Rheumatoid arthritis begins in the joints, but it doesn’t end there. The inflammation that causes swelling and pain in fingers, wrists, knees, and other joints can also affect the heart. A large study from Sweden suggests that a new diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis should get you thinking about your heart, too.
In a group of 7,500 men and women with new rheumatoid arthritis whose health was followed for up to 12 years, more people than expected had a heart attack, developed chest pain with activity or stress (angina), or needed a procedure to open or bypass a blocked heart artery within five years of their diagnosis (Journal of Internal Medicine, December 2010).
This work emphasizes how important it is for everyone with rheumatoid arthritis, including those just learning they have it, to focus on improving heart health while coping with their joint problems. Although an arthritis-specific approach to warding off heart disease doesn’t yet exist, the basic steps for protecting the heart and arteries are a great start:
-exercise
-follow a healthy diet
-manage your weight
-control your blood pressure and cholesterol.
It’s possible that taking a baby aspirin or a cholesterol-lowering statin may be good options for people with rheumatoid arthritis, but these and other drug-based strategies haven’t yet been tested.
Source Citation
“Heart Beat: Rheumatoid arthritis should heighten heart awareness.” Harvard Heart Letter 1 Mar. 2011. Academic OneFile. Web. 21 Mar. 2011.
Sipping a cup of green tea with a meal may help you feel more full and less likely to go back for seconds. That’s the conclusion of Swedish researchers, who compared the post-meal effects of green tea with plain water. Their study failed, however, to confirm hopes that the antioxidant-rich tea would also moderate insulin sensitivity or glucose levels, helping to curb diabetes risk. Researchers observed study participants for two hours after a meal, quizzing them on satiety and how full they felt. Not only did participants report feeling more full when accompanying the meal with a cup of green tea, they were also less interested in eating another mouthful of the same food. When washing down the meal with plain water, participants were later more of a mind to go for a second helping.
TO LEARN MORE: Nutrition Journal, January 2010; abstract at .
Here’s more motivation to get going on a program of regular physical activity: A new National Cancer Institute review of 14 prior studies reports that women who regularly exercise reduced their risk of endometrial cancer by about 30%. On the other hand, women who spend more of their day sitting were at greater risk of the cancer, which affects the lining of the uterus.
“Physical activity has been hypothesized to reduce endometrial cancer risk, but this relationship has been difficult to confirm because of a limited number of prospective studies,” explained Steven Moore, MD, and colleagues in the British Journal of Cancer. Scientists already knew that maintaining a healthy body weight is an important way to reduce the risk of endometrial cancer, but it was less clear whether exercise also has an independent benefit. A flurry of new cohort studies inspired the researchers to take a fresh look and conduct a meta-analysis of the evidence.
“We found that physical activity was clearly associated with reduced risk of endometrial cancer,” Dr. Moore and colleagues concluded. One possible explanation: Keeping active helps lower potentially harmful levels of estrogen, which can increase tumor risk.
The researchers went on, “Taken together with the established biological plausibility of this relation, the totality of evidence now convincingly indicates that physical activity prevents or reduces risk of endometrial cancer.”
It’s not clear, though, just how much exercise women need to enjoy a protective benefit. One of the studies analyzed showed that 20% of endometrial cancers could have been prevented if women had exercised vigorously for about 20 minutes at least five times a week.
Dr. Moore and colleagues went on to investigate sitting time in relation to endometrial cancer risk, using data from the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study. They found that, independent of exercise levels, greater sitting time was associated with increased endometrial cancer risk. Women who sit more than nine hours a day, for example, were at double the risk of the cancer, compared to those sitting fewer than three hours daily.
The researchers concluded, “Limiting time in sedentary behaviors may complement increasing levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity as a means of reducing endometrial cancer risk.”
Women in developed nations have about a 1 in 40 risk of developing endometrial cancer in their lifetimes. About 43,470 new cases of uterus cancer, most of them starting in the lining of the uterus, are diagnosed in the US annually, with 7,950 deaths.
TO LEARN MORE: British Journal of Cancer, Sept. 28, 2010; abstract at . American Cancer Society .
