Dr. Art Hister Archives - Page 7 of 9

Dr Art Hister – No Such Thing as Minor Surgery

There is no such thing as ‘minor’ surgery.

For obvious reasons – we are nearly all always hopeful of the best happening to us – most of us don’t often hear the potential negative consequences of some choice we’re making: a big mortgage, a new stock purchase or surgery we are going to get.

Now when it comes to mortgages and stocks going bad, all we lose is money; when it comes to surgery not working out as well as we’d hoped, we can have problems for the rest of our lives.

A reminder of that comes from a study in the British Journal of Surgery in which researchers talked to over 400 people in the Netherlands who’d had various types of surgery (cosmetic procedures, neurological operations, etc) a year after the surgery had been completed.

And a surprisingly high number of people were not satisfied with the results:

17 % reported more pain that they had had before their operations
14 % said their functioning had deteriorated
16 % had “poorer mental health”
24 % complained of less vitality

What really caught my eye, though, is that 47% said they had ‘achieved near optimal recovery’, which I presume meant they were nearly completely better, but that means that 53% – over half – still had significant problems, and a large 15% claimed to have less than 50% recovery.

Surgery can be life-saving, it’s often the only option, and sometimes the best option, but it’s always good to remember that surgery also carries significant risks and doesn’t always lead to improvement, so if someone tells you that you are about to have only ‘minor’ surgery, especially if it’s an elective procedure, just remind yourself that the best definition of ‘minor’ surgery is surgery done on someone else.

Dr Art Hister – Marathon Runners

If you want to run a marathon, get tested first.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, so many baby boomers have set themselves a goal of running a marathon (or several) before they pass into older age. Unfortunately, many have set out to do this without first determining if they are fit enough to undergo the load that marathon-running puts on their no-longer-that-young hearts.

So a recent study presented at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2010 should get at least a few marathon-hoping individuals to sit up and take note.

In this study that used MRIs and a sophisticated battery of tests on a group of amateur marathon runners both before and up to 8 weeks after the race, the researchers found that “abnormal heart segments (are) more widespread and significant” in non-fit runners (presumably, more widespread than most people or doctors think).
And the lead researcher concludes that “marathon runners can be a lot less fit than they think” (which if you’ve ever been to a marathon and watched the parade of runners that come by is absolutely no surprise). He goes on to advise that everyone who is thinking of running a marathon should seriously consider getting a test known as Vo2 max, which measures oxygen consumption by the heart while the person is working out.

Dr Art Hister – Weight and Genes

Bad news for those of you who swear you can’t lose weight because of your genes: you’re probably wrong.

Lots of people swear that no matter what they do, they can’t lose weight, even if they “don’t eat more than a mouse eats, honest”, even if they “exercise till I can’t stand it any longer”.

But the brutal truth is that even though there are a few people out there who indeed cannot lose weight easily, most of us can, and when we don’t lose weight on a diet or from exercise, it’s very likely because we are eating too much or not working out enough, or more often than not, both of those combined.

And if you believe the data from a study published in PLoS Medicine, even most obese people who are genetically prone to becoming massively overweight can nonetheless overcome their genetic predisposition and still lose a significant amount of weight.

In this study, even in obese people who had inherited “17 variants” of genes leading to obesity (in other words, the dice were really loaded against these folks staying slim), those who did the most exercise tended to weigh much less than those who were sedentary, and some were even able to maintain normal weights by doing enough exercise.

Bottom line: if you want your bottom not to grow too large, do more, eat less.

Sorry, but I just report em as I see em.

Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

At least one of the reasons we are getting so much fatter on average is that we’re so surrounded by people who are overweight that we’ve lost the sense of what a normal weight should be.

At least that seems to be the case in the US, and I am sure it’s not much different up here.

A recent Harris Interactive/Health Day survey asked a representative group of American adults how much they weighed and how tall they were. The respondents were then asked whether they thought, by BMI status, if they were normal weight or overweight.

A substantial number of the survey takers – 30% – who were overweight by BMI criteria (a BMI over 25) replied that they felt they were normal weight, while 70% of those who were obese thought they were “merely overweight”.

BMI is not a perfect measure of weight. For example, since muscle weighs a lot, a very muscular person can have a high BMI but be normal weight.

