BENEFITS OF VITAMIN E

Vitamin E is good for your hair and skin, but what about for your body? We answer 4 common questions about how your heart, brain, and more might benefit from additional vitamin E intake. Note: Always check with your doctor before taking supplements.

Is vitamin E good for my heart?

Possibly, if you're female. One Harvard study of nearly 40,000 healthy women found that after 10 years, cardiovascular mortality decreased by 24 percent in those who took a vitamin E supplement compared to a placebo, and that number jumped to 49 percent among women older than 65. The study also found that there was a 26 percent decrease in nonfatal heart attacks in women 65 and older who took vitamin E. Another observational study published in the New England Journal of Medicine analyzed the diet of nearly 90,000 women and found that incidence of heart disease was 30 to 40 percent lower in those with the highest intake of vitamin E. However, several clinical studies that looked at the effects of vitamin E on heart health found no link between the two, in both men and women.

Can vitamin E prevent cancer?

Vitamin E is an antioxidant and protects cells from free radicals, and studies have been done to examine whether it's effective at preventing certain cancers. • The most promising link between vitamin E and cancer prevention is with bladder cancer. The American Cancer Society conducted an epidemiological study of almost one million adults and found that those who took a vitamin E supplement for 10 years or longer had a reduced risk of bladder cancer. • Vitamin E may help prevent prostate cancer, but only in smokers. One study of nearly 30,000 men by the National Cancer Institute found that current or past smokers who took a vitamin E supplement were 71 percent less likely to develop prostate cancer than those who took a placebo. However, when researchers looked at the group as a whole—smokers and nonsmokers—there was no general association between vitamin E supplementation and a decrease in prostate cancer. Another study of male smokers from Finland found that those who took a vitamin E supplement for six years had a 32 percent decrease in incidence of prostate cancer and a 41 percent lower mortality rate from it than those who took a placebo. • Results are inconclusive when it comes to colon and breast cancer.

Can Vitamin E help my eyes?

Yes. A study by the National Eye Institute found that taking 400 IU of vitamin E a day slowed the progression of advanced age-related macular degeneration by about 25 percent in patients at risk for the condition. A small study by researchers at Tufts University found that taking vitamin E reduced the risk of cataracts in women age 52 to 74.

Can Vitamin E help my brain?

If you're older, vitamin E might help keep your brain sharp. A study published in JAMA Neurology found that among people aged 65 to 102, those with the highest vitamin E intake had a 36 percent reduction in cognitive decline after three years when compared to those with the lowest consumption. A clinical trial of Alzheimer's patients at Columbia University found that those who received 2,000 IU of vitamin E a day for two years significantly slowed the progression of the disease and the need for institutionalization, when compared to a placebo.

AMAZING FACTS ABOUT HUMAN BODY

Travis Stork, MD, of the hit syndicated show "The Doctors" takes you on a personal guided trip through all the incredible things your body quietly accomplished today.
Amazing Facts About: Your Brain

You had about 20,000 thoughts today.  Picture 100 billion neurons (or brain cells), which each “fire” (talk to each other) five to 50 times per second (on average). The impulses can travel as fast as 270 miles per hour. This speed is what allows you to, say, see an object and immediately identify that 1) it’s a cat, 2) it’s orange, 3) it reminds you of Garfield, and 4) Garfield was your favorite comic.
You didn’t overheat or freeze. Your inner thermostat, located in the hypothalamus, is an engineering marvel. A change of as little as one degree Fahrenheit triggers your body to make lifesaving adjustments. When your temperature gets too high, blood vessels in your skin dilate to release heat. When it drops, they constrict and your sweat glands shut down. Once your core temp hits 97 degrees, you can start shivering as a way to produce heat.
Amazing Facts About: Your Heart

Your heart beat anywhere from 60 to 100 times every minute today. Imagine doing biceps curls at that pace! That’s about 100,000 times a day—and up to three billion times in the average person’s life. What’s also very impressive about the heart is its ability to adapt to our lifestyles. During a vigorous workout, more than 70 percent of the heart’s output fuels your working muscles, for example, compared with just 20 percent while you are less active. You have about 100,000 miles of various blood vessels, laid end to end, and your heart pumps about 2,000 gallons of blood through them every day.
Amazing Facts About: Your Lungs

