After about a year, 46 percent of men and women who got such calls had brought their blood pressure down to optimum levels, compared to about 29 percent of people who didn’t receive calls, Dr. Pavel Hamet of the University of Montreal and his colleagues report.
“A fairly simple intervention supported by technology that consumed very little human resources can be highly effective in primary care settings,” they write in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.
]]>They found that people with two particular variants of the genes were at higher risk for high blood pressure.
High blood pressure, also called hypertension, can lead to stroke, heart attack, heart failure and kidney failure, and it tends to run in families. But scientists have struggled to pinpoint genetic traits involved in the condition.
Dr. Christopher Newton-Cheh of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and colleagues used genetic data on about 30,000 people from the United States, Sweden and Finland to detect the roles of two genes called NPPA and NPPB.
]]>“If you reduce uric acid, at least in some patients, you may be able to reduce blood pressure,” said Dr. Daniel Feig, associate professor of pediatrics-renal at BCM and chief of the pediatric hypertension clinics at Texas Children’s Hospital. “This could be one way people develop hypertension and may allow us to develop new therapies.”
Understanding how people develop high blood pressure gives scientists new tools for understanding the disorder and developing drugs to prevent and treat it.
]]>Hypertension is a common disorder in which blood pressure remains abnormally high (a reading of 140/90 mm Hg or greater) and is responsible for causing at least five million premature deaths each year worldwide.
“Listening to music is soothing and has often been associated with controlling patient-reported pain or anxiety and acutely reducing blood pressure,??? said study investigator, Prof. Pietro A. Modesti, MD, PhD, Professor of Internal Medicine, Dep.Critical Care Medicine, University of Florence, Italy. ???But for the first time, today??™s results clearly illustrate the impact daily music listening has on ABP. We are excited about the positive implications for both patients and physicians, who can now confidently explore music listening as a safe, effective, non-pharmacological treatment option or a complement to therapy.”
]]>The meta-analysis evaluated nine randomized, controlled trials using Transcendental Meditation as a primary intervention for hypertensive patients. The practice of Transcendental Meditation was associated with approximate reductions of 4.7 mm systolic blood pressure and 3.2 mm diastolic blood pressure.
]]>What’s more, researchers found, the combination of high stress and elevated blood pressure was twice as common among African-American women versus white women. They say the findings may help explain why black women are at particular risk of having a low-birthweight baby.
In the study, which appears in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine, researchers followed 170 white and African-American women who had their blood pressure and stress levels measured at different points during pregnancy.
]]>???Research shows that some 73 million people in the U.S. have high blood pressure, yet many of them don??™t even know it. And among those that do, a large number are not taking the medications they need to control it,” says Dr. Christopher Granger, a cardiologist at Duke University Medical Center. ???We??™ve discovered that these patients are getting highly variable treatment. Moreover, we also found out that we aren??™t doing a very good job following up with these folks once they leave the hospital,??? he adds.
Granger and colleagues at nearly two dozen institutions around the country created a special registry to find out what happens to patients with acute, severe hypertension ??“ those with blood pressure readings above 160/110 ??“ when they come to an emergency department or critical care setting for treatment.
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Summary Background Data
Severe obesity is associated with multiple comorbidities, particularly hypertension and type 2 diabetes mellitus, that may affect life expectancy.
Because chronic stress responses involve actual physiological changes to body systems and organs, a good bit of attention has been paid to acute physiological stress responses and how they might possibly lead to subsequent chronic stress responses (McEwen and Stellar, 1993).
]]>Each item was assigned what Holmes and Rahe called a Life Change Unit score based upon the item’s relative severity with reference to ‘death of a spouse.’ Research employing the Social Readjustment Rating Scale has demonstrated an association between the number of significant stressful life events and incidence of a number of psychological disorders and medical diseases (Brown and Harris, 1989; Horowitz et al.,1977).
]]>Additionally, transactional theories of stress suggest that stress responses can serve as new stressors that elicit more intense stress responses. For example, if an individual responds to interpersonal conflict (a stressor) by drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes (an acute behavioral stress response), these behavioral responses may become new stressors that warrant additional stress responses.
]]>The onset of chronic diseases, at times resulting in fatal outcomes, is quite prevalent following the loss of significant sources of social support, like the loss of a spouse. In order to examine the role of this type of stress??“stress response relation, several investigators have taken these questions into the laboratory. Laboratory investigations of social support have demonstrated that the magnitude of an acute stress response can be significantly reduced by simply having a supportive friend present during the stress presentation (Kamarck, Annunziato, and Amateau, 1995; Uchino, Cacioppo, and Kiecolt-Glaser, 1996).
]]>A striking example of this appeared on television during Hurricane Andrew in which the high winds leveled two neighbors’ homes with no loss of life. A news reporter interviewed the middle-aged fathers from both families who were standing in front of slabs of concrete that were once their respective Palm Beach houses.
One man was crying profusely, exclaiming that he had lost everything he had worked for all his life, while the other calmly expressed his thanks that everyone in his family was safe, even the dog.
]]>We all know people who seem to possess the ability to cope with life’s most challenging stressors (like becoming quadriplegic or losing the family home in a hurricane) without apparent distress; we also know others who experience extreme distress if they are five minutes late for an appointment.
]]>Although we may not be able to influence these variables, many of these factors have been shown to influence the magnitude and patterning of physiological stress responses observed under conditions in which we are exposed to standard environmental stressors.
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