WEDNESDAY, March 12 (HealthDay News) -- Taking care of someone with a serious heart problem may raise your own risk of cardiac disease, a new study finds.

The study of more than 500 family members and others caring for a heart patient showed that those who provided care all or most of the time were more likely to show psychological strain and less likely to eat heart-healthy diets.

Both of those factors upped their own cardiovascular risks.

"The added responsibility that someone has after a loved one leaves the hospital can lead to feelings of isolation, increase depression, and make them not eat as well as they should," explained lead researcher Dr. Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York City.

She was slated to present the findings Wednesday at the American Heart Association's annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease and Epidemiology, in Colorado Springs, Colo.

Exactly 50 percent of the study participants were caregivers -- 39 percent providing care most or all of the time and 11 percent part of the time. Almost two-thirds (63 percent) were women. Caregivers tended to be over 50, unemployed and not to have finished high school.

"The big lesson for physicians is the need to put on our radar screen the fact that caregivers may be at risk," Mosca said. "It is a missed opportunity in our practice than when someone comes in with a cardiac patient, we do not engage the caregiver in an educational process to the extent that it will help them as well as the patient."

Mosca and her colleagues put that advice to use, starting a program to induce caretakers in the study to follow healthier diets, with less than 30 percent of calories derived from fat, less than 7 percent of calories from saturated fat and less than 200 milligrams of dietary cholesterol a day.

"There was significant improvement in diet after six weeks with our educational program [79 percent of the participants were following the healthier diet, versus 53 percent at the beginning]," Mosca said. "The ones who were most likely to improve their dietary habits had the highest levels of cardiac risk factors, were younger, and [had] a lower perceived health status."

Depression often helps boost the health risks associated with caregiving, Mosca noted. In fact, measures of psychological strain were significantly higher among study participants with depression and low social support, she said. "We don't know if high caregiving strain leads to depression, or if depression increases the sense of strain," Mosca said.

The link between caregiving and increased cardiac risk seen in the study was predictable, according to Dr. Martha Daviglus, a professor of preventive medicine and medicine at Northwestern University, Chicago, and a spokeswoman for the American Heart Association.

"Taking care of a person who has this kind of vascular disease is a burden," Daviglus said. "We see the same burden in caring for someone with any kind of serious disease."

Doctors should be continually aware of the burden borne by caretakers, she added. "We should intervene. When we see a patient with a partner, we should ask about the health of the caregiver and run continuing checks on them."

More information

There's more on cardiovascular risk factors at the American Heart Association  .

TUESDAY, March 11 (HealthDay News) -- Increased consumption of magnesium-rich foods such as whole grains may reduce male smokers' risk of cerebral infarction, which occurs when blood flow to the brain is blocked, a new Swedish study suggests.

Researchers at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm analyzed the diets and other health/lifestyle habits and characteristics of 26,556 Finnish men, aged 50 to 69, who smoked but had never had a stroke. During an average of 13.6 years of follow-up, 2,702 of the men had cerebral infarctions, 383 had intracerebral hemorrhages (bleeding into the brain tissue), 196 had subarachnoid hemorrhages (bleeding between the brain and the tissues that cover it), and 84 had unspecified types of strokes.

After they adjusted for age and cardiovascular risk factors (such as diabetes and cholesterol levels), the researchers concluded that men who consumed the most magnesium (an average of 589 milligrams per day) had a 15 percent lower risk for cerebral infarction than those who consumed the least amount of magnesium (an average of 373 milligrams per day). The association was stronger in men younger than 60.

There was no association between magnesium consumption and risk for intracerebral or subarachnoid hemorrhage, said the researchers, who added that calcium, potassium and sodium intake weren't associated with risk for any type of stroke.

The findings were published in the March 10 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

"An inverse association between magnesium intake and cerebral infarction is biologically plausible," the study authors wrote. Magnesium lowers blood pressure and may also affect cholesterol concentrations and the body's use of insulin to turn glucose into energy, both of which would affect the risk for cerebral infarction, but not hemorrhage.

"Whether magnesium supplementation lowers the risk of cerebral infarction needs to be assessed in large, long-term randomized trials," the study authors added.

Recent studies have suggested that changes in diet may help reduce stroke risk, according to background information in the study. High blood pressure is a risk factor for stroke, which means that dietary changes that lower blood pressure may reduce stroke risk.

More information

The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke outlines ways to prevent stroke.

TUESDAY, March 11 (HealthDay News) -- Cardiac arrest outside of the hospital can quickly turn deadly, but a new method of restarting stalled hearts might boost people's chances of survival, researchers say.

