Actress Debbie Reynolds dies of a stroke, a day after daughter

Debbie Reynolds, a leading lady in Hollywood musicals and comedies in the 1950s and 1960s, including “Singin’ in the Rain,” died on Wednesday, her son said, just one day after the death of her daughter, actress Carrie Fisher.

Reynolds, 84, an Oscar-nominated singer-actress, was rushed to Cedars-Sinai hospital earlier on Wednesday,

“It’s true, she’s with Carrie,” her son, Todd Fisher, told Reuters, adding that shortly before suffering a stroke Reynolds had said she missed her daughter and wanted to be with her.

“She left very shortly after that and those were the last words she spoke,” Todd Fisher said.

After the news of Reynolds’ death, numerous people took to social media and wrote that “she died of a broken heart.”

One of the most enduring and endearing Hollywood stars of her time, Reynolds received a best actress Academy Award nomination for the 1964 musical “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”

Carrie Fisher, who rose to fame as Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” films and later battled through drug addiction before going on to tell her story as a best-selling author, died on Tuesday at age 60 after suffering a heart attack last Friday.

After Fisher’s death, Reynolds said on Facebook, “Thank you to everyone who has embraced the gifts and talents of my beloved and amazing daughter. I am grateful for your thoughts and prayers that are now guiding her to her next stop.”

Reynolds had been in frail health in the past year, and she missed a dinner in November 2015 to receive an honorary Oscar. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences said at the time that she was unable to attend because of “an unexpectedly long recovery from recent surgery.”

The nature of her illness was not disclosed. Fisher told reporters in May 2016 that her mother was “doing really well,” but she did not give details.

source: interaksyon.com

One in eight adults obese - global survey

PARIS -- Over one in eight adults are now obese -- a ratio that has more than doubled since 1975 and will swell to one in five by 2025, a major survey reported Friday.

Of about five billion adults alive in 2014, 641 million were obese, the data showed -- and projected the number will balloon past 1.1 billion in just nine years.

The research warned of a looming crisis of "severe obesity" and disease brought on by high-fat, high-sugar diets causing blood pressure and cholesterol to rise.

"There will be health consequences of magnitudes that we do not know," author Majid Ezzati of Imperial College London told AFP.

The survey, published in The Lancet medical journal, claimed to be the most comprehensive of its kind conducted to date.

People are divided into healthy or unhealthy weight categories based on a universally-adopted measure dubbed Body Mass Index -- a ratio of weight-to-height squared.

A healthy BMI ranges from 18.5 to 24.9.

One is considered underweight below 18.5, overweight from 25 up, and obese from 30 -- when the risk of diabetes, stroke, heart disease and some cancers escalates massively.

With a BMI of 35, one is categorized as severely obese, and from 40 upward as morbidly so.

Among men globally, obesity tripled from 3.2 percent of the population in 1975 to 10.8 percent in 2014 (some 266 million), and among women from 6.4 percent to 14.9 percent (375 million), said the survey -- 12.9 percent combined.

This was equivalent to the average adult, 18 and older, being 1.5 kilos (3.3 pounds) heavier every decade.

"If the rate of obesity continues at this pace, by 2025 roughly a fifth of men (18 percent) and women (21 percent) will be obese," according to a statement by The Lancet.

More than six percent of men and nine percent of women will be severely obese.

Weighty flip-flop

The ratio of underweight people in the world declined at a slower rate than obesity grew, said the authors -- from about 13.8 percent in 1975 to 8.8 percent for men, and 14.6 percent to 9.7 percent for women.

"Over the past 40 years, we have changed from a world in which underweight prevalence was more than double that of obesity, to one in which more people are obese than underweight," said Ezzati.

At current rates, more women will be severely obese (a BMI of 35 or more) than underweight by 2025, and the world will miss its stated target of halting obesity at 2010 levels.

In 2014, the world's fattest people lived in the island nations of Polynesia and Micronesia, where 38 percent of men and more than half of women were obese, said the study.

