Guest guest Posted October 14, 2004 Report Share Posted October 14, 2004 >>Does anyone have a source for information about the reliability of carotid IMT as an indicator of CHD? In other words, is the carotid IMT measurement(s) well correlated with the degree of coronary artery stenosis? One might logically think it would be. But it would be nice to know for sure that logic is applicable in this particular case. We started using this just over a year ago. There is more and more being published about it and it is becoming a new standard to use in research. There are several versions of it and several ways to read it and interpret it. We use the programs by Jacques Barth who was one of the inventors and has published info on it. I will find and post more info on it, as we have a bit here in our files, somewhere Jeff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 12, 2007 Report Share Posted March 12, 2007 > > Tony, > > >I think the critical factor was that your friend was not used to > >vigorous exercise and he overexerted himself beyond the capacity of > >one of the subcomponents (heart muscles, heart capillaries, etc). > > People don't suffer heart attacks just because they overextend themselves. > In the absence of underlying CVD, no one suffers a heart attack regardless > how hard they push themselves. They get tired, they get prematurely winded - > that's it. Heart attacks *always* indicate an underlying pathological > process. > > Al > Al, Just Googling " snow shoveling heart attack " gets over half a million hits. Apparently shoveling snow can cause death rates from heart attacks to triple among men 35 to 49 years old, and the American Heart Association recognizes the significant correlation. I would not dismiss overexertion, rather than pathology, as a cause of heart attacks. Strenuous activity causes the heart to pump harder and increases blood pressure. Couldn't this increased pressure burst some capillaries? I think that the statistics say yes. Does this constitute pathology? Not necessarily. Everything including tendons, muscles, and bones will break when stressed enough. They will always break at its weakest point. Tony == http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=3027990 Don't Let a Snow Forecast Also Forecast Your Heart Attack: Heart-Health Tips from the American Heart Association ALBANY - Cardiac deaths rise during the holiday season, and the American Heart Association recommends the following tips to help prevent sudden cardiac arrest: Avoid Sudden Cold Weather Exertion: Snowstorms present challenges for everyone, primarily because getting rid of snow usually means sudden exertion in cold weather. Snow shoveling can be healthy, good exercise, but not if you are normally sedentary, are in poor physical condition, or have risk factors that make snow shoveling inadvisable for your health. Everyone who must be outdoors in cold weather should avoid sudden exertion, like lifting a heavy shovel full of snow. Even walking through heavy, wet snow or snowdrifts can strain a person's heart. == http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/24/earlyshow/contributors/emilysenay/main\ 668725.shtml If you shovel for 30 minutes, you'll clear away 200 calories along with the snow. Snow shoveling is very demanding on the body. Typical winter conditions (a little more than an inch of snowfall and temperatures that dip below 20 degrees) cause death rates from heart attacks to triple among men 35 to 49 years old. Shoveling snow can be very dangerous if the right precautions aren't taken. What makes shoveling more dangerous than other average tasks around the house is the temperature. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase during strenuous activity. That, coupled with the body's natural reflex to constrict arteries and blood vessels when exposed to the cold, is a recipe for a heart attack. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 12, 2007 Report Share Posted March 12, 2007 Rodney wrote: > > His appearance - younger than his chronological age, slim, sensible > diet, and in all other respects *apparently* fit and healthy - looked > to me to fit a profile for low LDL. It was his heart attack that > seemed like the aberration. > > I think we may be missing the point. When would this first heart attack have occurred if the person ate a lot of meat and had a large BMI? The point of CR and ON is to move your own personal longevity chart to to right. We can not know what this person's natural tendencies would be in a different situation. One person is one person and one can not extrapolate from them. Positive Dennis Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 12, 2007 Report Share Posted March 12, 2007 Hi Rodney and All, I believe that his height and weight can be estimated accurately by you. What his diet was is something that presents questions? People are incorrect in their eating habits. Those who have suffered ill health are often reticent to admitting that the cause of their misfortune is their fork and knife. My brother had a heart attack and claimed that it had blocked completely his main artery, and that he had survived because his heart had bypassed the block. When I read his actual doctor's report, however, it was a branch from his main artery that was blocked. Anecdotes should be treated as such. Also, Al Young has said in a separate message that snow shoveling could lead to a burst artery, but heart attacks that require stents are due to blocked arteries, as you have pointed out. Cheers, Al. --- Rodney <perspect1111@...