LifeCare Chiropractic

The Best Chiropractic Care in Mesa, Arizona

Risks Of Heart Disease

Risk Factors for Heart Disease: Diabetes Tops the List

by

If queried, many would name high cholesterol as one of the major risk factors for heart disease. Not even close. Many wouldn’t think of a condition 50% of us have.

I was giving a short presentation last week and one of the participants asked about diabetes and heart disease.  I had mentioned that, for me, there is little difference between the two, and this appeared to be something she had not heard before.

While not surprising, this fact is very true.  84% of diabetics die of cardiovascular related complications (heart disease and stroke combined).  So it would seem to me that every diabetic needs to work on protecting his or her heart.

Here’s the good news: improving your lifestyle to protect or improve diabetes and improving your lifestyle to protect your heart are one and the same.  Good luck trying to find something to avoid or improve your diabetes that doesn’t have a protective effect on the heart.  Exercise?  Both.  Stress management?  Both.  Avoiding BPA in plastics?  Both.  Nuts?  Both.

You get the idea.

So why does this concept seem to be a secret?  Maybe it’s because primary care doctors or endocrinologists manage diabetes and cardiologists manage heart disease.  Sad to think this way, but it seems to fit.  The closest we seem to come to managing both conditions is to make sure that diabetics are taking his or her diabetic medications or that diabetics are taking their Lipitor.  No one seems to take into account that these two conditions are caused by the same lifestyle choices, rather than being two separate entities needing to be managed with distinct tools.

This particular study drives this concept home.  Researchers looked at HbA1c levels and how they related to the risk of heart disease.  HbA1c is a marker to see how well you have been managing your blood sugars over the past 3 months or so.  HbA1c is actually a protein in red blood cells that gets damaged by blood sugar when it goes up.  So, higher blood sugar = more damage to the proteins in your body.  EVERY protein, not just this one.  So lower is always better.  Higher means that every protein in every cell of your body is being damaged more.  Not good.

Here’s the problem: elevations in HbA1c do not just occur in diabetes.  Basically, it’s a spectrum, with lower numbers being better and higher numbers getting worse.  Whether or not you are diagnosed with diabetes, higher HbA1c numbers are not good, and in the study, elevated HbA1c levels were associated with heart disease regardless of whether or not the person had been diagnosed with diabetes (yet).

The bottom line is, regardless of whether you are diabetic or prediabetic, your heart is in grave danger.  Luckily, you don’t need to pick which condition you want to make lifestyle changes for.  My recommendations can be found here.

Are you at risk?

Do Transcendental Meditation for Anxiety to Save Your Heart

by

There are factors that play massive roles in your risk of heart disease. Stress is one factor.  Luckily, you can do Transcendental meditation for anxiety.

Stress from work.  Stress from family.  Stress from school.  It never seems to end and seems to have become ingrained in today’s hectic lifestyle.

Keep in mind that stress is a programmed protective response.  It creates underlying physiological changes that ensure our survival.  Short term it may cause the breakdown of muscle to keep a constant source of glucose in the bloodstream so that the brain has fuel and you can stay alert.  Imagine if a sabre toothed tiger was known to be in the area.  Not a good time to drop off for a nap, so you can see how the release of cortisol (the body’s stress hormone) to keep sugar in the bloodstream can keep you alive for the next few hours.

On the other hand, stress signals can be passed up the food chain.  Drought could change the grasses in the area.  Animals eating the grasses would recognize these signals within the plant and the animal’s body would respond with its own protective changes.  We then eat the meat from the animal and the message passes to us.  Our bodies may undergo adaptive changes, such as storing more calories as body fat to prepare for the coming famine.

So you can see, stress keeps us alive.  Or rather, it was designed to keep us alive when dealing with a clearly defined threat.  That does not define stress in today’s society.  Sure, when we are in a life threatening situation your body will release adrenaline and we can see how this could save your life.

But, in every other situation in today’s lifestyle does not have a clearly defined threat.  Worse, there is rarely a clearly defined end point, either.  This wreaks absolute havoc on your health.

It is possible that stress related problems are the leading cause of death in the US today.  Consider the research that finds that taking sleep medications are associated with over a half MILLION deaths per year.  While the study did not suggest this, stress can absolutely contribute to sleep problems (and is probably the leading cause of sleep disorders) and it is likely that the use of sleep medications was a marker for people who were over-stressed.  The stress is what is killing this many people per year.

If you have stress in your life, you need to rearrange your thinking.  It’s killing you and setting your kids up for health problems (read my previous blog post on this topic).  While this is not an easy solution, you need to first understand that it’s not an option. Doing otherwise IS going to kill you.  It’s that clear cut.

In the meantime, you need to manage your stress.  Exercise can be very effective.  I know that personally, for those few times that I have felt overwhelmed by stress, hiking very aggressively has always help to burn out the stress inside, leaving my problems to be faced academically, without emotional filtering.

Transcedental Meditation can be one of the most powerful tools to calm your brain.  Previous studies that I have reviewed have shown very strong protective benefits of meditation.  The pinnacle of meditation is Transcendental Meditation, or TM. 

In this particular study, participants who had heart disease (secondary prevention) were trained in transcendental meditation over the course of 12 hours of courses and followed up for a period of 5 years.  Before we go over the results, you need to understand that these patients already had problems.  Without the addition of meditation, drugs like Lipitor and blood pressure medications are usually used to try to prevent progression of heart disease and prevent death.  Frankly, they don’t do a very good job and have been trumped by much more fun interventions like dark chocolate.

So what kind of results did those who practiced Transcendental Meditation achieve?

  1. 48% overall lower risk of death. (Tweet this)
  2. 24% lower risk of dying from heart disease, having a heart procedure or being hospitalized for heart disease. (Tweet this)
  3. Those who do Transcendental Meditation according to the recommendations were more likely to survive the longest.

The bottom line is that, if you have been diagnosed with heart disease (or, frankly, if you are on your way to heart disease), taking a passive role and just using medication is going to get you half-ass results.  The ONLY way to live a long and healthy life is to make significant changes.  In the case of this study, it meant learning to manage your stress using a powerful meditation technique.

Of course, not all of us have the time and money to undergo Transcendental Meditation training.  But there are CDs, shorter online courses and biofeedback devices like the Resperate that you can take to learn skills in meditation that will dramatically benefit your health.

If you have adopted any type of stress management techniques in your life, what have you tried and what kind of benefits have you seen?