by bintangkecil on Monday, January 11th, 2010 | Health, News | No Comments

Why is watching too much TV can shorten your life?

According to a new study, watching too much television can make you feel a bit brain-dead. It might also take years off your life.

The more time you spend watching TV, the greater your risk of dying at an earlier age — especially from heart disease, researchers found.

The study followed 8,800 adults with no history of heart disease for more than six years. Compared to those who watched less than two hours of TV per day, people who watched four hours or more were 80 percent more likely to die from heart disease and 46 percent more likely to die from any cause. All told, 284 people died during the study.

Each additional hour spent in front of the TV increased the risk of dying from heart disease by 18 percent and the overall risk of death by 11 percent, according to the study, which was published Monday on the Web site of Circulation, an American Heart Association journal. (The study will appear in the Jan. 26 print edition.)

The pattern held even after the researchers took into account the education level and overall health of the participants — their age, whether they smoked, and their cholesterol and blood pressure, for example.

Television isn’t lethal in and of itself; the real problem appears to be that sitting is the “default position” for TV viewing, says lead study author David Dunstan, Ph.D., the head of the physical activity lab at the Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, a national research center in Victoria, Australia.

“Prolonged watching of television equals a lot of sitting, which invariably means there’s an absence of muscle movement,” Dunstan says. If your muscles stay inactive for too long, it can disrupt your metabolism, he explains.

What’s more, exercise doesn’t necessarily make up for long sessions in front of the tube. Dunstan and his colleagues figured into their analysis how much the study participants exercised. When they compared groups of adults who exercised the same amount but watched varying amounts of TV, those who watched more TV were still at a higher risk of dying during the study.

“You can be active and also watch high amounts of television,” Dunstan says. Television isn’t necessarily replacing our exercise time, he explains, but it is replacing everyday, “non-sweaty” movements as basic as standing and walking from room to room. The positive health effects of these seemingly negligible activities are underestimated, he says.

Previous studies have reported a link between sitting time and the risk of heart disease and death, but this is the first to focus on television watching, which is one of the most common leisure activities. Adults in Australia, where the study was conducted, average about three hours a day; in the United States, the average has been estimated at up to five hours.

The amount of television a person watches is a good index of the overall time they spend sitting, Dunstan says. But there’s also some evidence that watching TV may be unhealthier than other sedentary activities, says Peter Katzmarzyk, Ph.D., an exercise scientist at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Although it’s a handy way to gauge a person’s sitting time, television isn’t the only reason for the decline of everyday movement, Dunstan points out. Technology has made people more sedentary in general. While there are still plenty of occupations that require people to be on their feet all day, more and more of us sit at desks, glued to computer screens. Instead of walking down the hall to speak with co-workers, we email them.

“Modern technology has virtually engineered a lot of incidental, non-sweaty activity out of our lives,” Dunstan says.

Even watching TV provides opportunities to move around, Dunstan says. Commercial breaks are built-in excuses to stand up and stretch your legs for a minute or two.

Exercise is important for health, but avoiding prolonged periods of sitting is nearly as important, Dunstan says. “Just get up and move about during the day. The more you move, the greater the health benefits are likely to be.”

Tags: American Heart Association, Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, David Dunstan, health issues, heart disease, watch too much television, watch too much tv, watching television health risk, watching too much tv

by nate on Sunday, November 9th, 2008 | Health, Knowledge, Life | 2 Comments

As one of the person who needs to watch out for my cholesterol levels, I think this article really helps:

(CNN) – Healthy men and women with good cholesterol levels could significantly reduce their risk of heart disease by taking cholesterol-lowering drugs, better known as statins, according to a study released Sunday.
Nearly 18,000 people in 26 countries, including 7,000 women and nearly 5,000 minorities, participated in the clinical trial, the results of which were published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

All had very good cholesterol levels, with average LDL – or “bad” cholesterol – levels of 108 and average HDL –or “good” cholesterol – levels of 49.

However, each participant had elevated levels of “high-sensitivity C-reactive protein” or hs-CRP – a marker that indicates inflammation in the body and can contribute to coronary heart disease, the No. 1 killer of men and women in the United States.

Under the current guidelines set for lowering cholesterol levels, none of the participants would have qualified for taking statins.

In the study, the participants took 20 milligrams of the drug Rosuvastatin – commercially known as Crestor – or a placebo pill.

The maker of Crestor, AstraZeneca, funded the study.
ccording to the lead author, Dr. Paul Ridker of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, the pharmaceutical company had no input in the study’s design and didn’t see the final data analysis until the study was submitted for publication.

Designed to last up to five years, the trial was stopped after less than two because endpoints set by an independent oversight committee were met, the study says.

Researchers found that participants taking Crestor cut their risk of heart attack, stroke and death by nearly half – 44 percent – compared with participants taking the placebo.

Bad cholesterol levels were reduced by 50 percent and hs-CRP levels dropped 37 percent. Overall death in the Crestor group was 20 percent less than the placebo group.

“This is a huge reduction, unprecedented reduction in risk occurring very quickly,” said Dr. Steven Nissen, a cardiologist at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic, who has studied the significance of CRP in predicting heart disease.

Nissen estimates that 36 million Americans qualify for statins and that the new research could add at least 10 million to the ranks of who should be taking cholesterol-lowering drugs. Some published reports suggest the number could be twice as high.

The study’s statistician, Harvard University’s Robert Glynn, estimates that about 250,000 heart attacks, strokes, hospitalizations and cardiac deaths could be prevented over five years if people with good cholesterol and high hs-CRP levels were taking statins.

Ridker, the lead author, said doing so would benefit patients and health care providers, noting a simple blood test to detect hs-CRP levels is much cheaper than hospitalization.

Ridker said the diversity of the participants, including women, African-Americans and Hispanics, is significant because there is limited information on preventing heart disease among those demographic groups.

Today, only people with high levels of cholesterol are prescribed statins. Those with good cholesterol levels typically don’t have their hs-CRP levels tested because there are no clear guidelines on who should be tested and how often.

“These studies show that CRP levels are now emerging as an important risk factor in the development and progression of coronary heart disease,” said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, director of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, referring to this study and two others being presented at an American Heart Association conference this weekend.

Dr. Mark Hlatky, a professor of health policy and cardiology at Stanford University, reviewed the study for The New England Journal of Medicine. Hlatky agreed the study “provides more evidence about the effectiveness of statin therapy in reducing cardiovascular risk,” even among people who don’t currently meet the guidelines for this kind of therapy.

But he suggested that before changing any guidelines, more research needs to be done to determine the effectiveness of testing people for hs-CRP levels, something this study was not designed to do.

Tags: cholesterol drugs, heart disease, lower cholesterol, supplements