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Item #15
Big
Gut With Diabetes Can Kill
New
study shows that a 40 inch plus waist combined with high blood
pressure can kill!
It's
long been known that having a potbelly and high blood pressure
increases your risk of heart attack or stroke, but a medical study out
last week has estimated that people with those risks and others are
two to three times more likely to die prematurely.
Experts
say about one-third of middle-aged men and women in the USA have the
same cluster of risk factors, called metabolic syndrome.
People
with this syndrome have at least three of the following risk factors:
high blood sugar; a waist circumference of greater than 40 inches for
men or 35 inches for women; lower-than-average HDL cholesterol (the
so-called good cholesterol); high triglycerides and high blood
pressure.
Yet
most people with the syndrome have no idea they even have it, says
Hanna-Maaria Lakka, a researcher at the Louisiana State University.
The signs of the syndrome may be easy to ignore or very mild.
Lakka
and her colleagues studied 1,209 Finnish men who were middle-aged and
relatively healthy in the 1980s. As many as 14% of the men had
metabolic syndrome. The men in the study didn't have heart disease or
diabetes at the study's start. The team kept track of the men for 14
years and noted each time one of the recruits died.
The
team found that men who had the syndrome at the study's start had a
two to three times greater chance of dying of a heart attack or a
stroke during the study than men who did not have this collection of
risk factors.
In
addition, the team found that men who had the syndrome also had a
greater risk of dying for any reason, although most of the extra risk
of death was because of the higher chance of suffering a heart attack,
Lakka says.
People
getting a checkup should ask their family doctor to look for metabolic
syndrome, especially if they have a fat middle, says Robert Eckel, a
spokesman for the American Heart Association. He says even doctors can
dismiss the mild abnormalities that together make up the syndrome.
Yet
getting a diagnosis is one step toward a cure. "One of the best
treatments for metabolic syndrome is to get your act together when it
comes to diet and exercise," he says.
Regular
exercise and a healthy diet can trim a waistline, lower blood sugar
and hopefully reduce the risk associated with this syndrome, he says.
AHA Dec. 2002
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