Women may need to put cholesterol on their list of things to discuss with their doctor, a new study suggests. The study, published online in Women’s Health Issues, shows that among high-risk patients, optimal levels of LDL “bad” cholesterol may be less common among men than women.

High levels of cholesterol especially LDL cholesterol can make heart disease and heart attacks more likely. A simple blood test can check your cholesterol levels. Diet, exercise, and medications can help lower high cholesterol. The new study focuses on diabetes patients and survivors of recent heart “events,” defined as a heart attack, heart bypass operation, or angioplasty (procedure to reopen blocked coronary arteries, which supply blood to heart muscle). Read more

Vitamin D deficiency is common among women diagnosed with breast cancer, and it may raise the risk of cancer spread and death, researchers report. In a new study, women with vitamin D deficiency at the time of breast cancer diagnosis were 94% more likely to experience cancer spread and 73% more likely to die over the next 10 years, compared to women with adequate vitamin D levels.

The study is the first to suggest a link between vitamin D deficiency and breast cancer progression, but it doesn’t prove cause and effect. And it’s too soon to recommend that all women with breast cancer start taking supplements to improve their outlook, says study head Pamela Goodwin, MD, professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. But “women with breast cancer may want to get their vitamin D levels checked in a blood test and get them into the healthy optimal range,” she says.
Read more

A class of drugs used to treat erectile dysfunction may one day help delay or even prevent heart failure in patients with the most common forms of muscular dystrophy, according to a study published in the May 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Duchenne muscular dystrophy is a progressive muscle-wasting disease that primarily strikes boys between ages 2 and 6 years old. It affects all voluntary muscles, including the lungs and heart. Most patients die before age 30. Duchenne muscular dystrophy and a less severe variant called Becker muscular dystrophy affect about one in every 3,500 to 5,000 boys in the United States.

Maya Khairallah of the Montreal Heart Institute and colleagues assigned mice with muscular dystrophy to either a placebo or Viagra. The mice received the drug once a day for six weeks.
Read more

High blood pressure and high cholesterol levels not only are bad for your heart, they may also harm your eyesight, a new report suggests. The two conditions appear to increase one’s risk for retinal vein occlusion, a condition that leads to vision loss. It results from one or more veins carrying blood from the eye to the heart becoming blocked and causing bleeding or fluid build-up, according to background information in the report published in the May issue of the Archives of Ophthalmology.

The Irish study found that people with high blood pressure had more than 3.5 times the risk of developing retinal vein occlusion than those without it. People with high cholesterol levels had an approximately 2.5-fold higher risk of retinal vein occlusion.

The findings come from an analysis of 21 previously published studies involving 2,916 people with retinal vein occlusion and 28,646 people without the condition. It found that 63.6 percent of patients with retinal vein occlusion also had hypertension, compared with 36.2 percent of people without the eye condition. High cholesterol levels were more than twice as likely to be found in those with retinal vein occlusion as those without (35.1 percent vs. 16.7 percent). Read more

The path to heart disease begins in childhood, and that means preventive measures must be embraced by those at risk long before adulthood, researchers report. Two of the biggest threats to heart health that trace back to childhood are prehypertension blood pressure just below the official high blood pressure reading of 140/90 and obesity.

“The message of the Bogalusa Heart Study is that coronary artery disease, atherosclerosis, hypertension and heart disease all begin in childhood,” said study director Dr. Gerald Berenson, a professor of cardiology at the Tulane Center for Cardiovascular Health, in New Orleans. Berenson Read more