Sea Crest Health Care Center

Stress is a part and parcel of our frenetic lives, but chronic stress is not what the doctor ordered. Too much stress hikes up your blood pressure, causes body inflammation and can result in heart problems.

So what do we do to slow down? Here are some ways to manage your stress.

• Be realistic about your goals and keep things simple. If you offer to host the annual family Holiday party, don’t go over the top and self cater the entire thing. Take-out side dishes and salads are great fill-ins.

• Express your thoughts in writing. Keeping a journal, blog or diary can be very therapeutic. And if you are not keen of the pen, try recording yourself via a digital voice or video recorder.

• Incorporate some form of exercise into your day and be consistent about it. You don’t have to run the marathon; take a walk with a friend, join the pool at the local Y or shoot some hoops with your kids.

• Massages are the ultimate relaxant. If you don’t believe me, try one for yourself. An aside, did you know that despite the gloomy economy – massage therapy has remained quite popular according to a recent survey from the American Massage Therapy Association?

• Find out if your workplace has any stress-fighting resources in place. Many Employee-Assistance Programs (EAP), wellness programs or health plans provide confidential personal stress-relief plans.

There is a definite association between “covert coping” in the face of unfair treatment in the workplace. Men who tend to walk away from conflict at work could be setting themselves up for a myocardial infarction and cardiac death.

In a prospective study of Swedish workers, those who used “covert coping” techniques when they felt they had been unfairly treated were more likely to have an MI or die of ischemic heart disease. Constanze Leineweber, PhD, of Stockholm University in Sweden, and colleagues  in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, expanded on research indicating  that covert coping – or  walking away from a conflict and dealing with the anger “indirectly and introvertly” – increases cardiovascular risk factors. They cautioned that the study didn’t pin down a causal relationship between covert coping and cardiovascular disease. Instead, they said, it raises “an interesting hypothesis, which needs to be confirmed or refuted by future studies.” The researchers analyzed data from a long-running prospective cohort study in Stockholm, the Work, Lipids, and Fibrinogen study, dubbed WOLF for short.

Covert coping was measured by questionnaire, in which the participant was asked about how he or she dealt with unfair treatment from either a boss or a fellow worker. The questionnaire did not measure whether or not the participant experienced unfair treatment at work nor how often covert coping mechanisms were used.

The participants were asked whether they sometimes, often, seldom, or never:

Let things pass without saying anything
Walk away
Feel bad — developing a headache, for instance
Get into a bad temper at home

The results yielded a covert coping score that could range from 8 to 32; the researchers stratified covert coping as low if the score was 8 through 14, medium if it was 15 through 18, and high if it was 19 or more.

They also categorized immediate responses – to the first two options – as low, medium, or high.

Compared with those who had low covert coping scores, the researchers found:

When the unfair treatment came from a boss, those who sometimes or often walked away were three times as likely to have an MI or ischemic death. (The hazard ratio was 3.05, with a 95% confidence interval from 1.23 to 7.58.).

Letting things pass showed a nonsignificant trend to more cardiovascular outcomes for those who did so more often. When the unfair treatment came from a co-worker, the pattern was similar, except that those who said they seldom walked away also had a significant risk for cardiovascular outcomes. The hazard ratio for those who seldom walked away was 4.08, compared with 4.45 for those who said they did so sometimes or often. Both ratios were statistically significant. Neither of the delayed reactions had any association with cardiovascular outcomes – feeling bad or becoming ill-tempered at home – either for unfair treatment from a boss or a co-worker.

Future research, Leineweber and colleagues said, should look at “whether interventions designed to reduce covert coping would alter risk of myocardial infarction and cardiac death.”

by Natalia Freeman

Excess weight is bad for your heart. You know that – but do you know why?
Fat changes the way your body metabolizes your food. Sugar that might be available as energy is packed away as fat, and fat is harder to break down for energy. Your entire metabolic system is out of whack. This, in turn, affects the entire body, including the blood vessels. Without the right sort of energy arriving at the right speed, the system begins to experience strain. And strain is what causes poor health. The vascular issues that can arrise affect the heart and blood vessels, leading to weakness, poor circulation, and failure.
Often, obese people are placed on many medications – for diabetes, for heart conditions, for atherosclerosis, for hypertension… Many – if not all – of these conditions exist because of the excess weight causing system strain. It can be reversed. But, just as it takes time to reach an unhealthy state, it takes time to reverse it. A strictly adhered-to diet can, in a few years time, reduce or eliminate the necessity of a good portion of the drug cocktail.

by Edna Milay
Sometimes it seems like everything causes cancer. Then it seems like everything prevents it. What advice should you follow and what can you regard skeptically until further research actually proves something? Here are a few lifestyle tips for cancer prevention. All are well proven to correlate with reduced cancer risks.
1. A little alcohol affects men and women differently. Men actually benefit from a small daily intake of spirits, while women should not exceed a single drink a day, if even that much.
2. Avoid processed meats at all cost, and limit your consumption of all red meat. Fish and fowl are rich in all the proteins you need without the unhealthy fats that come along with.
3. Along the same lines, try to avoid overdosing on sodium and salt, which most people do. The average salt intake is already well above the necessary limit, so any reduction on your part can only be good.
4. Whole, unprocessed foods are your best bet. Fruits, veggies, and things that grow from the ground are healthy. Foods with ingredients you can’t pronounce or that don’t resemble any naturally occurring edible should be shunned. And while you’re at it, aim for a variety of veggies and fruits. Different foods have different vitamins and minerals, so take in as much as possible.
5.  Exercise. About 30 minutes of activity per day, enough to get your heart rate up, should do the trick.
6. Avoid fat, especially saturated and hydrogenated. Hydrogenated fats, found in margarine and most junk foods, are directly linked to cancer risks. Processed sugar is also a known evil. Reduce your calorie intake as much as possible, a strategy linked to longer life overall.

by Ruth Folger Weiss

Add this to your  “it’s nice to know” file:

Physical warmth impacts on how we view other people and, creates a causal scenario where we then treat the other person in a warm or cold fashion.

