Tag Archives: disease control and prevention

U.S. report confirms smoking bans cut heart attacks

`in.reuters.com

U.S. report confirms smoking bans cut heart attacks

Indoor smoking bans lower the risk of heart attack, even among nonsmokers, by reducing exposure to secondhand smoke, a panel of U.S. health experts confirmed in a report on Thursday.

The report, produced by the Institute of Medicine for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, provides the most definitive evidence to date that laws that ban smoking from workplaces, restaurants and bars can reduce cardiovascular-related health problems where they are imposed.

“Secondhand smoke kills. What this report shows is that smoke-free laws reduce heart attacks in nonsmokers,” said CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden.

“But still, most of the country lives in areas that don’t have comprehensive smoke-free laws covering all workplaces, all restaurants and all bars,” he said.

The CDC asked the independent Institute of Medicine to review research on smoking bans and secondhand smoke after some studies suggested that banning smoking might significantly reduce heart attacks.

The panel of experts reviewed research including 11 studies of smoking bans in the United States, Canada and Europe showing “remarkable consistency” in the association between bans and reductions in heart attack rates, which in some studies ranged from 6 percent to 47 percent.

“There is a causal relationship … smoking bans decrease the rate of heart attacks,” the panel concluded in its report.

Advocacy groups said they hoped the report would encourage passage of more smoking bans, which the CDC estimates covers about 40 percent of the population.

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Stressful childhood may mean earlier death

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Stressful childhood may mean earlier death

Having a stressful childhood may slash decades off a person’s life, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report.

Among people who reported experiencing at least six of eight different bad childhood experiences-from frequent verbal abuse to living with a mentally ill person-average age at death was about 61, compared to 79 for people who didn’t have any of these experiences as children, the researchers found.

Dr. David W. Brown and Dr. Robert Anda of the CDC and colleagues from the CDC and Kaiser Permanente have been following 17,337 men and women who visited the health plan between 1995 and 1997 to investigate the relationship between bad childhood experiences and health.

So far, Anda noted in an interview, they have shown links between childhood stressors and heart disease, lung disease, liver disease and other conditions. “The strength of it really surprised me, how powerfully it’s related to health,” the researcher said.

In the current analysis, the researchers reviewed death records through 2006 to investigate whether these experiences might also relate to mortality. During that time, 1,539 study participants died.

Each person was asked whether they had any of eight different categories of such experiences, including verbal abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse with physical contact, having a battered mother, having a substance-abusing person in the household, having a mentally ill person in the household, having a household member who was incarcerated, or having one’s parents separate or divorce.

Sixty-nine percent of the study participants who were younger than 65 reported at least one of the adverse childhood experiences, while 53 percent of people 65 and older did.

Those who reporting experiencing six or more were 1.5 times more likely to die during follow-up than those who reported none, the researchers found. They were 1.7 times as likely to die at age 75 or younger, and nearly 2.4 times as likely to die at or before age 65.

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Overweight mothers linked to infant heart defects

in.reuters.com

Overweight mothers linked to infant heart defects

Women who are overweight or obese when they get pregnant are more likely to give birth to children with congenital heart defects, according to a U.S. government study released on Thursday.

The study, conducted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, concluded that women who were overweight or obese at the time they became pregnant were 18 percent more likely to give birth to babies with heart defects, while severely obese women had a 30 percent increased risk.

The babies had problems including obstructive defects on the right side of the heart and defects in the tissue separating the heart’s two upper chambers, the researchers reported in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

“Congenital heart defects are the most common types of birth defect, and among all birth defects, they are a leading cause of illness, death and medical expenditures,” said Dr. Edwin Trevathan, a CDC expert on birth defects and developmental disabilities.

The CDC, the U.S. government’s disease watchdog, recommends that overweight women work with their doctors to achieve a healthy weight before pregnancy.

Researchers examined the health of 6,440 infants with congenital heart defects and 5,673 infants without problems, all of whose mothers were interviewed as part of the CDC’s National Birth Defects Prevention Study.

They assessed obesity according to each woman’s body mass index, or BMI, which relates weight to height. A woman 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighing 190 pounds (86 kg) would have a BMI of 31.6, while a woman of the same height who weighs 160 pounds (72 kg) would have a BMI of 26.6.

The researchers defined overweight as a BMI of 25 to 29.9, moderate obesity as a BMI of 30 to 34.9 and severe obesity as a BMI of 35 or above.

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