Heart Disease

July 22, 2018

Baltimore bounces sugary sodas off restaurant children’s menus, favoring milk, water, juices

Families dropping into Baltimore restaurants may be surprised by what is no longer on the children’s menu, thanks to an official mandate: sugary soft drinks.

At the behest of public health officials, Baltimore has become the largest US city and an East Coast pioneer in enforcing a new restaurant ordinance that makes water, milk, and 100 percent fruit juices the default drinks for youngsters.

Parents who really want their kids to have a sugar-laden soft drink can still get them, but the parent has to place the order. The idea is to get parents to pause and think, and nudge them toward healthier choices.

June 15, 2018

San Francisco voters send strong message cracking down on kids’ vaping

by Patrick A. Malone

San Francisco voters, upholding their elected leaders’ enlightened lawmaking, bashed Big Tobacco and its interests, providing a potent primary election message to public health officials nationwide to curb the growing menace to young people posed by e-cigarettes and vaping.

By a 2-to-1 margin, Bay Area residents supported their Board of Supervisors’ tough ban — which may be the most stringent in the nation — on sales of flavored tobacco products, including vaping liquids packaged as candies and juice boxes, and menthol cigarettes.

Specialized liquids, peddled in flavors like bubble gum, chicken and waffles, and unicorn milk, are key to the youth craze for vaping, in which teens use small devices about the size of a computer flash drive to get a nicotine-fueled boost. They can, with standard hits from liquids in devices like the trendy Juul, regularly consume as much nicotine as is found in a pack of cigarettes.

May 29, 2018

Heart doctors under fire over their pricey practices

by Patrick A. Malone

It’s one thing when modern medicine becomes so hidebound that it struggles over shedding a bit of traditional doctors’ garb. But new information emerging about cardiology’s entrenched reliance on maverick surgeons and evidence-light therapies in treating heart problems raises real questions: Exactly what’s going on in this costly area of care?

Haider Warraich ── a cardiology fellow at Duke and author of “Modern Death,” a book exploring how technology and modern mores are changing patients’ end-of-life experiences ── deserves praise for raising major concerns about the too easy acceptance by doctors and surgeons of existing, device-based treatments for heart conditions. The headline on his Op-Ed in the New York Times summarizes well his tough point: Don’t Put That in My Heart Until You’re Sure It Really Works.

He, of course, points to recent challenges about the effectiveness of cardiac stents. They have been commonly used for years now ── in hundreds of thousands of surgeries ── supposedly to relieve blockages in patients with stable chest pain. But recent research has started to show they provide no benefit over drugs, and it was only after further study showed that a new kind of dissolving stent contributed to increased heart attack risks that the device maker pulled the already in-use product, Warrich notes.

April 13, 2018

Are we back to this? Kids targeted by nicotine and sugary cereal peddlers

by Patrick A. Malone

Big Tobacco, Big Sugar, and technology may be targeting the well-being of young people faster than regulators can prevent them from heading back to the future in a bad way: Teens getting hooked on nicotine, while tots take in excess calories with super sweet breakfast cereals.

The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times each have big take-outs, reporting on the “explosive” and “epidemic” trend, mostly by more affluent teens, of vaping with so-called e-cigarettes, notably a hot new device called the Juul.

It’s about the size of a computer flash drive, and it uses fruity-flavored liquids to deliver a jolt of nicotine — more than what users might get by puffing a pack of old-fashioned cigarettes.

April 6, 2018

Pro sports faulted for fattening fans, old and young, with blitzes of food ads

by Patrick A. Malone

If Americans want to battle obesity, including among youngsters, one place to start is avoiding unhealthy food products hawked relentlessly by major league sports advertisers.

Weight woes plague grownups and show no signs of letting up — they’re increasing, instead, with 40 percent of Americans found to be obese in 2015 and 2016, a sharp increase over a decade earlier. The picture’s no prettier for young people, with the latest federal data showing the percentage of children ages 2 to 19 who are obese increased from 14 percent in 1999 to 18.5 percent in 2015 and 2016.

With studies showing that junk food and empty calories contribute significantly to making the nation an excessive waist-land, Vox, an online information site, deserves credit for pointing out how pervasive, insidious, and even accepted it has become for sports fans — especially young enthusiasts — to be barraged by advertising for fast and unhealthful meals, sugar-laden drinks and cereals, and foods full of fats, empty calories, and excess salt.

