Tag: Medical study

Doctors have been measuring blood pressure all wrong, study explains

If you’re someone with high blood pressure, you’re going to want to sit up for this news. Researchers working with the American Heart Association have released the results of a nearly 30-year study on high blood pressure, finding that doctors may miss certain health complications if they don’t have their patients lying down.

Typically, patients are only measured while sitting upright. Now, it should become common practice to do two readings, doctors argue.

“If blood pressure is only measured while people are seated upright, cardiovascular disease risk may be missed if not measured also while they are lying supine on their backs,” says lead study author Duc M. Giao, a researcher and a 4th-year MD student at Harvard Medical School, in a media release.

People who also had their blood pressure taken while lying down revealed elevated risks for heart attack, stroke, heart failure, and premature death. The type of medications people use to manage blood pressure did not impact cardiovascular risks, according to the findings.

The autonomic nervous system regulates blood pressure. However, the pull of gravity may prompt blood to pool while seated or in an upright position. Meanwhile, the body is sometimes unable to regulate blood pressure while lying down, being seated, and standing.

“Our findings suggest people with known risk factors for heart disease and stroke may benefit from having their blood pressure checked while lying flat on their backs,” Giao adds.

The first phase of the study began in 1987 and continued until 1989. A total of 15,972 adults living in the U.S. had their blood pressure taken while lying down or sitting up. One of the key features of the study was the diversity of the participants. Over half (56%) were women, and 25 percent of the participants were Black. Blood pressure data was gathered in both rural and urban clinics. Their health was then followed for an average of 25 to 28 years, with the latest health data collected between 2011 and 2013.

Source: https://studyfinds.org/measuring-blood-pressure-wrong/

Many long-covid symptoms linger even after two years, new study shows

0 (Angie Wang/AP)

People who endured even mild cases of covid-19 are at heightened risk two years later for lung problems, fatigue, diabetes and certain other health problems typical of long covid, according to a new study that casts fresh light on the virus’s true toll.

The analysis, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, is believed to be the first to document the extent to which an array of aftereffects that patients can develop — as part of the sometimes debilitating syndrome known as long covid — linger beyond the initial months or year after they survived a coronavirus infection.

According to the findings, patients who suffered bouts of covid severe enough to put them in the hospital are especially vulnerable to persistent health problems and death two years after they were first infected. But people with mild or moderate cases are not spared from the consequences when compared with those who never had covid, showing an elevated risk of two dozen medical conditions included in the analysis.

The study highlights the burden that continues to confront millions of people in the United States and the nation’s health-care system even though the federal government canceled the coronavirus public health emergency three months ago and the World Health Organization has declared the pandemic no longer a public health emergency of international concern.

“A lot of people think, ‘I got covid, I got over it and I’m fine,’ and it’s a nothingburger for them. But that’s not everything,” said the study’s senior author, Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. After a couple of years, “maybe you’ve forgotten about the SARS-CoV-2 infection … but covid did not forget about you. It’s still wreaking havoc in your body,” said Al-Aly, chief of research at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System.

Source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2023/08/21/long-covid-lingering-effects-two-years-later

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