> wrote: > Hi : > > Well I don't know what you have in mind for me to > provide as a > satisfactory answer to your question. Are you > expecting me to demand > he produce a signed certificate from his doctor? > > His appearance - younger than his chronological age, > slim, sensible > diet, and in all other respects *apparently* fit and > healthy - looked > to me to fit a profile for low LDL. It was his > heart attack that > seemed like the aberration. > > And that, of course, was the reason for my original > post about this. > It was *because* it was surprising to me that anyone > would have a > heart attack, and require a stent and blood thinning > medication with > an LDL that low that I posted about it. If he had > told me his BP was > 180/120 and his LDL was 300 I would never have > mentioned it here, > since it would have contributed nothing new to the > knowledge base of > this group. > > If someone knows of any papers that reported on > studies that looked > at the relationship between LDL and occlusion in > coronary and/or > carotid arteries we would be much better able to > assess this > information. Is he a 5 sigma event that it would be > reasonable to > ignore? Or is his case not especially unusual? If > the latter then > we all need to have carotid IMTs done, imo. > -- Al Pater, PhD; email: Alpater@... ________________________________________________________________________________\ ____ We won't tell. Get more on shows you hate to love (and love to hate): TV's Guilty Pleasures list. http://tv./collections/265 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest guest Posted March 12, 2007 Report Share Posted March 12, 2007 > > Tony, > > >I think the critical factor was that your friend was not used to > >vigorous exercise and he overexerted himself beyond the capacity of > >one of the subcomponents (heart muscles, heart capillaries, etc). > > People don't suffer heart attacks just because they overextend themselves. > In the absence of underlying CVD, no one suffers a heart attack regardless > how hard they push themselves. They get tired, they get prematurely winded - > that's it. Heart attacks *always* indicate an underlying pathological > process. > > Al > >Just Googling " snow shoveling heart attack " gets over half a million hits. Apparently shoveling snow can cause death rates from heart attacks to triple among men 35 to 49 years old, and the American Heart Association recognizes the significant correlation. I would not dismiss overexertion, rather than pathology, as a cause of heart attacks. Strenuous activity causes the heart to pump harder and increases blood pressure. Couldn't this increased pressure burst some capillaries? I think that the statistics say yes. Does this constitute pathology? Not necessarily. Everything including tendons, muscles, and bones will break when stressed enough. They will always break at its weakest point. Tony, I'm certainly not surprised to hear that in a middle aged American population death from physical over exertion in cold weather is 3 times as likely. Consider that population: it's generally sedentary and the standard american diet is, well, the standard american diet. I think you probably know as well as I do that the etiology of heart attacks usually, if not always, involves the rupturing of plaques that provoke clots that subsequently occlude coronary arteries. This scenario represents the disease process we both know as " arteriosclerosis " . My strong sense is that if it weren't for arteriosclerosis, heart attacks (focal necrosis of heart tissue due to arterial blockage) would not exist. I personally have never heard of heart attack resulting from burst capillaries. Have you? It's simply not normal (in the sense of an absence of underlying pathology) for a healthy human being to fall prey to a heart attack, even while exercising heavily in the cold. I doubt, for example, that traditional eskimo populations experience much in the way of heart attack. Otoh, my sense is that the life style most Westerners predisposes them to arteriosclerosis and most of us probably have at least some arteriosclerosis. We've all heard the accounts of autopsies on young men (soldiers, accident victims) that reveal at least the beginnings of arteriosclerosis. Maybe I'm too influenced by testosterone-sodden thinking, but I have a hard time accepting the idea that I risk death by the mere act of shoveling my driveway...given that I have a physical job, that I stairclimb 6 days/wk at moderately high intensity (labored conversations), and that there's no heart disease in my family (lotsa cancer, thankyou) that I know of. When I shovel my driveway, it's much like a stairclimbing session - 50 minutes of moderate exercise. In fact, in my case, the shoveling actually substitutes for the usual stairclimbing workout. Maybe it will kill me some day, but I'm of the attitude that there's a such thing as excess timidity vis-a-vis the safety proscriptions involving the " dangerous " business of actually moving our bodies at a level of vigor that nature apparently " intended " . Al Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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