Dr. Art Hister Archives - Page 8 of 9

Dr Art Hister – It’s Never Too Late to Change

One of the most important lessons I try to leave with my audiences, especially when I’m addressing a group of seniors, is this: it’s never too late to change and to start doing healthy lifestyle things you’ve long neglected or even never done.

So even when you get into your nineties – and the great thing is that the over-80 demographic is probably the quickest-growing demographic in Canada – there is always something more you can do to make your life more pleasant, to give you more energy, to help you cope with the inevitable conditions that accompany aging, to reduce your risk of illness, to keep your brain sharper, and even perhaps to prolong your life. Although, if you are going to make a change, one other bit of advice: go about it slowly because there’s really no rush.

And to illustrate the truth of that advice, that is, that it really is never too late to make healthy lifestyle changes, a study from Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston followed 2231 patients who had what is called left ventricular (LV) dysfunction, that is, in these people, the left ventricle of the heart (the bearing chamber that sends blood into the rest of the body) wasn’t working properly any more as a result of a heart attack.

Of these people, 463 had been smokers at the time of their heart attack, and although most of us would think that none of them would continue to smoke after suffering a heart attack, we know from many studies that a majority of smokers continue to smoke after a heart attack, which was the case in this study, too: 268 of these people continued to smoke.

At the end of 5 years, comparing the smokers with the ones who’d quit, 15 % of the non-smokers had had a 2nd heart attack compared to 23 % of the smokers.

So repeat after me: it’s never too late to quit, to start doing more exercise, to eat better, etc. It just takes will.

Dr Art Hister – Walking For Your Brain

I’m often asked by viewers, readers, listeners, my public forum attendees for: the “best” form of exercise, and to that there’s really only one answer, to wit, the best form of exercise is the form of exercise you will actually do. So, although swimming is a terrific exercise, if you hate water like I do (loathe the stuff, either in me or to lie in it), then there’s really no point in undertaking a swimming program because you’ll quit the 2nd time you realize you have to get wet to swim.

If I had to recommend one form of exercise for a typical large population, however, I would instantly pick walking.

Walking has many benefits: it’s aerobic (or it can be), it’s easy to do anywhere (even in a hotel room or a mall), it can be done inside (on crummy weather days), it’s cheap (if you’re spending a lot on “great” runners, you’re probably wasting a lot of money) , and it’s social (it’s easy to walk with friends).

Plus, regular brisk walking has been linked to multiple health benefits, such as improved brain function, which is nicely illustrated in a study from the University of Illinois (published in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience), in which researchers took 65 previously sedentary seniors and split them into two groups.

One group was told to do stretching and toning exercise, the others were put into a brisk walking group.

At the end of a year, the “toners” showed no improvement in cognitive scores (compared to when they entered the study) while the brisk walkers had significantly improved cognition scores, and had good improvements in certain measures of brain functioning that were investigated via functional MRIs.

Bottom line: walk more – it’s good for your brain.

Dr Art Hister – Too Much Stress Can Kill You

Finally, a bit of proof.

Everyone out there probably believes – and it’s good old common sense to hold this view – that stress is a killer.

The problem is, however, that it’s very hard to show that link in studies. So, whereas many studies have shown that people who self-report having a lot of excess stress and people who seem to researchers to be under lots of stress have poorer health outcomes, including earlier deaths than people who don’t feel or don’t seem to be under as great a stress burden; those are not the best objective means to evaluate the role that stress plays in these deleterious health outcomes.

In other words, what you need is an objective standard measure of stress load, such as cortisol levels, for example.

And that’s the neat thing about a recent study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism (JCEM, thank God).

In this study, researchers measured urinary levels of cortisol, the stress-related hormone, in 861 people over the age of 65, and found that the death rate was directly related to the cortisol level, that is, the higher the cortisol level, the more likely it was that that person would die in the 6 years that the study went on.

And as you’d probably expect, too, elevated cortisol levels were related only to higher rates of death from cardiovascular disease, in other words, from heart attacks and strokes.

Dr. Art Hister – Osteoporosis

Another new risk factor for osteoporosis to take into account: having suffered a fracture earlier in life.

Osteoporosis is a nasty condition that doesn’t get nearly as much attention in the public sphere – among patients and in the media – as it should.

But osteoporosis not only causes a great deal of disability because of fractures – chronic pain, loss of function, immobility, etc – but it can also kill.

Thus, 20% or so of people who break a hip will die as a direct result of that fracture over the next few months following that fracture.

And osteoporosis is not just an “old woman’s” disease, because men suffer about 1/3 of all hip fractures, and lots of younger people (those not yet seniors) already either have full-fledged osteoporosis or the beginnings of it.

So it’s important to recognize osteoporosis risk factors earlier in life, and to do something about them to lower your chances of ending up with a fracture (or several).

And to that end, we know that smoking, a poor diet, the use of certain drugs, being thin, not doing enough exercise, drinking too much alcohol, a lack of vitamin D, and a diet poor in calcium are all key risk factors for future fractures.

But to that long list you can now add, according to a recent study in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, having suffered a fracture at an earlier age, that is, according to data from the huge multi-national Global Longitudinal Study of Osteoporosis in Women (GLOW), older women who had fractures when they were young women also had a significantly higher risk of bone fractures later in life, perhaps because those women have some sort of built-in weakness in their bones to begin with.

