how to reduce heart attack risks

Shingles dramatically increases heart disease, stroke risk

If you’ve had shingles before the age of 40, you could be at an increased risk for heart disease and stroke.

According to Counsel & Heal, researchers followed individuals for an average of 6.3 years after they had contracted shingles. The study found that participants who had shingles before age 40 were 50 percent more likely to have a heart attack than people who did not have the disease; they were also 74 percent more likely to have a stroke.

Given these findings, lead researcher Dr. Judith Breuer of University College London recommended that anyone with shingles be screened for heart and stroke risk factors.

“The shingles vaccine has been shown to reduce the number of cases of shingles by about 50 percent,” Breuer told Counsel & Heal.

Current shingles vaccination recommendations are for anyone over the age of 60. Researchers have yet to determine the role of vaccination in younger individuals, Breuer said.

Source: Fresh news US

Biggest heart attack risks for Indians revealed

Indian researchers have conducted a data mining exercise to find out important risk factors in increasing the chances of an individual having a heart attack.

The authors confirm that the usual suspects high blood cholesterol, intake of alcohol and passive smoking play the most crucial role in `severe,` `moderate` and `mild` cardiac risks, respectively.

Subhagata Chattopadhyay of the Camellia Institute of Engineering in Kolkata used 300 real-world sample patient cases with various levels of cardiac risk – mild, moderate and severe and mined the data based on twelve known predisposing factors: age, gender, alcohol abuse, cholesterol level, smoking (active and passive), physical inactivity, obesity, diabetes, family history, and prior cardiac event.

He then built a risk model that revealed specific risk factors associated with heart attack risk.

Chattopadhyay explained that the essence of this work essentially lies in the introduction of clustering techniques instead of purely statistical modeling, where the latter has its own limitations in `data-model fitting` compared to the former that is more flexible.

He said that the reliability of the data used, should be checked, and this has been done in this work to increase its authenticity. I reviewed several papers on epidemiological research, where I`m yet to see these methodologies, used.

The study has been published in International Journal of Biomedical Engineering and Technology.