Cut salt, cut heart attacks.Cutting back on salt doesn't just lower blood pressure. Now researchers have hard evidence that it also curbs the risk of having a heart attack, stroke, coronary bypass coronary bypass Surgical treatment for coronary heart disease to relieve angina pectoris and prevent heart attacks. It became widely used in the 1960s. One or more blood vessels—usually an artery in the chest or a vein from the leg—are transplanted to create , angioplasty angioplasty (ăn`jēōplăs'tē), any surgical repair of a blood vessel, especially balloon angioplasty or percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty, a treatment of coronary artery disease. , or other "cardiovascular event." In the late 1980s and early 1990s, two Trials of hypertension Prevention (TOHP TOHP Cardiology A series of clinical trials–Trial of Hypertension Prevention–that evaluated the efficacy of nonpharmacologic interventions vs drugs on HTN, effect of potassium supplementation on persons with normal high BP and effects of Ca2+ or Mg2+ ) randomly assigned roughly 3,000 people aged 30 to 54 with prehypertension to eat their usual diet or to cut back on sodium--the average reduction was 800 to 1,000 milligrams a day--for 1 1/2 to 3 years. (All the participants were overweight and had diastolic blood pressures Diastolic blood pressure Blood pressure when the heart is resting between beats. Mentioned in: Hypertension between 80 and 89.) Ten to 15 years after the trials ended, researchers found that the risk of a cardiovascular event was 25 to 30 percent lower in those who had been told to cut sodium. The results were similar, regardless of the participants' weight, race, sex, or age. What to do: Eat less salt. The participants averaged 3,600 mg of sodium a day when they entered the study, so they cut back to 2,600 to 2,800 mg a day during the first 1 1/2 to 3 years of the study (intakes weren't measured afterwards). That's feasible (if you don't eat out too often). BMJ BMJ n abbr (= British Medical Journal) → vom BMA herausgegebene Zeitschrift 334: 859, 885, 2007. |
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