To ascertain how temperature affects emotions, Lawrence Williams, PhD, assistant professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and John A. Bargh, PhD, professor of psychology at Yale University conducted a study on undergraduates.

Students were  casually asked to hold  a tester’s  cup of coffee for a moment prior to entering a room;  half the participants were asked to hold a cup of warm coffee and half were asked to hold a cup of iced coffee.

The students were   subsequently given a portfolio of information  on an unknown person described with words like intelligent, skillful, industrious, practical, and cautious. They were then asked to respond to a questionnaire evaluating the person’s personality. Interestingly, those who had held the warm coffee were much more likely to score the  “person in question”  as warmer than those who had held the iced coffee.

“It appears that the effect of physical temperature is not just on how we see others, it affects our own behavior as well,” Bargh says. “Physical warmth can make us see others as warmer people, but also cause us to be warmer — more generous and trusting .”

In the boardroom and in your social life, never underestimate the importance of  an outreached hand, especially when it’s a warm one!

~ by Damion Drilla

Dementia isn’t all about aging, studies show. Health in mid-life can have a marked effect on cognitive ability later on.

A British study of 10,308 people, mostly men, followed the subjects from roughly the ages of 35-55 (the study started in 1985) to about 60-75 years (the study ended in 2004).

Coronary heart disease in midlife was found to be linked to lower cognition in later years. In men, heart disease was linked to lower reason, vocabulary, and MMSE scores. In women, it corresponded additionally to lower phonemic and semantic fluency.

The longer the heart disease – meaning, the earlier it was contracted – the greater the drop in cognitive ability over the years. This suggests that heart disease creates an ongoing condition that continuously deteriorates mental function until dementia kicks in.

~ by Cher Giovani

The study wasn’t about dementia: it was about blood pressure. A British group researching hypertension in the elderly followed a group of participants aged 80 and over to record the effects of drug therapy treatment for hypertension on the patients. Among the many variables measured was cognitive impairment.

The 3,336 subjects were randomly assigned to receive or not receive drug therapy for hypertension. At the beginning, they were all screened to have similar medical records, including no diagnosis of dementia.

The study found that treatment definitely reduced incidence of stroke, heart failure, and death. There were also 263 cases of dementia, including vascular dementia, Alzheimer’s, and ordinary cognitive decline. Treatment showed a small, but definite increase in cognitive decline among the untreated subjects.

Further study would be necessary to see if treating hypertension directly affects dementia, or if the reduced decline is tied to the form of treatment itself; the greatest reduction in dementia was found with the use of calcium channel blockers.

~ by Jeff Noley

There are some drugs with side effects that are worse than what they treat. Or at the very least, are pretty rotten compared to the alternatives.

Avandia is one example of a drug you might want to rethink taking. Yes, diabetes is a terrible disease. But so is heart disease. And Avandia raises the chance of a heart failure by 109% compared to those taking other diabetes drugs. Exactly why hasn’t been discovered yet, but that’s not the point. Diabetics should steer clear of Avandia if they don’t want to compound their health problems. If there is no alternative to Avandia, ask your doctor about taking heart medications in conjunction with the diabetes drug to lower your risk.

Celebrex is another drug you should treat with care. It’s a pain relieve that causes pain – in the stomach, kidneys, liver, and heart. Just 400 mg of Celebrex a day have twice the risk of dying of cardiovascular disease than those who don’t. 800 mg a day tripled the risk.

Pneumonia and other respiratory tract infections are among the top-ten killers of men, but one of the medicines used to treat it can kill just as effectively. Ketek can affect the heart and damage the liver. It is far better to use one of the alternatives, such as Augmentin,  doxycycline, or Zithromax.

In general, a drug-free life is a healthy one. But if you need medication, don’t blindly accept your doctor’s prescription. Visit the library and look it up in the Physicians’ Desk Reference, and check around online for testimonials or complaints from people taking it. Always ask what the alternative is, and do a search for one yourself. There are more than 4,000 prescription medications out there; your doctor can’t be an expert on all of them. But you can – and should – be an expert on anything you’ll be putting into your system.

By Lydia Yolen

There’s finally good news in the health industry – heart disease and stroke death rates are down down down.

Death rates from coronary heart disease are down 30.7% since 1999, and stroke mortality has dropped 29.2%.

The American Heart Association set a goal to reduce coronary heart disease and stroke death by 25% by 2010, and it seems that they’ve succeeded. But they’re not resting on their laurels. Though death rates themselves are down, the risk factors that lead to death are perilously high, risking a reverse of the downward trend with time.

Age, being male, and genes are not risk factors that anyone can change, but you can try to reduce your risk factors by eliminating the following:

• Smoking
• High cholesterol
• High blood pressure
• Physical inactivity
• Obesity
• Diabetes
• Stress
• Birth control pills
• Excessive intake of alcohol