Omega-3 heart benefits confirmed; 500mg/day recommended
CM NEWS - Omega-3 fatty acids from oily fishes or capsules can reduce cardiovascular risk by up to 45%, according to a review of major scientific data. Experts recommend dosage of 500mg a day for healthy persons and 1 g for patients with coronary artery diseases. Read more
Hawthorn extract ‘helps blood flow’
Telegraph - Hawthorn extract can significantly ease the symptoms of chronic heart failure, research suggests.
The herbal medicine can help the heart beat more powerfully, increasing blood flow through the arteries and reducing irregular heartbeats. Read more
Soy reduces heart disease for women
AFP - Older women who eat traditional Japanese soy-based foods on a regular basis face lower risks of heart disease, a doctor who headed a government-sponsored study said. Read more
Asparagus root lowers cholesterol, nurtures heart
CM NEWS - Asparagus roots, or tian dong (天冬 or 天門冬) can lower cholesterol and blood lipid, thus help prevent atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular diseases, a new study says. Read more
Soy protects hearts of older women
Acupuncture on hypertension ‘a clear effect’: landmark study
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Heartwire - A study billed as the first rigorous, randomized trial in the West to test acupuncture against a sham (fake) needle technique to treat hypertension suggests that, performed properly, acupuncture may produce blood-pressure changes on a par with monotherapy in mild to moderate hypertension.
“It’s certainly not like a wonder drug; it’s not a massive effect, but it’s a clear effect,” lead investigator Dr Frank A Flachskampf (Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, Germany) said.
Smaller randomized trials have been performed in China, with mixed results, while one randomized study in the West found no difference in blood-pressure lowering between traditional Chinese acupuncture, standardized acupuncture, and a sham procedure, the authors note. This earlier study did not use ambulatory blood-pressure measurements, believed to be superior to office-based measurements.
Results of their study are published online June 4, 2007 in Circulation.
For the study, 160 outpatients with uncomplicated, mild to moderate hypertension were randomized to six weeks of acupuncture performed by Chinese medicine practitioners, trained in China, or to a sham procedure. In both arms, patients underwent 22 sessions, each 30 minutes in length. By the end of the six weeks, 24-hour ambulatory systolic and diastolic blood pressures were significantly reduced from baseline in the acupuncture-treated patients (5.4 mm Hg and 3.0 mm Hg, respectively), and this change was also significantly different from values in the sham-treated patients, in whom no meaningful changes were seen.
After three and six months, however, the blood-pressure reductions disappeared, leading investigators to conclude that ongoing acupuncture treatments would be required to maintain the blood-pressure reductions.
“The main finding is that for the first time in a reasonably sized but still relatively small randomized study, this establishes beyond a reasonable doubt that acupuncture lowers blood pressure,” Flachskampf commented. “It’s a modest but undeniable effect on both systolic and diastolic blood pressure.”
The extent of the blood-pressure reductions are comparable to those seen with ACE-inhibitor monotherapy or aggressive lifestyle changes, including radical salt restrictions, he added.
A “demanding” alternative to drugs
Flachskampf had some caveats, acknowledging that the regular acupuncture sessions used in the study represent a significant time investment: each acupuncture session lasted 30 minutes—not including transportation and administrative time—and took place several times a week. The study subjects were also reasonably healthy, with no other major risk factors and with only mild to moderate hypertension.
“This is clearly something that would probably not work as well with very sick people or people with blood pressure at dangerous levels,” he said. “We cannot easily extrapolate to people, for example, with complicated hypertension who have had a myocardial infarction.”
Flachskampf believes, however, that acupuncture likely represents an attractive option in specific patients, particularly those averse to taking medical therapy who are open to so-called “alternative” medicine.
“This is probably only for people who somehow relate to this spiritually, who say I am profoundly against taking drugs and I’m very fond of Oriental wisdom or things like that,” Flachskampf told heartwire. “I don’t want to make a joke about this, but this certainly needs more compliance than taking two or three pills a day. It’s much more demanding.”
Unlike drugs, acupuncture appeared to have few or no side effects, although two people complained that the needles were painful. “Clearly, many millions of Chinese get acupuncture without any major problems so I think this is really a minor point,” Flachskampf observed.
[Circulation 2007; DOI: 10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.106.661140. Flachskampf FA, Gallasch J, Gefeller O, et al. "Randomized trial of acupuncture to lower blood pressure." ]
acupunctureDan shen’s effect for stroke patients lacks strong evidence
Health Behavior News Service, by Bruce Sylvester - The traditional Chinese medicine dan shen (丹参, Salviae miltiorrhizae), a standard treatment for ischemic stroke in China, lacks strong scientific evidence to support such use, according a new review of studies.Nevertheless, based on the available data, dan shen treatment showed a tendency to improve short-term neurological deficits in stroke patients, say researchers at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China.
However, the short-term result “should be interpreted cautiously because of the poor methodological quality of included trials and the small numbers of patients,” said review co-author and neurology professor Ming Liu.
The review appears in the current issue of The Cochrane Library, a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates research in all aspects of health care. Systematic reviews draw evidence-based conclusions about medical practice after considering both the content and quality of existing trials on a topic.
Obstruction of a blood vessel supplying blood to the brain can result in ischemic stroke, which accounts for about 83% of all strokes.
In China, post-stroke use of herbal medicine is part of standard care in both Western-style hospitals and in traditional Chinese medicine hospitals. Dan shen, in various pill, tablet and injection formulations, is the herb most commonly given for ischemic stroke; its use in that context spans more than three decades.
However, few researchers have tested the herb’s effectiveness in rigorous clinical trials that approach current international standards.
The reviewers found six studies that met inclusion criteria for the review — randomized or quasi-randomized and controlled — involving 494 acute ischemic stroke patients.
The Cochrane reviewers found that methods of randomly assigning study subjects to dan shen or placebo were unclear, and that this could have led to results exaggerating a positive treatment effect by 30% to 41%. “It is therefore plausible that dan shen is truly ineffective and the apparent benefits are simply due to bias arising from the methodological weaknesses of the studies,” they say.
Since treatment and follow-up in these studies ranged from 14 to 28 days, it was not possible to assess the long-term effects of dan shen.
“We found no evidence to support the routine use of dan shen agents for ischemic stroke,” Liu said. “However, if the apparently beneficial effects on neurological impairment were confirmed in methodologically rigorous trials, it would lead to a useful treatment for stroke being identified,” she added.
Ted Kaptchuck, O.M.D., associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said, “in Chinese society, at this time, basic science and laboratory evidence seems to be enough to gain widespread acceptance and adoption for the use herbal and other medications. In the West, we think it is a long shot to go from basic laboratory evidence to demonstrated clinical efficacy in randomized trials. We are not at the point where it is clear that a traditional Chinese herb has a major role in health care.”
Liu agreed: “The designs of these trials need to be improved in the future research, not only in the clinical trials on dan shen agents, but also in trials on other Chinese herbal medicine.”
[Dan Shen agents for acute ischaemic stroke (Review). Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 2007, Issue 2.]
The Cochrane Collaboration is an international nonprofit, independent organization that produces and disseminates systematic reviews of health care interventions and promotes the search for evidence in the form of clinical trials and other studies of interventions. Visit http://www.cochrane.org for more information.
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