cholesterol Archives - Iran News Daily

People on blood pressure, cholesterol drugs have bad diets

reporter 1222 — Thu, 06 Feb 2020 11:24:48 +0000

TEHRAN (Iran News) – People diagnosed with high blood pressure or high cholesterol often let heart-healthy habits slip after starting treatment with prescription drugs, a new study has found.

In an analysis published on Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, Finnish researchers found adults at risk for heart disease and stroke who took cholesterol — or blood pressure-lowering medications were more likely to reduce their activity levels and gain weight over time than those not on drug treatment, according to UPI.

“Medication shouldn’t be viewed as a free pass to continue or start an unhealthy lifestyle,” study coauthor Maarit J. Korhonen, a senior researcher at the University of Turku in Finland, said in a press release. “People starting on medications should be encouraged to continue or start managing their weight, be physically active, manage to quit smoking.”

Heart-healthy lifestyle habits — like exercise and a balanced diet — are always recommended whether or not blood pressure or cholesterol medications are prescribed.

Korhonen and her colleagues assessed more than 40,000 public-sector workers in Finland who had not been previously diagnosed with heart disease or stroke. On average, participants were 52 years of age at the beginning of the study, and 80 percent of them were female.

Each participant was given two or more surveys in four-year intervals between 2000 and 2013. The surveys assessed BMI, physical activity and smoking history.

The researchers also obtained pharmacy data if they began taking the prescribed high blood pressure or statin medications, categorizing medication use based on those who began the preventive medications between the start of the study and the four-year follow-up surveys and those who did not start medications.

Compared to those who did not start medications, the researchers found that those who did were eight percent more likely to become physically inactive. They also noted that those on medication were 82 percent more likely to become obese or have an increase in body mass index.

The researchers note that because of a public health initiative in Finland, as well as variations in the habits of participants — such as smoking, the cessation of which can affect weight gain, and a lack of specific information on participant diets — the results of the study may not be broadly generalizable. But, they say, the research suggests that many slack off in lifestyle habits when they start drug treatment.

“Our findings support the notion that there is scope to improve management of lifestyle-related risk factors among individuals who have initiated preventive medication,” researchers wrote in the study. “Patients’ awareness of their risk factors alone seems not to be effective in improving health behaviors.”

The post People on blood pressure, cholesterol drugs have bad diets appeared first on Iran News Daily.

Low Levels of Bad Cholesterol Increase Stroke Risk

reporter 1222 — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 10:30:52 +0000

According to the latest guidelines from the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association, a person’s levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol should remain under 100 milligrams per deciliter (mg/dl) to maintain health.

That is because, generally, specialists have considered LDL to be “bad” cholesterol. LDL carries cholesterol to the cells that need to make use of it, but if its levels are too high, it can stick to the arteries, leading to all manner of cardiovascular problems.

However, new research from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, MA, has found that women with LDL levels below 100 mg/dl may actually be more at risk of hemorrhagic (bleeding) stroke. This type of stroke, though less common than an ischemic stroke, is harder to treat and thus more dangerous to the person experiencing it.

In this study, the researchers looked at the data of 27,937 women aged 45 years and over who took part in the Women’s Health Study. The data included measurements of each participant’s LDL cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol, and triglyceride levels at the beginning of the study.

The researchers has admitted that their study has faced some limitations, including the fact that they only had access to cholesterol and triglyceride level measurements at baseline and that they did not have a chance to investigate whether menopause-related factors played a role in some of the women’s increased stroke risk.

The post Low Levels of Bad Cholesterol Increase Stroke Risk appeared first on Iran News Daily.

Discovery Can Pave the Way for More Effective Cholesterol Medicine

reporter 1222 — Sun, 17 Sep 2017 05:14:29 +0000

TEHRAN – Research sheds new light on how the body converts the bad kind of cholesterol. The discovery could lead to new and potentially more effective medicine.

More than 600,000 Danes are being treated with cholesterol lowering medicine. 98 per cent of them are treated with statins, which curb the body’s own production of cholesterol so that the level of cholesterol falls. However, statins also give rise to the body forming more of a harmful protein — known as PCSK9 — which counters the effect of the statins.

New research from Aarhus University has now uncovered the way in which PCSK9 breaks down the LDL receptors, which are a kind of receptor molecule that absorbs the bad LDL cholesterol in the blood into the liver.

This discovery makes it possible to develop potentially more efficient and also cheaper PCSK9 inhibiting medicine, which is the new hope for cholesterol treatment, ScienceDaily reported.

“Statins save many lives every year, but the medicine has the unfortunate consequence that the liver cells begin to produce more PSCK9. We have now uncovered how PCSK9 is captured by specific molecules in the liver called heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPG), which subsequently lead to the breaking down of the LDL receptor. The consequence is less LDL receptor in the liver, higher LDL cholesterol in the blood and an increased risk of blood clots in the heart. If this process is inhibited, the LDL receptor is protected against degradation, and the amount of cholesterol in the blood falls,” says Camilla Gustafsen, who is one of the researchers behind the result and assistant professor at the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University.

With the discovery, the researchers have provided one of the pieces that has been missing in the puzzle of understanding PCSK9, and this opens up for the development of a new type of medicine that can potentially work far better than statins.

The research result has just been published in the international scientific journal Nature Communications.

Potential for better and cheaper medicine

PCSK9 inhibiting medicine is already available on the market, but due to high costs it is only offered to patients who are particularly at risk, as well as those who do not have benefit from or are intolerant to statins. Using the new knowledge about PCSK9, the researchers from Aarhus have begun to develop new medicine that is now ready for the first tests on patients.

“The development of PCSK9 inhibitors is one of the biggest biomedical success stories of recent times, and getting basic research translated into medicine has happened extremely quickly thanks to intense research around the world. But there are still aspects of the PSCK9 protein that we do not yet fully understand. The new discovery shows the potential for creating more effective PCSK9 inhibitors than those we have today, and more cheaply, so that they become accessible for many more people in line with statins,” says Simon Glerup, who is one of the driving forces behind the research project and associate professor at the Department of Biomedicine at Aarhus University.

The first medicine must first undergo comprehensive testing and will first be available for patients in five years at the earliest.

The post Discovery Can Pave the Way for More Effective Cholesterol Medicine appeared first on Iran News Daily.