Today, you breathed 25,000 times—without trying. If you had to consciously choose to breathe that often, you’d never get anything else done. Or be able to sleep. So thank your brain stem for making the habit of breathing automatic. Curious why you need to inhale and exhale so often? Well, humans have a very high metabolism; at rest, you demand about seven to ten ounces of oxygen each minute. And your lungs are perfectly designed to handle these truckloads of oxygen. They contain about 300 million microscopic air sacs called alveoli, which provide the surface area roughly equivalent to half a tennis court to bring oxygen into the body while releasing carbon dioxide.
Amazing Facts About: Your Eyes

The muscles that help focus your eyes moved about 100,000 times today. That’s a workout equivalent to a 50-mile walk.
You also blinked about 15 times a minute, or almost 15,000 times today while you were awake. You do this spontaneously to protect your eyes and clean away dirt. Even cooler: Your brain doesn’t let you miss out while you blink—it fills in missing information so you never realize your eyes were closed.
Amazing Facts About: Your Mouth

You produced about six cups of saliva today. Yes, that’s a lot of spit, but saliva is one of the body’s most under appreciated fluids. Without it, you wouldn’t be able to taste or swallow food. Or form words. Saliva is also a potent germ fighter: Its enzymes clean your mouth and prevent tooth decay and infections. No wonder animals lick their wounds.

Amazing Facts About: Your Circulation System

Today, you made up to three million red blood cells each second. That’s almost 260 billion for the day. They perform one of blood’s most important roles: delivering precious oxygen to all your body’s cells. A single drop of blood contains millions of these guys, which get their scarlet hue from the protein hemoglobin.
You got cut but didn’t bleed out or get a systemic infection. Next time you get a scrape, think about this cascade of events: After some bleeding, which helps clean the wound, your body stops blood flow by forming a clot. If bacteria enter through the break in the skin, white blood cells quickly arrive to destroy them. Mast cells from your immune system release histamine, a chemical that increases blood flow to the site (it also makes the area red and swollen).
This leads other cells to begin battle with the bacteria. It’s a magical sequence that helps save your life whenever you get cut.
Amazing Facts About: Your Digestive System

The lining of your stomach regenerated about 25 percent of itself today. Your tummy is home to a powerful fluid: hydrochloric acid, which helps break down foods in much the same way that laundry detergent cleans stains. It’s so potent (strong enough to dissolve the metal zinc) that your stomach lining regenerates itself every four to five days so the acid won’t injure it.
You had dozens and dozens of chances to choke to death today—but didn’t. The back of your mouth displays an impressive feat of life guarding every time you eat or drink food or liquids. As you prepare to swallow, your soft palate comes up to cover your nasal cavity (so you don’t squirt spaghetti out your nose) and your epiglottis covers your trachea (so food doesn’t go down your lungs). To appreciate the art of swallowing, watch a baby being spoon-fed a jar of mashed carrots. He’ll push the food out with his tongue because he is still learning how to perfect the swallowing reflex, without which he would likely die.
Amazing Facts About: Your Kidneys

Your kidneys cleaned and recirculated almost 50 gallons of blood today. That’s about three times as much as a medium-size car’s gas tank would hold. To fully appreciate the wonder of the kidneys, which form the most high-tech filtration system you’ll ever encounter, all you have to do is look at someone on dialysis due to poor kidney function. People need a machine about the size of a mini fridge to filter their blood, adjust electrolyte levels, and get rid of waste, while your body accomplishes this without any fanfare using two small organs, each about the size of a computer mouse.
Your kidneys also help maintain the proper level of hydration. When you’re drinking a ton of water, they excrete more, turning your urine a clear or pale yellow color. When you’re dehydrated, they cling to as much fluid as possible, so your urine becomes more concentrated, making it look darker (like apple juice). 

