News Briefs: October 2022

Sleep Added to List of Essential Healthy Heart Habits

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There’s one more item to add to the list of essential habits to support better brain and heart health. The American Heart Association (AHA) is adding sleep duration to “Life’s Simple 7,” a list the AHA compiled several years ago to help focus the public’s attention on manageable risk factors for stroke, heart attack, and other health problems. The new list is called “Life’s Essential 8,” and it also includes diet, physical activity, exposure to nicotine (including secondhand smoke), weight, cholesterol levels, blood sugar levels, and blood pressure. By managing each of those factors, you can reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease and help ward off a heart attack or stroke. Sleep was added because it promotes overall health, and getting enough sleep helps support better blood pressure control, weight and other items on the list. The AHA recommends that all adults get seven to nine hours of sleep per night. The AHA also recommends at least 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise and following a heart-healthy diet, such as the Mediterranean-style eating plan or the Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet. The combination of quality sleep, regular exercise, and a balanced diet can go a long way toward supporting other factors for heart and brain health, such as keeping blood pressure, cholesterol, and blood sugar in healthy ranges, and maintaining a healthy weight.

Could Depression Symptoms Warn of an Impending Stroke?

It’s not uncommon for someone who has a stroke to later develop depression. It happens enough that “post-stroke depression” is a widely used term among health-care providers working with stroke survivors. But in a recent study, published in the journal Neurology, researchers in Germany found that symptoms of depression are often present years before a stroke occurs. Researchers tracked the psychological and physical health of nearly 11,000 adults without a history of stroke at the start of the study. Over the course of the 12-year study, 34 percent of the people who had a stroke met the criteria for probable depression, compared with 24 percent of those who did not have a stroke. While it’s not clear whether depression can be used to predict a stroke, the researchers emphasized the importance of screening people who exhibit depressive symptoms for stroke risk and to follow up with depression screenings of stroke survivors who start to exhibit any signs of depression. The researchers also said that more study is needed to better understand any mechanism between depression and stroke risk. However, one possible explanation is that depression can lead to a sedentary lifestyle, poor sleep, and other stroke risk factors, thus increasing the likelihood of a stroke or heart attack down the road.

Wearable Activity Trackers May Someday Provide Early Warnings of Dementia

Researchers monitoring the movement of about 600 participants in a long-running health study of older adults found that movement patterns differed significantly between individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) or Alzheimer’s disease and those with normal cognition. In particular, the researchers found that there was generally less activity during waking hours among participants with some degree of cognitive impairment and that when those individuals were active—especially in the afternoon—their activity was more fragmented or broken up into shorter bursts. The researchers, who published their findings in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, suggest that “sundowning,” the shift to a more aggressive or emotional and confused temperament that affects many people with dementia later in the day, may account for some of the fragmented activity. Researchers are hopeful that in the future, activity trackers may be useful in identifying patterns of activity that could signal early cognitive changes and allow for possible interventions to slow the progress of Alzheimer’s or other neurological disorders.

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