Heart Beat: Music May Help Keep Your Cardiovascular System in Tunevascula June 25, 2009
Posted by medixunlimited in Health.Tags: cardiovascular system, heartbeat, mosic
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Music may calm the savage beast or, at least, make the workday seem shorter. A new study now adds cardiovascular health to the list of music’s potential benefits, suggesting it can directly trigger physiological changes that modulate blood pressure, heart rate and respiration.
“Music induces a continuous, dynamic—and to some extent predictable—change in the cardiovascular system,” said Luciano Bernardi, a professor of medicine at the University of Pavia in Italy and lead author on the paperCirculation, in a statement. Understanding the mechanisms of how swelling crescendos and deflating decrescendos affect our physiology, he suggests, could lead to potential new therapies for stroke and other conditions.
Bernardi and his colleagues had previously found that changes in the cardiovascular and respiratory systems mirrored musical tempo. To extend this knowledge to the body’s response to changing rhythms, they enlisted 24 volunteers—half experienced singers, the remainder with no musical training.
While participants listened to five random selections of Beethoven, Bach, Puccini and other classical artists as well as a two-minute segment of silence, monitors recorded physiological signals. The researchers found that selections with crescendos, especially those with a series of them (think: Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody), led to proportional constriction of blood vessels and increases in blood pressure, heart rate and respiration. These measures decreased during decrescendos and silent periods. The team also found that “rich” music phrases around 10 seconds long, like those rhythms from famous arias by Verdi, caused heart rate and other parts of the cardiovascular system to synchronize with the music. Both groups experienced this entrainment, although the musicians showed a stronger response.
These results, Bernardi says, indicate that music’s effects go beyond a patient’s head. “It is not only the emotion that creates the cardiovascular changes,” he notes, “but this study suggests that also the opposite might be possible.” He believes the boosts in mood—including those pleasurable “chills”—triggered by music might also be a side effect of a physiological reaction.
Connie Tomaino, the executive director and co-founder of the Institute for Music and Neurological Function in New York City, has seen evidence of this mechanism in her own clinical practice. “The study hints at the possibility that some of these entrainment mechanisms act at the subconscious level,” Tomaino says. “There’s enough clinical evidence out there that shows this is true.” She notes that even people in semivegetative states show respiratory changes when music is played.
Bernardi’s study is limited by a small sample size and uniformity between participants—all were healthy Caucasians between the ages of 24 and 26. The authors suggest further research is needed to confirm and generalize their findings to the wider population and to other types of music.
Meanwhile, Tomaino finds Bernardi’s study “really nicely supports previous inferences” into the science of music. (She is a consultant for a new documentary airing tonight on PBS called “The Music Instinct: Science and Song,” featuring an array of musicians including jazz, pop and rap and how they affect human mind and body.) She points to a paper published earlier this year that found a developing fetus is already equipped with the ability to distinguish changes in sound patterns, presumably in order to interpret and learn from the world around them. “We’re prewired to be receptive to rhythm,” Tomaino says. So, scaramouch, do the fandango. published in the journal
source: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=music-therapy-heart-cardiovascular
A Few Extra Pounds Might Bring Extra Years June 25, 2009
Posted by medixunlimited in Health.Tags: longer life, longevity, obese, obesity, overweight, underweight
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A new study finds that being overweight — but not obese — might help you live longer.
In the study of more than 11,000 Canadian adults, overweight people lived longer than normal-weight people, while those who were either extremely obese or underweight died at an earlier age than normal-weight people.
The findings do not mean that normal-weight people should try to pack on extra pounds, the researchers said.
“It may be that a few extra pounds actually protect older people as their health declines, but that doesn’t mean that people in the normal weight range should try to put on a few pounds,” said study co-author Mark Kaplan, a professor of community health at Portland State University.
The study followed 11,326 adults in Canada for 12 years. Compared to normal-weight people, those who were underweight were 70 percent more likely to die and those who were extremely obese were 36 percent more likely to die, the researchers found.