Nearly a fifth of the world's obese adults (118 million) lived in six high-income countries -- the United States, Britain, Ireland, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.

The US was home to one in four severely obese men and almost one in five severely obese women in the world.

Surgery as a solution? 

At the other extreme, the paper said, Timor-Leste, Ethiopia and Eritrea had the lowest BMI numbers in the world, with averages as low as 20.1

More than a fifth of men in India, Bangladesh, Timor-Leste, Afghanistan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and a quarter of women in Bangladesh and India, were underweight.

"The global focus on the obesity epidemic has largely overshadowed the persistence of underweight in some countries," the research paper said.

"To address this problem will require social and food policies that enhance food security in poor households, but also avoid overconsumption of processed carbohydrates and other unhealthy foods."

Like being underweight, severe and morbid obesity has many health risks.

"We can deal with some of these, like higher cholesterol or blood pressure, through medicines," said Ezzati.

"But for many others, including diabetes, we don't have effective treatment."

The paper says stomach-shrinking bariatric surgery may become the "most effective intervention for weight loss and disease prevention" as waistlines continue expanding.

The data was compiled from 1,698 studies involving 19.2 million adults from 186 countries which are home to 99 percent of the world's population.

Unlike earlier research, studies were only included if the participants' height and weight had been measured -- not self-reported.

The data did not include statistics on children and teenagers.

source: interaksyon.com

Doctors warn: Christmas is happiest but deadliest time of the year

MANILA - More people suffer from heart attack and stroke during the Christmas season, and sufferers are more likely to die during this period than at any other time of year. The phenomenon is called Merry Christmas Coronary, Happy New Year Heart Attack.

This was the warning issued by the Philippine College of Physicians (PCP) Foundation as the holidays brings more traffic, overcrowding, and stress.

“Cold weather is not the only cause of the spiking of cardiovascular cases. Study after study shows the culprits to be holiday stress, pollution, and most of all, food and alcohol binging. Eating and drinking sprees send them to emergency rooms for palpitations and light-headedness - symptoms of ‘holiday heart,’” said Dr. Anthony Leachon, President of PCP Foundation.

“For lucky ones the abnormal heart rhythm, usually atrial fibrillation, fixes itself within 24 hours. But others would require admission for monitoring and in extreme cases, electric shock to normalize heart rates. It’s certainly not a fun way to spend the holidays,” he added.

Deadliest days

A 26-year (1973-2001) charting of 53 million deaths in the US reveals a 5-percent jump in natural-cause demise during the holidays.

Christmas Day was the deadliest, followed by December 26, then January 1, according to the study.

Research by sociologist Dr. David Phillips also noted increases in hospital admissions for cardiac and non-cardiac causes. Published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in December 2004, Phillips study excludes suicides, homicides, and accidents.

Could many of the deaths have been caused by lack of specialist attention, as doctors are on holiday too? No, according to a study of 127,959 patients hospitalized for heart attack in 1994-1996 by cardiologist James Jollis at Duke University.

Treatment was basically the same for all patients during the holidays and off-season. Still, according to Jollis, the 30-day mortality of patients in December is higher, with over-indulgence singled out as the culprit.

Cardiologist Robert Kloner’s 1999 report further discounted mere cold weather and pointed to the “holiday effect.”

Focusing on hospitals in Los Angeles, where winters are milder, he noted that change of diet rather than temperature leads to more heart attacks and strokes.

Merrymakers of all ages tend to eat fatty stuff, with adults drinking more alcohol in parties. Pollutants from wood-burning fireplaces further trigger cardiovascular irregularities.

All three studies by Phillips, Jollis, and Kloner exhibit annual 5-percent rises in heart attacks and strokes -- and deaths – during Christmas.

But the situation in the Philippines seems to be worse.

Leachon, who is a cardiologist in the Manila Doctors Hospital, recalled a 2004-2008 survey of Metro Manila hospitals to show a tripling of emergencies and admissions in Christmastime.

Patients were taken in for heart attack, stroke, and diabetes due to overeating and overdrinking.

