MONDAY, Dec. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Being in good physical form appears to protect middle-aged and older men and women from stroke, a new British study suggests.

The finding highlights an apparent association -- rather than a direct cause-and-effect -- between the physical ability to function well and a reduced risk for stroke.

After sifting through thousands of quality-of-life reports provided by patients themselves, the research team found that those functioning at the higher end of the physical capacity spectrum appear to have half the risk for stroke as their poorest functioning compatriots, independent of other risk factors.

"We were surprised at the magnitude of the relationship, as this is comparable to established stroke risk factors such as smoking," noted study author Dr. Phyo Kyaw Myint, who works with the Clinical Gerontology Unit at Addenbrooke's University Hospital in Cambridge.

The findings are published in the Dec. 11 issue of Neurology.

Myint and his colleagues uncovered an apparent stroke-physical function connection by analyzing data concerning more than 13,600 British men and women between the ages of 40 and 79.

All the participants first completed a health examination and questionnaire between 1993 and 1997. At that time, patient blood pressure, body-mass index, respiratory capacity, and cholesterol levels were assessed. Researchers also noted any history of diabetes, smoking and alcohol consumption.

None of the patients had experienced any incidence of cancer, stroke or heart attack before their initial exam.

Eighteen months after the initial exam, patients completed a follow-up questionnaire by mail, in which patients were asked to indicate their degree of physical and social functioning; their mental health status; any physical and/or emotional limitations on carrying out routines; energy levels; experiences of pain; and self-perceptions regarding their overall health.

All participants were followed until 2005, by which point 244 strokes were recorded.

The researchers found that those men and women who reported better physical function had a considerably lower risk for stroke.

After adjusting for all other observed characteristics -- including gender and age -- Myint and his team found that patients in the top quarter of physical function capacity had half the risk of stroke when compared with patients in the lowest quarter of physical function.

The authors concluded that poor physical function could indicate a high risk for stroke, thereby highlighting a specific segment of the general population that could derive particular benefit from some form of intervention.

Myint stressed, however, that to date his team has simply conducted a hands-off review of patient self-reports regarding their physical capacity and lined those reports up against stroke incidence records. At no time were patients assessed for their ability to follow a prescribed physical activity routine of varying intensities and durations.

He cautioned against leaping to the notion that greater physical function or activity directly causes a drop in the risk for stroke.

"We don't know whether physical function per se is causally related to stroke or simply a good marker for other factors that influence stroke risk," Myint noted. "These findings need confirmation from other studies. However, there is already a substantial body of evidence for public health recommendations to increase physical activity."

In the meantime, Alice H. Lichtenstein, director of the Cardiovascular Nutrition Lab at Tufts University in Boston, said that people should not sit idly by while investigators continue to unravel the complex web of factors related to stroke risk.

"This study does not show causation, but clearly, individuals who follow current guidelines for decreasing risk for stroke and general cardiovascular risk -- including keeping physically active -- have better outcomes," she said. "So, in terms of both physical function and activity, what people need to try to do is go from where they are to more."

"For some people, doing more may literally mean just walking around the block once, or picking up the pace, or adding extra time moving," said Lichtenstein. "For others, it can even be something like doing the housecleaning. And it can be cumulative: 10 minutes at one point, 10 minutes at another. Because although we'd like everyone to set aside special time just for physical activity every day, we know that for a lot of people, it's just not going to happen. So, any increase is going in the right direction, and that should be the goal."

This week, the American Society for Nutrition is poised to issue a new set of national recommendations regarding both physical activity and nutrition.

The recommendations are described as "comprehensive, scientific guidelines on physical activity for all Americans." According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the guidelines will gather together the latest knowledge on both healthy eating and regular physical activity.

More information

To learn about stroke risk, visit the American Heart Association  .

THURSDAY, Dec. 6 (HealthDay News) -- Researchers say they're moving closer to using transplanted cells to protect heart attack survivors from suffering sudden cardiac arrest.

Working with mice, scientists strengthened the heart's electrical system to prevent it from going haywire. "We're showing that the electrical risk can be reversed," said study co-author Dr. Michael Kotlikoff, a professor in the department of biomedical sciences at Cornell University.

It's still unclear, however, how long it may take before the research could be tested in humans.

At stake is the health of people who survive heart attacks. They face a higher risk of another life-threatening event known as cardiac arrest, which occurs when the electrical system in the heart loses its ability to properly control heartbeat.

The heart "goes into an irregular rhythm, stops functioning and stops pumping blood at all," Kotlikoff said.

The higher risk may have something to do with disruption in cells around areas of the heart that were damaged during a heart attack, said Dr. Kenneth Chien, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Cardiovascular Research Center in Boston. He was not involved in the research.

According to the new study, previous transplantation of cells into human heart-attack survivors has had mixed results. So, Kotlikoff and colleagues from Germany and the United States tried a new approach by transplanting genetically engineered embryonic heart cells into the hearts of mice after they had heart attacks.

According to Kotlikoff, the cells become mature heart cells and produce a molecule that helps electrical impulses move between cells.

The new findings, which are published in the Dec. 6 issue of Nature, have now outlined the "mechanism underlying the reversal" of the risk of irregular heartbeat after a heart attack, Kotlikoff said.

Cell transplantation "increases the electrical conduction within the damaged or dead section of (heart) tissue," he said.

According to Kotlikoff, the next steps are to figure out whether the cells could provide protection in people and for how long.

Potentially, the cells could be delivered to the heart -- perhaps through a tube -- and prevent heart-attack survivors from having to get pacemakers, Kotlikoff said.