Amazing Facts About: Your Skeleton

You regenerated about 0.03 percent of your skeleton today. Your bones—strong as steel but as light as aluminum—aren’t just some chalky-white lifeless scaffold; they are living tissues with blood vessels and nerves. They are constantly repairing and rebuilding—about 10 percent of your adult skeleton is replaced each year. Your bones are also a good example of “use it or lose it”: The bones of someone with a broken leg who is immobile for a few weeks will literally shrink during that time, but they will bulk up once the person starts bearing weight and exercising again.
Amazing Facts About: Your Feet

Your feet produced up to two cups of sweat today. No wonder your shoes and socks smell less than fresh. That sounds like a lot, but you’ll want to cut your feet a break when you consider how much work they do. If a healthy person takes 8,000 to 10,000 steps a day, that’s the equivalent of walking the circumference of the earth four times by age 70!
Amazing Facts About: Your Skin

Your skin shed about 50 million dead cells today. That’s about 30,000 to 40,000 a minute (just think about how much skin you’ve axed since you started reading this article). You may have heard that your skin is your body’s largest organ, and because it serves so many important functions, the scaffolding is always up, so to speak. Just one square inch of skin has 650 sweat glands, 20 feet of blood vessels, 60,000 pigment cells, and more than 1,000 nerve endings. 

Amazing Facts About: Your Immune System

Today, you may have fought cancer. Your body has trillions of cells. If a mutation occurs in the DNA (genetic material) of any, it can create cancer cells, which divide uncontrollably and can clump together to form tumors. When you consider how many cells split every minute—and each time a cell divides, it has to copy 30,000 genes—it’s a wonder we don’t get cancer all the time. The reason we don’t: the body’s incredible system to catch errors. When a cell divides, proofreading enzymes fix any DNA mistakes. If the proofreaders don’t work, the cell itself can detect that it’s “broken” and commit suicide. It says, “I’m about to become cancerous, so I’ll kill myself to save the body.”

Courtesy To: Steve Vaccariello, Bryan Christie & Reader's Digest

HYPERTENSION OR HIGH BLOOD PRESSURE

Blood is carried from the heart to all parts of the body in blood vessels. Each time the heart beats, it pumps blood into the vessels. Blood pressure is created by the force of blood pushing against the walls of blood vessels (arteries) as it is pumped by the heart. Hyper tension, also known as high or raised blood pressure, is a condition in which the blood vessels have persistently raised pressure. The higher the pressure in blood vessels the harder the heart has to work in order to pump blood. if left uncontrolled, hyper tension can lead to a heart attack, an enlargement of the heart and eventually heart failure. Blood vessels may develop bulges (aneurysms) and weak spots due to high pressure, making them more likely to clog and burst. the pressure in the blood vessels can also cause blood to leak out into the brain. this can cause a stroke. Hyper  tension can also lead to kidney failure, blindness, rupture of blood vessels and cognitive impairment.

How hyper tension is defined?

Blood pressure is measured in millimeters of mercury (mm Hg) and is recorded as two numbers usually written one above the other. The upper number is the systolic blood pressure - the highest pressure in blood vessels and hap-pens when the heart contracts, or beats. The lower number is the diastolic blood pressure - the lowest pressure in blood vessels in between heartbeats when the heart muscle relaxes. Normal adult blood pressure is defined as a systolic blood pressure of 120 mm Hg and a diastolic blood pressure of 80 mm Hg. However, the cardiovascular benefits of normal blood pressure extend to lower systolic (105  mm  Hg) and lower diastolic blood pressure levels (60 mm Hg). 

Hyper tension is defined as a systolic blood pressure equal to or above 140 mm Hg and/or diastolic blood pressure equal to or above 90 mm Hg. 

Normal levels of both systolic and diastolic blood pressure are particularly important for the efficient function of vital organs such as the heart, brain and kidneys and for overall health and well being.

Causes of hyper tension

There are many behavioural risk factors for the development of hyper tension including :

• consumption of food containing too much salt and fat, and not eating enough fruit and vegetables
• harmful levels of alcohol use 
• physical inactivity and lack of exercise 
• poor stress management.
• these behavioural risk factors are highly influenced by people’s working and living conditions.

In addition, there are several metabolic factors that increase the risk of heart disease, stroke, kidney failure and other complications of hyper  tension, including diabetes, high cholesterol and being overweight or obese. Tobacco and hyper tension interact to further raise the likelihood of cardiovascular disease.

Social determinants of health, e.g. income, education and housing, have an adverse impact on behavioural risk factors and in this way influence the development of hyper tension. For example, unemployment or fear of unemployment may have an im-pact on stress levels that in turn influences high blood pressure. 

