CVD

Consuming fruits regularly almost halves heart disease risk

A new study has suggested that eating fruits on a daily basis minimizes the risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) up to 40 percent. The study presented at ESC Congress observed that that the more fruit people ate, the more their risk of CVD declined.

Consuming fruits regularly almost halves heart disease risk

Dr Du said that CVD, including ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke, was the leading cause of death worldwide and improving diet and lifestyle was critical for CVD risk reduction in the general population but the large majority of this evidence had come from western countries and hardly any from China.

She added that China had a different pattern of CVD, with stroke as the main cause compared to western countries where IHD is more prevalent. Previous studies had combined ischaemic and haemorrhagic stroke probably due to the limited number of stroke cases in their datasets and given their different physiology and risk factors, they had conducted the first large prospective study on the association of fruit with subtypes of stroke in Chinese adults from both rural and urban areas.

The researchers found out that compared to people who never ate fruit, those who ate fruit daily cut their CVD risks by 25-40percent and there was a dose response relationship between the frequency of fruit consumption and the risk of CVD.

The researchers concluded that their results demonstrated that the benefit of eating fruit in the healthy general population and in patients with CVD and hypertension and fruit consumption was an effective way to cut CVD risk and should not only be regarded as might be useful

BMI has no role in cardiovascular disease in a healthy woman

obese women have a window of opportunity to lose weight and avoid developing a metabolic disorder, which would increase their CVD risk.

Metabolically healthy women have same cardiovascular disease risk regardless of their having different BMIs, according to a study.

Dr Soren Skott Andersen and Dr Michelle Schmiegelow from Denmark findings in more than 260,000 subjects suggest that obese women have a window of opportunity to lose weight and avoid developing a metabolic disorder, which would increase their CVD risk.

The study used Danish national health databases and followed 261,489 women who had given birth during 2004-2009 with no prior history of cardiovascular disease. The women were divided into four categories according to their pre-pregnancy body mass index (BMI, kg/m2) and presence of metabolic disorders (present/not present). The women`s mean age was 31 years.

The women were followed for an average of 5 years following childbirth. Discharge diagnoses and data on cause of death were used to determine if the women had a heart attack, a stroke, or died.

The researchers found that being overweight ( BMI=25 kg/m2) but metabolically healthy was not associated with an increased risk of a heart attack, stroke or a combination of heart attack/stroke/death in comparison with normal weight, metabolically healthy women.

The investigators found that the metabolically unhealthy, overweight women had an almost 7-fold increased risk of heart attack and a 4-fold increased risk of stroke.