1. Blood Type and Coronary Heart Disease. J of "Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Disease, 2012;doi:10.1161/ATVBAHA.112.248757. "Cardiology Today" Sept. 2012
Analysis of 62,073 women from the Nurses' Health Study and 27,428 adults from the Health Professionals Follow-up Study after at least 20 years followup showed that:
people with blood type AB had a 23% increased risk for CHD, people with type B had an 11% increased risk, and people with type A had a 5% increased risk when compared to people with blood type O. 7% of US population have blood type AB, and 43% have blood type O. 2. Two studies were published recently in Archives of Internal Medicine which linked lonliness and living alone to increased risk of health problems, including cardiovascular disease.
Of the 44,753 participants 19% reported living alone.
Living alone linked to a higher rate of 4 year all-cause mortality (14.1% vs 11.1%) and CV death(8.6% vs 6.8%). This increase in mortality was particularly pronounced among those aged 45 to 65(7.7% vs 5.7%) and among those aged 66 to 80 years(13.2 vs 12.3%). Interestingly, living alone did better for those aged older than 80 years(24.6% vs 28.4%). The second longitudinal cohort study included 1604 participants (mean age 71 years), 43% of whom reported feeling lonely from the psychosocial module of the Health and Retirement Study.
During the 6 years of follow-up, loneliness was linked to all outcome measures.
Lonely participants showed decline in activities of daily living (24.8% vs 12.5%), difficulties with upper extremity tasks (41.5% vs 28.3%), decline in mobility(38.1% vs 29.4%), difficulty in climbing stairs (40.8% vs 27.9%) and an increased risk for death (22.8% vs 14.2%). |
So, WM,
I want you to realize that what you've been doing for our home page
is helping us to live longer by helping us deal with loneliness.
These studies once again confirm what we have suspected or known, i.e.
friends are becoming more important in our survival game in old age.
Let us, including me, try to be kind and nice to one another as we are all getting older together.