The symptoms of high blood pressure

Most hypertensive people have no symptoms at all. There is a common misconception that people with hyper tension always experience symptoms, but the reality is that most hypertensive people have no symptoms at all. Sometimes hyper tension causes symptoms such as headache, shortness of breath, dizziness, chest pain, palpitations of the heart and nose bleeds. It can be dangerous to ignore such symptoms, but neither can they be relied upon to signify hyper tension. Hyper tension is a serious warning sign that significant lifestyle changes are required. The condition can be a silent killer and it is important for every-body to know their blood pressure reading.

Hypertension and life-threatening diseases

It is dangerous to ignore high blood pres-sure, because this increases the chances of life-threatening complications. The higher the blood pressure, the higher the likelihood of harmful consequences to the heart and blood vessels in major organs such as the brain and kidneys. This is known as cardiovascular risk, and can also be high in people with mild hyper tension in combination with other risk factors e.g.,  tobacco use, physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, obesity, diabetes, high cholesterol, low socioeconomic status and family history of hyper tension. Low socioeconomic status and poor access to health services and medications also increase the vulner-ability of developing major cardiovascular events due to uncontrolled hyper tension.

Diagnosing hyper tension

Blood pressure measurements need to be recorded for several days before a diagnosis of hyper tension can be made. Blood pressure is recorded twice daily, ideally in the morning and evening. Two consecutive measurements are taken, at least a minute apart and with the person seated. Measurements taken on the first day are discarded and the average value of all the remaining measurements is taken to confirm a diagnosis of hyper  tension.

If hyper tension is detected early it is possible to minimize the risk of heart attack, heart failure, stroke and kidney failure. All adults should check their blood pressure and know their blood pressure levels. Digital blood pressure measurement machines enable this to be done outside clinic settings. If hyper tension is detected people should seek the advice of a health worker. For some people, lifestyle changes are not sufficient for controlling blood pres-sure and prescription medication is needed. Blood pressure drugs work in several ways, such as removing excess salt and fluid from the body, slowing the heartbeat or relaxing and widening the blood vessels.

Self-monitoring of blood pressure is recommended for the management of hyper  tension in patients where measurement devices are affordable. As with other noncommunicable diseases, self care can facilitate early detection of hyper tension, adherence to medication and healthy behaviours, better control and awareness of the importance of seeking medical advice when necessary. Self-care is important for all, but it is particularly so for people who have limited access to health services due to geographic, physical or economic reasons.

How to tackle hyper tension?

While some people develop hyper tension as they get older, this is not a sign of healthy ageing. All adults should know their blood pressure level and should also find out if a close relative had or has hyper tension as this could place them at increased risk.

The odds of developing high blood pressure and its adverse consequences can be minimized by : 

Healthy diet

• promoting a healthy lifestyle with emphasis on proper nutrition for infants and young people
• reducing salt intake to less than 5 g of salt per day
• eating five servings of fruit and vegetables a day
• reducing saturated and total fat intake.

Alcohol

• avoiding harmful use of alcohol.

Physical activity

• regular physical activity, and promotion of physical activity for children and young people. WHO recommends physical activity for at least 30 minutes a day five times a week. 
• maintaining a normal body weight. 

Tobacco

• stopping tobacco use and exposure to 
• tobacco products 

Stress

• proper management of stress

If proper diet and regular physical activity are not enough to keep your blood pressure within safe limits, your doctor will prescribe a medication.

Diuretics

Diuretics, or “water pills,” are often the first medication chosen. These drugs help control blood pressure by ridding the body of excess salt and water. If diuretic therapy doesn't bring your blood pressure down to normal, your doctor may have you take other medications. 

Beta Blockers

Beta blockers lower blood pressure by slowing the heart rate and reducing the force of the heartbeat, easing the heart’s workload.

Calcium Channel Blockers

Calcium channel blockers can decrease the heart’s pumping strength and relax blood vessels.

ACE Inhibitors

ACE (angiotensin converting enzyme) inhibitors interfere with the body’s production of angiotensin II, a chemical that causes the arteries to narrow.

ARBs

The ARBs (angiotensin receptor blockers) block the effects of angiotensin II.

Vasodilators

Vasodilators, another useful group of drugs, can cause the muscle in blood vessel walls to relax, allowing the vessel to widen. They’re especially effective in the arterioles, very small arteries that connect larger arteries to the tiny capillaries. 

In most cases, these drugs lower blood pressure. Quite often, however, people respond very differently to them. That’s why most patients must go through a trial period to find out which medications work best with the fewest side effects. Patients frequently must take two to three medications to control their blood pressure.