That said, most of us are not too muscular (some of us – me, for example – aren’t even slightly muscular) and so for us, BMI is a pretty good measuring rod for what our weight should be.
Most experts say that you should be aiming for between 20 and 25, although I am a lot more liberal than that, so I figure that if you’re working out or just being quite active, you can allow yourself a few extra pounds without worrying about it (never mind “allowing” yourself; how about “accepting” instead because honestly, how do you keep those (few?) extra pounds off anyway as you get older, eh?)

Dr Art Hister – Cold and Your Heart

As the days get colder, a reminder for all of you who are at higher risk of heart disease (which is just about anyone over the age of 40, I think) that when the weather turns cold, the number of heart attacks goes up.

In fact, a few months ago, a study published in the British Medical Journal found that when the temperature in the UK drops by one degree Celcius, the number of heart attacks goes up by about 200.

There are a number of potential reasons starting of course with the fact that people become more sedentary when winter sets in, that people who should know better still go out and clean snow off their driveways after a snowfall (well, if you’re like me, you better clean your walkway if you want to keep peace at home), and probably because cold temperatures have a biological effect on the body, perhaps by making the blood more “Sticky” and hence leading to more clots, such as those that occur in some heart attacks and strokes.

So, when the temperature goes down, remember to try to keep warm, to avoid overdoing it when working outside, to keep working on reducing your other risk factors for a heart attack, and if you can afford it, of course, to spend as much time as you can in Hawaii.

Dr. Art Hister – Heart Disease in Obese Kids

If your kids are fat, they’re dying too quickly.

I realize that’s a pretty scary headline but it’s really true and this is a very serious health matter, mainly because so many surveys reveal that many (perhaps even most) parents of overweight and especially of obese kids don’t realize how fat their kids are or how serious the situation is for their kids.

So to underline the seriousness, you should pay attention to a very depressing study presented at the recent Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2010.

The average age of the kids in this study of 63 obese kids was 13, and the researchers concluded that although they all still seemed to have normal blood pressures and normal cholesterol levels (compared to a control group of 55 non-obese kids), their blood vessels nevertheless had the kind of stiffness (the more stiff your arteries, the greater the risk of heart disease and strokes) normally not seen until middle age, and then only in middle-aged people with heart disease.

In other words, unless something was done to alter their status, these kids were in serious danger of developing heart disease probably as early as their young adult years.

Dr Art Hister – You Are What Your Mom Ate – or Not

One of the more intriguing pathways being followed by some researchers the last few years is the one that follows along the theory that lots of the health outcomes that we experience as mature adults are actually a function or a result of what happened to us not only 20 or 30 years earlier, that is, in adolescence or early adulthood, but rather that many of the health conditions we develop in midlife and our senior years are actually a consequence of what happened to us in early childhood, even infancy, and perhaps even in utero.

For example, it’s now very well established that the odds of developing osteoporosis in adulthood are highly related to the exercise we do – or that we don’t do – when we’re much younger. The same relationship – what we do or don’t do as kids or even younger leading to disease much later in life – holds for some cancers (breast cancer in adults, for example, has been linked to exercise in our young years, as the risk of melanoma is related to sun exposure in childhood, and others), some cases of high blood pressure and heart disease and strokes, and so on.

Well, according to a fascinating recent study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, some cases of dementia in adulthood may even be traced to what happened to our moms while we were still in utero.

In this study, the researchers conclude that people who’d been exposed to severe prenatal malnutrition in the Netherlands during World War II (that is, their moms were literally starving while pregnant with them) had significantly higher odds of suffering early cognitive decline in adulthood compared to those who’d not been similarly exposed to malnutrition in utero, that is, people who’d been fetuses carried by moms suffering severe malnutrition during the war were at higher risks of cognitive deficits in midlife than their peers who had been carried by moms who had enough to eat while pregnant.

Just another clear indication why a village raises a child, because when a pregnant woman doesn’t get enough good food to eat, we all pay the costs eventually.

Dr Art Hister – No Such Thing as Minor Surgery

Dr Art Hister – Marathon Runners

Dr Art Hister – Weight and Genes

Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

Dr Art Hister – Cold and Your Heart

Dr. Art Hister – Heart Disease in Obese Kids

Dr Art Hister – You Are What Your Mom Ate – or Not

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Dr Art Hister – No Such Thing as Minor Surgery

Dr Art Hister – Marathon Runners

Dr Art Hister – Weight and Genes

Dr Art Hister – Do You Even Know if You’re Overweight?

Dr Art Hister – Cold and Your Heart

Dr. Art Hister – Heart Disease in Obese Kids

Dr Art Hister – You Are What Your Mom Ate – or Not

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