On the other hand, overweight people were 17 percent less likely to die than those of normal weight. The risk for obese people was the same as for people of normal weight, the study authors noted.
Overweight was defined as a body mass index (BMI) between 25 and 30, and obesity was defined as BMI of 30 and above. BMI is a measurement based on weight and height. For example, a 5-foot 10-inch man weighing 181 pounds has a BMI of 26; a 5-foot 6-inch woman weighing 210 pounds has a BMI of about 34.
The study was published online June 18 in the journal Obesity.
“It’s not surprising that extreme underweight and extreme obesity increase the risk of dying, but it is surprising that carrying a little extra weight may give people a longevity advantage,” co-author David Feeny, a senior investigator at the Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research in Portland, Ore., said in a Kaiser news release.
But Kaplan noted that there’s more to health than just living longer. “Our study only looked at mortality, not at quality of life,” he pointed out, “and there are many negative health consequences associated with obesity, including high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes.”
Being healthy involves more than body mass index (BMI) or the number on a bathroom scale, said Dr. Keith Bachman, a weight management specialist with Kaiser Permanente’s Care Management Institute.
“We know that people who choose a healthy lifestyle enjoy better health: good food choices, being physically active every day, managing stress, and keeping blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels in check,” Bachman said in the news release.
source: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_85988.html
Eat Well, Live Longer June 25, 2009
Posted by medixunlimited in Health.Tags: Health, healthy foods, longer, longevity, Nutrition
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f you eat a healthy diet, you’re likely to live longer.
It might be trite advice, but a new study offers proof that it can make a difference in your longevity.
Those with the best diets reduced their risk of death by up to 25 percent over a 10-year follow-up, said study author Ashima Kant, a professor of nutrition at Queens College of the City University of New York.
Kant and her colleagues extracted information from a National Institutes of Health/AARP database including more than 350,000 men and women, evaluating the link between dietary habits and their risk of death during the follow-up period. They divided the participants into five groups, depending on how closely they followed the 2005 USDA Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
“If you had the highest fifth of these scores, your risk of dying over the follow-up period was 20 to 25 percent lower,” Kant said. She found gender differences, with women eating the healthiest reducing their risk of death by 25 percent and men reducing it by 20 percent.
“We have been advocating these kinds of behaviors for a while,” she said. Other studies have found a survival benefit but have tended to look only at individual foods, she said. “This gets at looking at all these dietary features in a collective way,” she said.
Kant’s team asked the participants about six components of a healthy diet, including intake of fruits, vegetables, low-fat dairy, whole grains, lean meat and poultry, and fat.
People didn’t have to eat perfectly to get a top score, she said. For instance, “if a person had five or six servings of vegetables a week, that would get them the top score [for that question],” she said.
“It’s not that you have to do everything [recommended under the dietary guidelines] to have any health benefits,” she said, noting that participants in the groups with lower (but not the lowest) scores also tended to live longer. For instance, women who were in the second-from-the-highest group on dietary scores were 20 percent less likely to die and men in that group were 17 percent less likely.
The study is published in the July issue of The Journal of Nutrition.
Good dietary habits may also help delay the progression of hardening of the arteries, according to a separate study published in the July issue of the The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Researchers from Tufts University and Wake Forest University evaluated the effect of a good diet on the progression of coronary artery disease in 224 postmenopausal women who had the disease when they enrolled in the Estrogen Replacement and Atherosclerosis Study. The better the diet, the slower the progression of disease, they found.
“Both studies are finding similar things,” said Penny Kris-Etherton, a distinguished professor of nutrition at Penn State University, who wrote an editorial to accompany the atherosclerosis study.
“We’re getting more and more evidence that diet [when poor] can play a key role in chronic disease development, progression and all-cause mortality,” she said.
Will the findings — especially the fact that those who got the top benefit didn’t eat perfectly — inspire people?
“As a nutritionist, you try to be optimistic and hope so,” Kris-Etherton said. “But society sometimes makes it difficult. We live in an environment where there are so many food choices that aren’t consistent with our [dietary] guidelines.”
source: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/news/fullstory_85977.html
