WASHINGTON (March 28, 2014) — People who are married have lower rates of several cardiovascular diseases compared with those who are single, divorced or widowed, according to research to be presented at the American College of Cardiology's 63rd Annual Scientific Session. The relationship between marriage and lower odds of vascular diseases is especially pronounced before age 50.

"These findings certainly shouldn't drive people to get married, but it's important to know that decisions regarding who one is with, why, and why not may have important implications for vascular health," said Carlos L. Alviar M.D., cardiology fellow, New York University Langone Medical Center, and the lead investigator of the study.

Only about 1/6th of the world bans smoking and a new paper in The Lancet seeks to increase that, and implied causality is the way to do it.

Implied causality is fine, of course. No one knew smoking was bad until there was implied causality and then real causality, but in the culture war that seeks to control choice, population statistics are being used to sillier and sillier effect and it begins to border on pseudoscience, like third-hand smoke, and then sociology, like that banning smoking will cut premature births by 10 percent.

The largest earthquakes occur where oceanic plates move beneath continents. Obviously, water trapped in the boundary between both plates has a dominant influence on the earthquake rupture process.

Writing in
Nature Geoscience (28.03.2014), a group of scientists from the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences and from Liverpool University analyzed the Chile earthquake of February, 27th, 2010 and found that the water pressure in the pores of the rocks making up the plate boundary zone was key. 

What is high blood pressure? When do you need medication?

The answer was never clear. What is clear is that a lot of people are on medication that may not need it. In February, the Eighth Joint National Committee relaxed the blood pressure goal in adults 60 years and older to 150/90 from 140/90. The result will be that up to 5.8 million U.S. adults will no longer be told they need hypertension medication. That's good for the federal government, which is going to be increasingly concerned about costs as Obamacare is adopted, and it is good for the parts of culture that believe guidelines are created by pharmaceutical companies who control recommendations. It may actually be fine for patients also.

Erectile dysfunction is common among older men with cardiovascular risk factors where cholesterol-lowering statins are frequently prescribed.

Matching curves have suggested a negative association between statin therapy and testosterone levels, leading to concerns about the effects of these medications on the quality of erection. Not so, according to a meta-analysis of previous studies on erectile dysfunction and statins. Instead, the authors find that statins are associated with a significant improvement in erectile function, a fact researchers hope will encourage men who need statins to reduce their risk of heart attack to take them. 

The heart becomes more spherical when exposed to long periods of microgravity in space, according to a study of 12 astronauts. The research has implications if any progress toward a trip to Mars ever gets made. NASA already has a zero-risk culture and cute robots don't have heart attacks whereas a spaceflight of 18 months or more that could affect astronauts' heart strength may be a concern.

In space, no one can hear your heartbeats - as easily. The heart works a lot less and that leads to less muscle mass, even over a relatively short duration.

Still feeling the residual effects of springing ahead for daylight saving time? The hour of sleep lost – or gained – may play a bigger, perhaps more dangerous role in our body's natural rhythm than we think. It seems moving the clock forward or backward may alter the timing of when heart attacks occur in the week following these time changes, according to research to be presented at the American College of Cardiology's 63rd Annual Scientific Session.

Ammonia pollution from agricultural sources poses larger health costs than previously estimated, according to a numerical model by Harvard University researchers Fabien Paulot and Daniel Jacob, who estimated chemical reactions in the atmosphere to better represent how ammonia interacts in the atmosphere to form harmful particulate matter. The improved simulation helped the scientists narrow in on the estimated health costs from air pollution associated with food produced for export – a growing sector of agriculture and a source of trade surplus.

"The 'cost' is an economic concept to measure how much people are willing to pay to avoid a risk," Paulot said. "This is used to quantify the cost for society but also to evaluate the benefits of mitigation."

BUFFALO, N.Y. – One of the serious health consequences of obesity is elevated blood pressure (BP), a particular problem in children because research has found that high BP in children usually follows them into adulthood, carrying with it a wide range of possible negative consequences.

Even modest elevations in the BP of adolescents, according to recent research, can pose cardiovascular problems later in life.

A systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies of the effect of child obesity intervention programs on blood pressure has found that whether such programs prevented obesity or not, many of them reduced BP in children. It also found that the most effective programs in this regard promoted both healthy eating and physical activity.

If there is a pleasant, chemically-induced but culturally acceptable pastime, someone at U.C. Davis is probably studying it. They have one of my favorite beer scholars, Prof. Charles Bamforth, and are even setting up a coffee science group. Their nutrition department has been generously funded by Mars candy company and, no surprise, a whole 'science of chocolate' panel appeared at an AAAS meeting as a result.