Category: Health

{{The emotional problems associated with loneliness have long been acknowledged, but now there is evidence that being lonely has an impact on overall health.

Researchers found that lonely people are more likely to be heavy drinkers, smokers and overweight.}}

Six out of ten persons of the black race, are more susceptible to heart failures, Dr. Philip Amoo, a Physician Specialist at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Ghana, has said.

According to him, persons of the black race are more prone to developing cardiovascular diseases as well as cancers which are usually transmitted through the gene and partly due to poor lifestyle.

Heart failure means that the heart is not able to pump blood as well as it should.

Several young persons have had their lives terminated unexpectedly by heart-related diseases in recent times.

Four risk factors are the strongest predictors of heart failure: high blood pressure (also called hypertension), chronic kidney disease, being overweight, and having low levels of HDL, the “good” cholesterol.

Most Africans who reportedly develop heart failure, have high blood pressure by age 40, according to research.

Speaking to local media, Dr. Amoo noted that the situation has become pronounced in in recent times because of failure to give due regard to the risk factors.

He said: “To have a new hypertension when it’s not in the family or in your gene, you would get it at 60 [which means] you must abuse your body for a long time. But what do we see?”

“…If our fathers in the village where they are not exposed to these junk foods they hardly ever have these heart attacks, hypertension and so on. Because even though they have the gene that will make them predisposed to all these, the external factor [lifestyle] that must be coupled to it before you’ll have the disease are not there.

“So if you take Ten Ghanaians from the village somewhere with clean blood pressure…and bring them to Accra, exposed them to the junk food; you wait within Ten years, Six of them would come down with blood pressure,” Dr. Amoo concluded.

He therefore advised regular checkups particularly for persons of 35 years and above in order not to have their lives abruptly cut by the disease.

“By the age of 35…checking your blood pressure every year is non-negotiable. Once you are a black [race] make sure that at least yearly you check your blood pressure.

If you have your mother, your father, [any relative] coming down with hypertension, diabetes then know that you have a higher risk of inheriting the disease and it’s just a matter of time”.

{Dr. Amoo }

{myjoyonline}

{{In 1986, a 44-year-old woman was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital. She felt fine all day, but in the afternoon she developed extreme crushing pain in her chest, radiating through her left arm. }}

It’s a classic sign of a heart attack, but the puzzling thing was that she didn’t suffer from coronary heart disesase. There was no life-threatening clot in the arteries surrounding the heart.

It looked, from the outside, like a heart attack, but it wasn’t. Describing the unusual case in the New England Journal of Medicine, Thomas Ryan, and John Fallon suggest the apparent damage to the heart muscle was emotional rather than physiological. Earlier that day, she had been informed that her 17-year-old son had committed suicide.

Could the woman have suffered from a broken heart? The answer, it turned out, was already hiding in plain sight. The Massachusetts case was surprising to doctors – but it wasn’t news to everybody.

For many years, doctors scorned the idea of a relationship between psychology and physiology. In their book Zoobiquity, Kathryn Bowers and Barbara Natterson-Horowitz described this attitude: “Among many physicians, the idea that emotions could cause actual physical events within the architecture of the heart was viewed with nearly the same sideways glance as an interest in healing crystals or homeopathy.

Real cardiologists concentrated on real problems you could see: arterial plaque, embolising blood clots, and rupturing aortas. Sensitivity was for psychiatrists.”

Despite this, the evidence that extreme emotions can impact the heart goes back decades – only not among humans. It was wildlife biologists and veterinarians who first noticed that extreme emotions can wreak havoc on body physiology.

By the mid-20th Century, they noticed that a curious thing happens when an animal experiences a sudden jolt of life-or-death fear. When it’s caught by an advancing predator, adrenaline fills the bloodstream to such an extent that the blood almost becomes like a poison, damaging the animal’s muscles, including the heart. It’s called “capture myopathy”.

By 1974, the effect was so well known to veterinarians that a letter in Nature proposing a possible way to avoid it didn’t even bother explaining what it was in the first place.

By then, researchers had realised that capturing animals for scientific or conservation purposes – such as for captive breeding, for mark-and-release studies, or for relocation – was often, ironically, fatal.

Indeed, by the time that physicians were puzzling over that strange, apparently emotion-driven heart-attack in Massachusetts, veterinarians had already recognised stress-related cardiomyopathy in a tremendous variety of non-human species: elk, pronghorn sheep, moose, deer, scimitar-horned oryx, antelope, muntjac, wisent, gazelle, dugongs, and wild turkeys.

Since then, that list has expanded to include duikers, Arabian oryx, dolphins, whales, ducks, little bustards, partridges, river otters, cranes, bats, a variety of shorebirds, and a slow loris. Animals who are most prone to capture myopathy are small mammals, ungulates, birds, and anxious primates.

From around the mid-1990s, more case studies in humans, too, began to hint at physiological problems due to extreme psychological stress. In 1995, researchers Jeremy Kark, Silvie Goldman, and Leon Epstein found that Israelis were more likely to die as a result of heart-related problems on 18 January 1991 than on any day in the preceding and subsequent two months, as well as for the same period of time the previous year.

That’s because that’s when the Persian Gulf War began, resulting in 18 missiles directed at Israel from Iraq. To be clear, the increase in mortality measured by this study was not due to injuries directly caused by the missile attacks; they were cardiovascular-related deaths that mostly occurred outside of hospital care.

“The perception of an imminent, life-threatening situation was widespread,” the researchers wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association.

“To prepare for chemical attack, gas masks and automatic syringes containing atropine were distributed to the entire population. Every household prepared a sealed room. Civil defence instructions were issued in the media.”

