Neck Circumference Associated With Heart Disease Risk

He noted that if the results of the preliminary research hold up after further study, it could provide a novel approach in determining a patient’s risk. “We normally end up struggling with trying to find out what are the best measures of obesity and fat?” said Nambi. Since this is the first presentation of the data, Sarah Rosner Preis, a postdoctoral fellow with NHLBI and the study’s lead author, noted that the findings are preliminary. Her findings were that a wider neck was associated with riskier levels of other measurements for heart disease — such as higher systolic blood pressure and lower “good” HDL cholesterol — but not heart disease itself.

Still, the connection could be an important one if the finding is borne out in future research. And if true, heart disease would join a list of other diseases linked to a thicker neck. “To our knowledge, there has been no study that has specifically examined the association between neck circumference and risk of heart disease,” she said. “Prior studies have suggested that neck circumference may be associated with diabetes, insulin resistance and hypertension.”

‘Superpill’ – To Reduce Heart Disease By 60 % & Stroke By 50 %

The study involved 2,053 patients, recruited from heart centers around India between March 2007 and August 2008. The polypill contains low doses of three medications against high blood pressure; simvastatin, which lowers LDL or bad cholesterol and aspirin, a known blood-thinner. “Before this study, there were no data about whether it was even possible to put five active ingredients into a single pill,” the study said. “We found that it works,” the researchers said. Participants in the study were divided into groups and given either the polypill or aspirin, the cholesterol-lowering medication, or one of the three blood pressure medications on their own; different combinations of blood pressure medications, or all three blood pressure treatments with or without aspirin. The researchers found that blood pressure in participants in the polypill group was lowered as much as in the group taking the three blood pressure medications together, with or without aspirin.

Those blood pressure reductions “could theoretically lead to about a 24-percent risk reduction in congestive heart disease and 33 percent risk reduction in strokes in those with average blood pressure levels,” the study said. The polypill reduced LDL cholesterol significantly more than in all other groups except the one in which simvastatin was taken alone. The simvastatin group’s LDL levels fell only slightly more than the polypill group, the study found. Heart rates in the polypill group and the group taking one of the blood-pressure medications, atenolol, fell by seven beats a minute — significantly more than in the other study groups. Side-effects in patients taking the polypill were the same as when taking one or two medications, the study found. The study was “a critical first step to inform the design of larger, more definitive studies, as well as further development of appropriate combinations of blood-pressure lowering drugs with statins and aspirin,” said Yusuf.

Dr Christopher Cannon, a cardiologist from Harvard University, said the polypill took the medical world a step closer to beating heart disease, a leading cause of death worldwide. Some 80 percent of heart disease cases are thought to occur in developing countries. “The concept is simple. Several different drugs are available (generically and thus inexpensively) to treat many of the cardiac risk factors. So, combining them in one pill could reduce heart disease by 80 percent,” Cannon said in a comment piece in The Lancet, in which the results of the study were published. “This approach has obvious appeal and vast implications for global health, because heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide,” he wrote. Still, some said the pill was unlikely to provide panacea for all heart patients.

Dr. Robert Bonow, a former president of the American Heart Association and co-director of the Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute at NorthwesternUniversity in Chicago, told ABC News that while the pill might be better than nothing for many who would otherwise receive no care, a one-size-fits-all approach makes individualized treatment difficult. “This is not a tailored treatment, and it’s low doses,” he told the television network. “So maybe in people with high blood pressure, it is not enough to lower their blood pressure. Or in people with high cholesterol, it is not enough to get them to the target cholesterol levels that their physicians would like to see.”