Experts say a New Zealand woman's 2-gallon-a-day Coca-Cola habit probably contributed to her death, a conclusion that led the soft-drink giant to note that even water can be deadly in excessive amounts. 

Natasha Harris, a 30-year-old, stay-at-home mother of eight from Invercargill, died of a heart attack in February 2010. Fairfax Media reported that a pathologist, Dr. Dan Mornin, testified at an inquest Thursday that she probably suffered from hypokalemia, or low potassium, which he thinks was caused by her excessive consumption of Coke and overall poor nutrition. 

Symptoms of hypokalemia can include abnormal heart rhythms, according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health. 

Mornin said that toxic levels of caffeine, a stimulant found in Coke, also may have contributed to her death, according to Fairfax. 

Harris' partner, Chris Hodgkinson, testified that Harris drank between 8 and 10 liters (2.1 and 2.6 gallons) of regular Coke every day. 

"The first thing she would do in the morning was to have a drink of Coke beside her bed and the last thing she would do at night was have a drink of Coke," Hodgkinson said in a deposition. "She was addicted to Coke." 

Hodgkinson also said Harris ate little and smoked about 30 cigarettes a day. In the months before her death, he said, Harris experienced blood pressure problems and lacked energy. 

He said that on the morning of her death, Harris helped get her children ready for school before slumping against a wall. He called emergency services and tried mouth-to-mouth resuscitation but couldn't revive her. 

Another pathologist, Dr. Martin Sage, said in a deposition that "it is certainly well demonstrated that excessive long or short term cola ingestion can be dramatically symptomatic, and there are strong hypothetical grounds for this becoming fatal in individual cases." 

Inquests such as this are sometimes held for unusual or unexplained deaths in New Zealand, and can help shape future health policies. With the evidence in the case now complete, the coroner's office will compile and issue a final report into the death. 

In an interview with The Associated Press, Lisa Te Morenga, a nutritionist at the University of Otago, said excessive consumption of any type of liquid in a cool climate would be likely to play havoc with the body's natural systems and balance. 

Karen Thompson, a spokeswoman for Coca-Cola Oceania, said in a statement that its products are safe. 

"We concur with the information shared by the coroner's office that the grossly excessive ingestion of any food product, including water, over a short period of time with the inadequate consumption of essential nutrients, and the failure to seek appropriate medical intervention when needed, can be dramatically symptomatic." 

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A small switch in your daily schedule could significantly cut your risk of heart attack and stroke, a new study finds.

Taking blood pressure medications at bedtime instead of in the morning reduces the risk of a heart attack and other cardiovascular problems by about two-thirds, Spanish researchers reported.

The new study adds to a growing body of research that suggests blood pressure medication is more effective when taken before going to sleep instead of upon awakening. But the researchers caution that no one should switch from morning to bedtime dosing without first consulting a doctor and having his or her blood pressure monitored over a 24-hour period.

It’s now well-accepted that heart attacks are more common in the morning than the evening, says Michael Smolensky of the biomedical engineering department at the University of Texas at Austin. Smolensky wasn’t a coauthor on the new report but has collaborated with the authors.

Less widely accepted is the notion that blood pressure varies over the course of the day, so one or two readings in the doctor’s office doesn’t tell the whole story, says Smolensky, co-editor of the journal Chronobiology International.

“Mother Nature had in mind that when we went to sleep at night our heart rate and blood pressure would decline” to give our cardiovascular system a rest, Smolensky says. But, he says, people with high blood pressure are less likely to experience that nightly dip, which puts them at a greater risk of complications.

In an email to msnbc.com, lead author Ramon Hermida described bedtime hypertension treatment as “the most effective, cost-free approach to obtain the goal of greater sleep blood pressure reduction.” Still, says Hermida, director of the bioengineering and chronobiology labs at the University of Vigo in Spain, “all patients should be evaluated individually…with ambulatory blood pressure monitoring.”

Monitoring patients’ blood pressure over a day or two is important, because taking medication at night might lower it too much, Smolensky says. That could lead to falls if they got up to go to the bathroom at night or even increase their risk of a stroke because they weren’t getting enough blood to the brain, he says.

Hermida’s new study randomly assigned 661 patients to take all of their prescribed high blood pressure medications upon awakening or to take at least one of them at bedtime. At the beginning of the study, all of them wore ambulatory blood pressure monitors for 48 hours. They were tracked for about 5 ½ years on average and had their blood pressure monitored for 48 hours straight at least once a year.

All of the patients had chronic kidney disease. They represented a subset of patients in a larger study of the timing of blood pressure treatment. That study overall found a similar reduction in risk as it did in the kidney disease patients alone.

“Ours is just the very first trial ever testing the influence on cardiovascular morbidity and mortality of awakening vs. bedtime hypertension treatment,” says Hermida, who published his latest findings in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. “Further studies will be needed to corroborate our findings.”