Usually about 30-50 cases occur from January to November. But this rose to 153 in December 2004, 163 in 2005, 172 in 2006, 170 in 2007, and 170 in 2008.

Half of the holiday patients died.

So for the coming holidays, Leachon gave these health tips to remind the people on how to prevent life-threatening medical condition:

    Stop smoking.
    Eat low-fat low-salt diet. Stick to healthy habits and help your family too.
    Exercise daily for 30 minutes.
    Observe moderate alcohol drinking.
    Don’t skip regular appointments with the doctor.
    Have enough of your usual medications to allow for holiday business or pharmacy breaks and travel.
    Check out the medical facilities where you will be traveling; ask your physician who you could see if you 
    need a doctor away from home.
    If you have symptoms, don’t ignore them.

source: interaksyon.com

For Some, Exercise May Increase Heart Risk

Could exercise actually be bad for some healthy people? A well-known group of researchers, including one who helped write the scientific paper justifying national guidelines that promote exercise for all, say the answer may be a qualified yes.

By analyzing data from six rigorous exercise studies involving 1,687 people, the group found that about 10 percent actually got worse on at least one of the measures related to heart disease:blood pressure and levels of insulin, HDL cholesterolortriglycerides. About 7 percent got worse on at least two measures. And the researchers say they do not know why.

“It is bizarre,” said Claude Bouchard, lead author of the paper, published on Wednesday in the journal PLoS One, and a professor of genetics and nutrition at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, part of the Louisiana State University system.

Dr. Michael Lauer, director of the Division of Cardiovascular Sciences at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the lead federal research institute on heart disease and strokes, was among the experts not involved in the provocative study who applauded it. “It is an interesting and well-done study,” he said.

Others worried about its consequences.

“There are a lot of people out there looking for any excuse not to exercise,” said William Haskell, emeritus professor of medicine at the Stanford Prevention Research Center. “This might be an excuse for them to say, ‘Oh, I must be one of those 10 percent.’ ”

But counterbalancing the 10 percent who got worse were about the same proportion who had an exaggeratedly good response on at least one measure. Others had responses ranging from little or no change up to big changes, seen in about 10 percent, where risk factor measurements improved anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent.

“That should make folks happy,” said Dr. William E. Kraus, a co-author of the study who is a professor of medicine and director of clinical research at Duke. He was a member of the committee providing the scientific overview for the Department of Health and Human Services’ national exercise guidelines, which advise moderate exercise for at least 150 minutes a week.

The problem with studies of exercise and health, researchers point out, is that while they often measure things like blood pressure or insulin levels, they do not follow people long enough to see if improvements translate into fewer heart attacks or longer lives. Instead, researchers infer that such changes lead to better outcomes — something that may or may not be true.

Some critics have noted that there is no indication that those who had what Dr. Bouchard is calling an adverse response to exercise actually had more heart attacks or other bad health outcomes. But Dr. Bouchard said if people wanted to use changes in risk factors to infer that those who exercise are healthier, they could not then turn around and say there is no evidence of harm when the risk factor changes go in the wrong direction.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Dr. Bouchard said.

The national guidelines for exercise are based on such inferences and also on studies that compared the health of people who exercised with that of people who did not, a weak form of evidence often said to be hypothesis-generating rather than proof.

“We do not know whether implementing exercise programs for unfit people assures better outcomes,” said Dr. Lauer of the heart institute. “That has not been established.” And so, he said, “there is a lot of debate over how strong the guidelines should be in light of weak evidence.”

Authors of the study say people should continue to exercise as before, but might also consider getting their heart disease risk factors checked on a regular basis. No intervention, including drugs, works for everyone, Dr. Kraus said. So it should not be surprising that exercise does not work for some.

“I am an exercise guy; I believe in exercise for health,” Dr. Kraus said. “I would rather have everyone exercise. But you can’t ignore the data.”

Still, he added, even if someone does not get the expected benefit in some heart risk factors, there are other reasons to exercise: for mental health and to improve physical functioning.