The overall survival rate for people given the technique -- called minimally interrupted cardiac resuscitation (MIRC) -- was 9.1 percent, compared to 3.8 percent of those who got standard emergency measures, according to the report in the March 12 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

And in a subgroup of people who experienced both cardiac arrest and the chaotic heartbeat called ventricular fibrillation, survival rose from about 12 percent before MIRC to 28.4 percent after, the researchers said

Current guidelines call for people who have cardiac arrest to receive an electric shock and periodic chest compressions to get their heart beating again. MIRC's innovation is that it emphasizes near-constant chest compression.

"The technique minimizes all interruption of chest compression, and maximizes the time when chest compressions are being given," said study author Dr. Bentley J. Bobrow, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz. "Patients get pre-shock and post-shock chest depression, and also [the drug] epinephrine," he said.

The blood flow produced by standard chest compression is simply not enough to provide sufficient blood to the heart and the brain, Bobrow explained. In fact, national guidelines issued last year emphasized chest compression over rescue breathing, recommending two breaths for every 30 chest compressions, effectively doubling the number of recommended compressions.

The new study, done in two Arizona cities, included 2,460 people who experienced cardiac arrest outside of the hospital -- 1,799 of whom got treatment before emergency personnel were trained in MIRC.

Only 69 of those pre-MIRC patients survived, the researchers noted. In contrast, 60 of the 661 people given MIRC for cardiac arrest survived.

"One of the really novel things was that this didn't cost anything," Bobrow said. "Usually with a new treatment, cost is an issue. Here, we were really prioritizing how emergency medicine people push on the chest. There is very little cost outside of training."

But the effort needed to train people in the new technique should not be underestimated, said Dr. Mary Ann Peberdy, an associate professor of internal medicine and emergency medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, in Richmond.

"What the group in Arizona was able to do in orchestrating these complex changes, which are significantly different from the rules drilled into people, was impressive," said Peberdy, who co-authored a related editorial in the journal.

The new study is only the second large trial of MIRC to be reported in the medical literature, she said. Another trial, also conducted in Arizona, found similar results two years ago, Peberdy said.

This latest study "is just a first step," Bobrow stressed. "We are constantly reassessing how we are doing with this protocol. We have to keep on modifying our techniques."

The study shows that "changes in the complicated EMS system are possible," Peberdy added. "People are going to have to look at the science themselves, and decide whether to change the protocol for patients who suffer cardiac arrest inside the hospital as well as outside the hospital."

Virginia Commonwealth has been using a version of MIRC for several years, she said, emphasizing "less interruptions of chest compression and better chest compression. It has improved our neurologically sound clinical survival," meaning that more people live with less brain damage.

More information

There's more on cardiac arrest and its warning signs at the American Heart Association  .

FRIDAY, Feb. 22 (HealthDay News) -- Americans have a significantly higher prevalence of stroke than their European counterparts, possibly because of additional risk factors and barriers to health care faced by those in the United States, says a new study.

Compared with European men, U.S. men had 61 percent higher odds of having a stroke, and U.S. women had almost twice the chances of having a stroke as European women, according to the findings expected to be presented Friday at the American Stroke Association's International Stroke Conference 2008, in New Orleans.

"Most of this gap is among relatively poor Americans who were, in our data, much more likely to have a stroke than poor Europeans, whereas the gap in stroke prevalence is less marked between rich Americans and rich Europeans," study author Mauricio Avendano said in a prepared statement.

Researchers studied data on 13,667 people in the United States and 30,120 individuals in 11 European countries. The analysis included stroke occurrence, socioeconomic status, and major risk factors for stroke including obesity, diabetes, smoking, physical activity and alcohol consumption.

The age-adjusted prevalence rate of stroke varied considerably across countries. It was highest in the United States and lowest in the southern European countries of Spain, Italy and Greece, as well as Switzerland.

Higher stroke prevalence was associated with lower socioeconomic status as measured by wealth, income and education, but these associations were stronger in the United States than in most European countries. "Prevalence" is an estimate of the total number of cases of a disease existing in a population during a specified period.

Policies related to nutrition and transportation may also make Americans more prone to less physical activity and less healthy diets than many of their European counterparts, said Avendano, a research fellow in public health at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. This includes health-care access, which is universal in Europe but not in the United States, and "the preventive orientation of some European systems aimed at tackling stroke risk factors, as opposed to the U.S. health-care system, which focuses more on treatment and may actually be more successful in keeping stroke cases alive."

The study is based on 2004 data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey (HRS); the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe (SHARE); and the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (ELSA). These surveys include biennial interviews among people aged 50 and older.

More information

To learn more about preventing a stroke, visit the National Stroke Association.