The entire country was heavy with anxiety to begin with, and the life-or-death fear associated with missile strikes was too much for some to bear.

The following year, a different group of researchers took a look at sudden cardiac-related deaths in Los Angeles on 17 January 1994. That day was when a magnitude 6.8 earthquake – “one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded in a major city in North America,” the researchers noted – struck the region at 4:31am.

In the New England Journal of Medicine, they reported a massive spike in cardiovascular-related deaths due to the stress of the early-morning jolt. As in the case of the Israeli missile attacks, that doesn’t include traumatic injuries directly caused by the earthquake.

These deaths are instead attributable to the extreme stress of being shaken awake by a violent earthquake. It should be noted, however, that many of those who died were not entirely healthy to begin with.

In the 1990s Japanese researchers coined the term “takotsubo cardiomyopathy” to describe a stress-induced apparent heart attack. It was so-named because the ballooning of the left ventricle characteristic of this sort of cardiomyopathy is reminiscent to a type of fishing pot, called takotsubo, which are used to trap octopuses.

But it wasn’t until 2005 that enough studies had been described in the medical literature that human medicine began to fully take note. That year the concept of stress cardiomyopathy was firmly established within the medical literature, though many physicians still refer to is as takotsubo, or occasionally as “broken heart syndrome.”

So while it isn’t necessarily sadness or rejection that can hurt us physiologically, there is now little doubt that the mind and our emotions can have a direct, measurable effect on our physical bodies, and when things take a turn for the worse, it can lead to catastrophe.

After consulting with veterinarians at the Los Angeles Zoo, it was Natterson-Horowitz, a UCLA cardiology professor, who put the heart-related aspects of capture myopathy with takotsubo cardiomyopathy side by side. In Zoobiquity, she and Bowers, a journalist, ask whether the two syndromes are really one and the same, afflicting humans and animals alike.

It’s just a shame that it took so long for doctors to accept what wildlife biologists and veterinarians had known for decades. If this episode teaches us anything, it’s that the traits we share with animals run far deeper than first appears.

As this column has explored, the commonalities are myriad, whether it’s the ability to dance, to rule by democracy, or to lure the opposite sex with perfume.

They’re written into the very fabric of our biology. Our species occupies but one tiny branch on the enormous tree of life; it would be a shame if our hubris prevented us from applying knowledge derived from decades of research on every other species on the planet to our own.

{BBC}

{{The World Health Organization has declared its South East Asia region polio-free.
The certification is being hailed a “historic milestone” in the global fight to eradicate the deadly virus.}}

It comes after India officially recorded three years without a new case of polio.

The announcement means 80% of the world is now officially free of polio, although the disease is still endemic in Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

Other countries in the WHO South East Asia region, such as Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bhutan, have been free of the virus for more than 15 years.

However, despite the “huge global significance” of the announcement, the WHO admits there are still major challenges to overcome if the world is the reach the goal of eradicating polio everywhere by 2018.

There have also been outbreaks in conflict-hit countries such as Syria, which had previously managed to stamp out the virus.

Polio mainly affects children under five years old. The virus is transmitted through contaminated food and water, and multiplies in the intestine. It can then invade the nervous system, causing paralysis in one in every 200 infections.

South East Asia is the fourth of six WHO regions to be declared polio-free after the Americas, Western Pacific and Europe regions. Eastern Mediterranean and Africa have yet to gain a similar status.

Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, WHO South East Asia regional director, said: “This is very significant because before this region was certified polio-free, we had half the world’s population polio free.

“With the South East Asia region being added we now have 80% of the population polio free.

“This was a problem the region was struggling with for a long time, but now finally, we are polio free.”

Many experts thought India would be the last country in the world to get rid of polio says Deepak Kapur, of Rotary International’s India National Polio Plus Committee.

He said India faced several enormous challenges including its large population.

He said: “India has close to 170 million children under five who needed to be immunised.

“Then there’s the existence of insanitary conditions which helped the polio virus to proliferate – and impure drinking water because polio is a water borne disease.”

But he said the fact that India had managed it and now the whole of South East Asia could be declared polio free sent a powerful and optimistic message to the three remaining polio-endemic countries.

The world signed up to eradicating polio in 1988. The Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched, which is a partnership between governments and organisations such as Unicef, the WHO and Rotary International. The aim was to banish polio once and for all.

In 1988 there were 350,000 recorded cases. By 2012 cases had fallen to 223. But last year there was a rise in cases to 406 new infections.

The increase is largely down to vaccination campaigns being interrupted by conflict. In October 2013, Syria reported its first case of polio since 1999. By March 2014 there were 25 cases.

An outbreak in the Horn of Africa, which started in May 2013, has seen 217 new cases in Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia.

While Thursday’s announcement clearly marked an important milestone, there was still a long way to go, said Mr Kapur.

“Every child in the world is at risk of contracting polio until such a time as the wild polio virus is completely eradicated from every part of the world,” he said.

“Until then no child – be it in North America or Europe – will be free of polio potentially hunting them down all over again.

“The only way to ensure the wild polio virus no longer exists in any part of the world is to wipe it out of every community in the world.

“It is not good enough to wipe it out on one continent and not the rest of the world because today the world is just one global village.

“The only way to keep polio away is through immunisation.”

He said if every child on the planet were immunised, there would be nowhere for the virus to flourish and spread.

“Today’s a big occasion for the entire global polio eradication initiative because if India – which had the most difficult of situations – can do it, others around the world can do it too,” Mr Kapur said.

“So Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria need to replicate the example of India and go after this virus.

“Global eradication could and should be achieved in the very near future.”

BBC