Chien called the study findings "a step in the right direction," but said the method's blend of gene and cell-based therapy could be troublesome. Federal regulators "are very stringent about gene therapy, let alone gene and cell therapy (together)," he said.

More information

There's more on cardiac arrest and heart attack at the American Heart Association  .

THURSDAY, Nov. 29 (HealthDay News) -- Letting patients know how cholesterol boosts their heart risks helps them stick to cholesterol-lowering treatment, Canadian researchers report.

Researchers at McGill University in Montreal enrolled more than 3,000 patients (2,687 completed the study) with cholesterol problems who were instructed to change their lifestyle and then prescribed cholesterol-lowering statin medications when necessary.

Of those patients, more than 1,500 were given a one-page computer printout of their probability for developing heart disease at the start of the study, and at follow-up visits three, six, nine and 12 months later.

At the end of the 12-month study, patients who'd received the heart disease risk profiles had small but significantly greater reductions in "bad" low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels and their ratio of total cholesterol to "good" high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels, the researchers said.

"Patients in the risk profile group were also more likely to reach lipid targets," the study authors wrote in the Nov. 26 issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.

"Communicating risk (of heart disease) is consistent with many of the recommendations to improve adherence, including enhancing self-monitoring and using the support of family and friends," the researchers concluded.

"Informing patients of their coronary risk may also increase the effectiveness of primary prevention by identifying individuals most likely to benefit from treatment while reassuring those at low risk. This information may also assist physicians in treatment selection while improving patient adherence," the research team wrote.

The study was funded by Pfizer Inc., which makes the cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor. The authors have associations with a number of drug makers.

More information

The U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute has more about cholesterol and heart disease.

TUESDAY, Nov. 6 (HealthDay News) -- The high-fat, high-protein and low-carbohydrate Atkins diet may put practitioners at risk for heart disease in as little as one month, a new study suggests.

When individuals followed the maintenance phase of the diet -- without weight loss -- they experienced increased "bad" cholesterol and other markers for heart disease, experts report.

"I think the Atkins diet is potentially detrimental for cardiovascular health, if maintained for a long duration and without attempts to lose weight," said lead researcher Dr. Michael Miller, lead author of the study, director of preventive cardiology at the University of Maryland Medical Center and associate professor of medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. "A stabilizing Atkins diet is not the way to go," he said.

It's also unclear if the popular South Beach or Ornish diets, also studied in the trial, actually promote heart health.

This was just one of several studies involving diet and nutrition slated for presentation at this week's annual meeting of the American Heart Association in Orlando, Fla.

A second study, conducted primarily among Mormons in Utah, found that routine fasting was associated with a lower risk of coronary artery disease.

And yet another trial found that moderate drinking might help ward off angina after heart attack.

"Nutrition continues to be an area of interest, and, clearly, there is conflicting information out there," said Dr. Robert Bonow, immediate past president of the American Heart Association. "With the Atkins diet, you do lose weight and experience a short-term beneficial effect on lipid parameters, but the concern would be long-term. Saturated fats are not good for heart health, and many people experience rebound weight gain which is not good."

Although much research has been done on the Atkins diet, no one has yet looked at the effects of the diet when the person is not losing weight.

"During the process of weight loss, we would expect to see a benefit on various [cardiovascular] parameters," Miller said. In other words, the weight loss that can come with these diets will help the heart.

But how does the cardiovascular system fare on a high-fat regimen when weight remains stable? "Weight loss confounds the results, and we wanted to compare these diets without that possible confounder," Miller explained.

For this trial, 18 healthy adults completed four weeks each on the Atkins (50 percent fat), South Beach (30 percent fat) and Ornish (10 percent fat) diets.

People on the Atkins diet had increased levels of LDL ("bad") cholesterol, more constricted blood vessels and an increase in blood markers for inflammation, some by as much as 30 percent or 40 percent, the researchers said.

The results were less clear for the Ornish or South Beach regimens. In those diets, markers for inflammation remained stable or dipped by up to 20 percent, the researchers found.

Another study followed up on reports from the 1970s that Mormons experience fewer deaths from heart disease.

Previous researchers had assumed that a prohibition on tobacco use among Mormons was the reason, but the current researchers hypothesized that there were additional factors at play.

Indeed, people who reported fasting regularly had a lower risk of developing coronary artery disease. The study adjusted for various factors including resting on the Sabbath, avoiding tea and tobacco, and age and body mass index.

The study did not put a time limit on fasting, but the religious teachings of Mormons do include fasting once a month for about 24 hours.

It could be that self-proclaimed fasters have better control of their diet in general, or fasting may prompt some kind of protective biological mechanism, said Benjamin Horne, senior author of the study, director of cardiovascular and genetic epidemiology at Intermountain Medical Center and adjunct assistant professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.

Still, the study has raised more questions than it has answered, including whether to fast at all and for how long, he said. Horne warned that diabetics, in particular, should not start fasting until more is known.

A final study, this one of almost 2,500 individuals, confirmed that moderate alcohol consumption (one to two drinks daily) was associated with a reduced risk of angina one year after having a heart attack, compared to both abstinence or heavy alcohol consumption. Drinking too much (more than four drinks a day) was associated with an increased risk of angina, said researchers from St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City.

How does one find the healthiest lifestyle in the midst of all this information?

"We recommend weight loss in a slow and consistent manner rather than a crash course," said Bonow, who is also Goldberg Distinguished professor at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and chief of the division of cardiology at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

Bonow offered what he believes is a quick nutritional checklist for health: "Exercise and paying attention to calories in and out, lots of fruits and vegetables, less saturated fat, milk products should be skim, fried foods are bad, omega-3 fatty acids are good."

More information

For more on diet and nutrition, visit the American Heart Association  .