March 30, 2018

Smoke- and road-risks of pot can’t be ignored

by Patrick A. Malone

States may be rushing to legalize marijuana, but common sense, good research, and the law may be lagging. New reports confirm what should be inarguable: Marijuana may have health harms when smoked, and it poses safety risks when used while driving.

With the new and considerable attention paid to cigarette smoking, it’s plain to see that, like tobacco, a key health worry with marijuana rests in its burning and inhalation.

It hasn’t been easy to study due to grass’ legal classifications and, therefore, the restrictions imposed on researchers. But medical scientists at the University of California San Francisco have started to find that dope smoke, direct and second-hand, demonstrates similar or even slightly greater detrimental health effects than tobacco smoke.

March 23, 2018

FDA launches new anti-smoking campaign that targets addictive nicotine

by Patrick A. Malone

The federal Food and Drug Administration has taken a big step on what’s likely to be a long legal path to slash the levels of highly addictive nicotine in cigarettes — a step officials say could save millions of lives and billions of dollars in the years ahead.

Commissioner Scott Gottlieb called the agency action “unprecedented,” and said the FDA now will start consulting with medical scientists and policy-makers to figure how to better combat smoking, including with other measures to curb menthol and other flavored cigarettes and premium cigars.

Slashing the acceptable levels for nicotine will be a significant task, if it can be accomplished, as the FDA earlier had said it planned to.

March 13, 2018

ERs see a 30 percent spike in drug overdose cases, as opioid crisis worsens

by Patrick A. Malone

America’s drug overdose crisis keeps worsening, with federal officials reporting that emergency room treatment of opioid overdoses spiked by 30 percent across the nation in 2017.

Abuse of opioids, including the synthetic painkiller fentanyl and heroin, also is triggering significant outbreaks of diseases, including hepatitis C, which is costly to treat, and deadly major bacterial infections.

And the prescription painkiller crisis — which studies increasingly show was been launched, in part, based on wrong information about drugs’ purported benefits — may be masking the worrisome rise, yet again, of cocaine abuse.

March 2, 2018

Is it carbs, fats, calories, or genes in dieting? Try quality food in moderation

by Patrick A. Malone

Rigorous, reliable research on diet and nutrition is not common, so it’s worth paying close attention to the results of an $8-million, year-long study conducted at Stanford University with more than 600 test subjects. Its recommendations are filled — in a good way — with common sense and moderation.

The New York Times reported of the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Nutrition Group and others, that its findings will help debunk some long-held notions about dieting — and some diet fads. Here’s the core of the newly published work’s key findings, according to the newspaper:

[P]eople who cut back on added sugar, refined grains and highly processed foods while concentrating on eating plenty of vegetables and whole foods — without worrying about counting calories or limiting portion sizes — lost significant amounts of weight over the course of a year. The strategy worked for people whether they followed diets that were mostly low in fat or mostly low in carbohydrates. And their success did not appear to be influenced by their genetics or their insulin-response to carbohydrates, a finding that casts doubt on the increasingly popular idea that different diets should be recommended to people based on their DNA makeup or on their tolerance for carbs or fat.

February 8, 2018

A new caution on how breast cancer care also can harm women’s hearts

by Patrick A. Malone

As cardiologists and oncologists swap cross-fire about the conditions they treat and how they do so, here’s hoping that, above all, their female patients end up helped and not harmed, getting vital information about risks and benefits of therapies for two of the leading killers of women: heart disease and breast cancer.

What’s behind the medical specialists’ cross currents? Cardiologists and the American Heart Association are pointing to a major therapeutic statement published in the medical journal Circulation.

On the one hand, it provides what many see as an important, needed call to doctors of all kinds to recognize that heart disease among women goes “dangerously under-diagnosed and under-treated,” due in no small part because practitioners still fail to see that women suffer heart attacks in different ways than do many men. They do not, for example, suffer stabbing chest pain, radiating into the arm. Instead, as they experience clogs in tiny veins and arteries, they may feel a constant exhaustion and a discomfort as if they were having their chest squeezed or crushed.