And while the researchers would like to spare people from adverse exercise effects, Dr. Bouchard said, “It is not possible yet to make more specific recommendations because we do not understand why this is happening.”

Dr. Bouchard stumbled upon the adverse exercise effects when he looked at data from his own study that examined genetics and responses to exercise. He noticed that about 8 percent seemed to be getting worse on at least one measure of heart disease risk. “I thought that was potentially explosive,” he said.

He then looked for other clinical trials that also examined exercise under controlled conditions, making sure that participants actually exercised and did not change their diets, and carefully measuring heart risk factors and how they changed with an exercise program. He found five studies in addition to his own. In all the studies, a proportion of people, about 10 percent, had at least one measurement of heart disease risk that went in the wrong direction.

Then the researchers asked if there was some way of predicting who would have an adverse effect.

They found it was not related to how fit the people were at the start of the study, nor to how much their fitness improved with exercise. Age had nothing to do with it, nor did race or gender. In some studies subjects were allowed to take medications to control their blood pressure or cholesterol levels. In others they were not.

Medication use did not matter. The study subjects exercised at a range of intensities from very moderate to fairly intense. But intensity of effort was not related to the likelihood of an untoward effect. Nothing predicted who would have an adverse response.

Some experts, like Dr. Benjamin Levine, a cardiologist and professor of exercise sciences at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, asked whether the adverse responses represented just random fluctuations in heart risk measures. Would the same proportion of people who did not exercise also get worse over the same periods of time? Or what about seasonal variations in things like cholesterol? Maybe the adverse effects just reflected the time of year when people entered the study.

But the investigators examined those hypotheses and found that they did not hold up.

Dr. Kraus said researchers needed to figure out how to tailor exercise prescriptions to individual needs. For example, people with good cholesterol and insulin levels but worrisome blood pressure would want to know if exercise made their blood pressure rise. A rise in blood pressure would not be compensated by improvements in already good cholesterol or insulin levels.

Dr. Lauer said that if nothing else, the study pointed out the need to know more about what exercise actually does. “If we are going to think of exercise as a therapeutic intervention, like all interventions there will be adverse effects,” he said.

He said, “There is a price for everything.”

source: nytimes.com

Studies find an aspirin a day can keep cancer at bay

LONDON (Reuters) - Three new studies published on Wednesday added to growing scientific evidence suggesting that taking a daily dose of aspirin can help prevent, and possibly treat, cancer.

Previous studies have found that daily aspirin reduces the long-term risk of death due to cancer, but until now the shorter-term effects have been less certain - as has the medicine's potential in patients already diagnosed with cancer.

The new studies, led by Peter Rothwell of Britain's Oxford University, found that aspirin also has a short-term benefit in preventing cancer, and that it reduces the likelihood that cancers will spread to other organs by about 40 to 50 percent.

"These findings add to the case for use of aspirin to prevent cancer, particularly if people are at increased risk," Rothwell said.

"Perhaps more importantly, they also raise the distinct possibility that aspirin will be effective as an additional treatment for cancer - to prevent distant spread of the disease."

This was particularly important because it is the process of spread of cancer, or "metastasis", which most often kills people with the disease, he added.

Aspirin, originally developed by Bayer, is a cheap over-the-counter drug generally used to combat pain or reduce fever.

The drug reduces the risk of clots forming in blood vessels and can therefore protect against heart attacks and strokes, so it is often prescribed for people who already suffer with heart disease and have already had one or several attacks.

Aspirin also increases the risk of bleeding in the stomach to around one patient in every thousand per year, a factor which has fuelled an intense debate about whether doctors should advise patients to take it as regularly as every day.

Last year, a study by British researchers questioned the wisdom of daily aspirin for reducing the risk of early death from a heart attack or stroke because they said the increased risk of internal bleeding outweighed the potential benefit.

