Lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, smoking and blood pressure have a greater impact on the heart health of women than men, a new study says. Women with poor health have nearly five times the risk of heart disease compared to women with ideal health, according to findings scheduled for presentation Saturday at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Chicago. By comparison, men in poor health only have 2.5 times the risk of heart disease compared to men in ideal health. “For the same level of health, our study shows that the increase in risk [related to each factor] is higher in women than in men — it’s not one-size-fits-all,” lead researcher Dr. Maneesh Sud, an interventional cardiologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, said in a news release. The new study is the first to show that such lifestyle risks are more strongly linked to women’s heart health, researchers said. “This is novel and something that hasn’t been seen in other studies,” Sud said. The study focused on eight factors associated with heart disease: diet, sleep, exercise, smoking, body mass index, blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure. (Body mass index is a estimate of body fat based on height and weight.) Researchers looked at these factors in more than 175,000 Canadian adults who enrolled in the Ontario Health Study between 2009…  read on >  read on >

Folks frequently use their smartwatches to monitor their daily step count, aiming to get enough physical activity to improve their health. But smartwatches are tracking another measure of health that could prove even more important, a new study suggests. Smartwatches also capture a person’s average daily heart rate, and dividing that by their daily number of steps provides a more reliable measure of a person’s heart fitness than either number on its own, according to research to be presented in Chicago Saturday at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology. “The metric we developed looks at how the heart responds to exercise, rather than exercise itself,” lead researcher Zhanlin Chen, a medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, said in a news release. “It’s a more meaningful metric because it gets at the core issue of capturing the heart’s capacity to adjust under stress as physical activity fluctuates throughout the day,” he added. “Our metric is a first attempt at capturing that with a wearable device.” Generally, people are recommended to get 10,000 steps a day, although the number has varied from study to study. For this new study, researchers analyzed data from nearly 7,000 American adults who provided Fitbit data and their electronic health records to an National Institutes of Health research program. All told, the data reflected 51…  read on >  read on >

Dancing is known to lift the spirit, and a new study shows that Alzheimer’s disease patients respond to the rhythmic moves as well. Dance classes eased agitation in a small group of people with Alzheimer’s disease and other related dementias, researchers reported in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease. “This study highlights how movement-based interventions, like adapted dance, can be a meaningful way to improve both physical and emotional well-being for individuals with dementia,” researcher Rodney Guttmann, interim chair of biology with the University of West Florida, said in a news release. The three-month study took place in The Retreat, an adult day care fun by the Council on Aging of West Florida. “I was fortunate to witness the dancing intervention multiple times in person, and the activity was so well-run and fun that I could see morale, comprehension and physical ability among the participants improve in real time,” Council on Aging President and CEO Josh Newby said in a news release. For the study, researcher recruited four men and 12 women with Alzheimer’s disease or related dementia. Half of the participants were randomly assigned to take hour-long dance classes twice a week for three months, while the other half participated in activities without music like bingo, puzzles, crafts, cards and board games. Those in the dance group were taught six different routines like the box…  read on >  read on >

Concussion damage could linger in an athlete’s brain for at least a year, long after they’ve rejoined their sport, a new study says. Concussed college athletes had brain changes that remained visible in brain scans up to a year after they’d been cleared to return to play, researchers reported in a study published March 12 in the journal Neurology. “The presence of significant, long-lasting brain changes after injury reinforces concerns about the consequences of repeated concussions, and to what extent these effects accumulate over time,” lead researcher Nathan Churchill, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience research with St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, Canada, said in a news release. For the study, researchers examined 187 college athletes, of whom 25 had suffered a concussion during regular season play in basketball, football, hockey, lacrosse, rugby, soccer and volleyball. The concussed athletes were also compared to 27 athletes, matched for factors like sex and sport, who hadn’t suffered a concussion. Athletes had MRI scans taken before their seasons began, as well as five days, one to three months, and a year after returning to play following a concussion. Concussed players still showed signs of brain injury in MRI scans taken an average five days after concussion, when they’d been cleared to resume play, results show. Those signs of brain injury lasted for up to one year later, researchers noted.…  read on >  read on >

Purposeful splishing and splashing can help you trim your waist size and drop excess pounds, a new evidence review has concluded. Water aerobics led to about 6 pounds of weight loss and more than an inch off the waists of overweight and obese people, researchers reported in the journal BMJ Open. “Specifically, water aerobics interventions lasting over 10 weeks significantly reduced body weight and waist circumference, with a more pronounced effect observed in females,” concluded the research team led by senior investigator Jong-Chul Park with Pukyong National University in Busan, South Korea. For the evidence review, researchers pooled data from 10 previous clinical trials involving 286 participants. Water aerobics is particularly good for people with excess weight, as the buoyancy of water helps reduce joint injuries that might occur during land-based exercise, researchers said in background notes. The water exercises in these trials included aerobics, Zumba dance, yoga and jogging, six to 12 weeks. People exercised mostly two to three times a week, with most sessions lasting an hour. While water aerobics did help people drop pounds and cut waist size, it wasn’t associated with a reduction in Body Mass Index (BMI) or percentage of body fat, researchers noted. (BMI is an estimate of body fat based on height and weight.) The studies included few men, making it hard to judge water aerobics’ effectiveness among…  read on >  read on >