So, if that’s you, if you’re someone who had a fracture earlier in life, you should be especially careful, I think, to watch your other risk factors for this potentially devastating condition.

Dr Art Hister – Laptopitis

If you don’t already have enough to worry about, and if like me, you spend lots of time at a computer, then here’s yet another new “condition” to be wary of, according to a group of researchers at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill).

They call it “laptopitis” and no, they aren’t referring to infections you can pick up from sharing a computer with people who left viral and bacterial particles behind when they used the keyboard that you are now using (although that does happen lots, I’m sure).

Rather, “laptopitis” is the name these people coined for all the aches and pains – chronic headaches, neck and shoulder pain, low-back pain, wrist pain, and so on – that a person can develop from either over-using a computer, that is, from endless hours of sitting at a terminal without getting up, or more likely, from using poor posture and improper techniques when using a computer.

So, if you want to prevent “laptopitis” or if you already have some elements of it and you want to make sure it doesn’t get worse, do yourself a favour and visit one of the host of web sites that give you all sorts of tips about what’s best to do when working at a computer – what height it’s best to set the monitor at, how to rest your arms, what kind of chair to use, etc. – although the tip that I want to emphasize is the one I think most people ignore the most: get up often from your seated position.

Sitting for several hours in a row is just not conducive to good health, either good physical health, or equally important, good psychological health.

And when you get up from your desk, here’s another important tip if you want to stay healthy: don’t automatically go to the fridge.

Dr Art Hister – Don’t Do Drugs and Drive

A couple of disturbing studies from the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse have determined that among drivers, drug use is quickly approaching (and may even have surpassed) alcohol as a major danger.

In one study from BC, random testing revealed that alcohol was found among 8 % of drivers, but drugs were detected in 10 % of drivers.

In a 2nd study that examined fatalities among drivers, alcohol played a role in 38 % of such deaths, while at least one kind of drug was detected in 33 % of motor vehicle drivers who died between 2000 and 2006 (I would guess that that rate is probably higher in 2010 since the use of all drugs, not just recreational drugs, has gone up quite substantially in the last decade).

A few things should be glaringly obvious from these reports.

First, lest we forget, despite the glaring headlines about drug use in drivers, these studies confirm that alcohol use is still a huge, huge problem for drivers and at least as dangerous as drugs.

That said, for all those who argue that marijuana use has no substantial health consequences, well, yes, it can and too often, it does: marijuana use poses a big risk not only to the marijuana user who smokes and then drives, but it also poses a huge risk to the other drivers and pedestrians and cyclists that user might encounter when he’s high and his reflexes and awareness are not what they should be.

Third, and equally important, lots of prescription and some over-the-counter drugs can also affect neurological and brain functioning so if you’re taking such medications, it would be best to avoid driving until you knew precisely what effect those drugs have on your reflexes and awareness.

Dr. Art Hister – High Blood Pressure Pills

You might want to label the latest good news about high blood pressure (HBP) pills, ‘Hats Off to ALLHAT’.

You see, these days every study gets a fancy name with an acronym attached (CREST, MRFIT, and so on) in order to make the results of the study more memorable for everyone (hey, doctors are no different than you are: we also forget lots of stuff unless we have mnemonic devices to help us), and of the thousands of HBP studies that have been done, the most famous one without doubt is ALLHAT because if your doctor is in the least bit interested in blood pressure, there’s a very good chance he or she will know what the ALLHAT study concluded, and all the controversy that conclusion came to.

Thus, when the first ALLHAT results were announced, the conclusion was pretty simple: in a 3-way race of HBP pills that compared an old, pretty cheap but tried-and-true generic diuretic (the kind of blood pressure pill that doctors have been using for decades) to two new HBP drugs, a calcium channel blocker and an ACE inhibitor, the researchers concluded that the diuretic was the best drug. Period.

Many experts, however, refused to accept those ALLHAT conclusions, arguing that if the study had just gone on a few years more, it’s likely that the newer (and much more expensive drugs) would edge out the diuretic at lowering the rate of complications (strokes, kidney damage, heart attacks, etc.) from high blood pressure.

So guess what?

An update on ALLHAT has just been released at a major conference in China, and while the edge for the diuretic has narrowed somewhat, after 8-13 years, the best you can say about the other drugs is that they are no better than the diuretic at lowering complications from HBP (in fact, there is some room to argue that the new drugs are somewhat worse since one of them led to a higher risk of strokes in this study, while the other produced a higher risk of heart failure).

Now, this doesn’t mean that a person taking an ACE inhibitor or a calcium channel blocker should instantly stop their drug and start on a diuretic but it certainly implies that anyone on one of these pills might want to at least talk to their doctor about whether they should continue with those meds.

Dr Art Hister – It’s Never Too Late to Change

Dr Art Hister – Walking For Your Brain

Dr Art Hister – Too Much Stress Can Kill You

Dr. Art Hister – Osteoporosis

Dr Art Hister – Laptopitis

Dr Art Hister – Don’t Do Drugs and Drive

Dr. Art Hister – High Blood Pressure Pills

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Dr Art Hister – It’s Never Too Late to Change

Dr Art Hister – Walking For Your Brain

Dr Art Hister – Too Much Stress Can Kill You

Dr. Art Hister – Osteoporosis

Dr Art Hister – Laptopitis

Dr Art Hister – Don’t Do Drugs and Drive

Dr. Art Hister – High Blood Pressure Pills

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