Other studies, including some by Rothwell in 2007, 2010 and 2011, found that an aspirin a day, even at a low dose of around 75 milligrams, reduces the long-term risk of developing some cancers, particularly bowel and oesophageal cancer, but the effects don't show until eight to 10 years after the start of treatment.

Rothwell, whose new studies were published in The Lancet and The Lancet Oncology journals on Wednesday, said this delay was because aspirin was preventing the very early development of cancers and there was a long time lag between this stage and a patient having clinical signs or symptoms of cancer.

Rothwell and others said deeper research was now needed into aspirin as a potential treatment for cancer in patients whose disease has not yet spread.

"No drug has been shown before to prevent distant metastasis and so these findings should focus future research on this crucial aspect of treatment," he said.

Peter Johnson, chief clinician at the charity Cancer Research UK, said his group was already investigating the anti-cancer properties of aspirin. "These findings show we're on the right track," he said.

In a written commentary on the research in The Lancet, Andrew Chan and Nancy Cook of Harvard Medical School in the United States said it was "impressive" and moved health experts "another step closer to broadening recommendations for aspirin use".

source: mb.com.ph

Diet soda tied to heart attack, stroke risks: study

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Diet soda may benefit the waistline, but a new study suggests that people who drink it every day have a heightened risk of heart attack and stroke.

The study, which followed almost 2,600 older adults for a decade, found that those who drank diet soda every day were 44 percent more likely than non-drinkers to suffer a heart attack or stroke.

The findings, reported in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, don't prove that the sugar-free drinks are actually to blame.

There may be other things about diet-soda lovers that explain the connection, researchers say.

"What we saw was an association," said lead researcher Hannah Gardener, of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. "These people may tend to have more unhealthy habits."

She and her colleagues tried to account for that, Gardener told Reuters Health.

Daily diet-soda drinkers did tend to be heavier and more often have heart risk factors like high blood pressure, diabetes and unhealthy cholesterol levels.

That all suggests that people who were trying to shed pounds or manage existing health problems often opted for a diet soda over the sugar-laden variety.

But even after the researchers factored in those differences -- along with people's reported diet and exercise habits -- they found that daily diet soda was linked to a 44-percent higher chance of heart attack or stroke.

Nevertheless, Gardener said, it's impossible for a study to capture all the variables that could be at work.

The findings do build on a few recent studies that also found diet-soda drinkers are more likely to have certain cardiovascular risk factors, like high blood pressure or high blood sugar.

This is the first study, Gardener said, to look at actual "vascular events" -- that is, heart attacks, strokes and deaths from cardiovascular causes.

The findings are based on 2,564 New York City adults who were 69 years old, on average, at the outset. Over the next decade, 591 men and women had a heart attack, stroke or died of cardiovascular causes.

That included 31 percent of the 163 people who were daily diet-soda drinkers at the study's start. In contrast, 22 percent of people who rarely or never drank diet soda went on to have a heart attack or stroke.

There was no increased risk linked to less-than-daily consumption. Nor was regular soda tied to heart attacks and strokes.

If diet soda, itself, somehow contributes to health risks, it's not clear how, Gardener said.

There's research in rats suggesting that artificial sweeteners can end up boosting food intake and weight. But whether results in rodents translate to humans is unknown.

"I don't think people should change their behavior based on this study," Gardener said. "And I wouldn't advocate drinking regular soda instead."

Regular soda is high in calories, and for people who need to shed pounds, experts often suggest swapping regular soda for the diet version.

A study out this month found that the advice may be sound. Obese people who were randomly assigned to drink water or diet drinks in place of sugary ones lost about five pounds over six months.

Gardener said that further studies such as hers are still needed to confirm a connection between diet soda and cardiovascular trouble.

Ultimately, she noted, clinical trials are considered the "gold standard" for proving cause-and-effect. That would mean randomly assigning people to drink diet soda or not, and then following them over time to see if there were differences in their rates of heart problems or stroke.

A study like that, Gardener said, would be "difficult and costly" -- since it would have to follow large groups of people over many years, and rely on people to stick with their assigned beverages.

article source: mb.com.ph