Coffee may not be bad for your blood pressure

High blood pressure has been linked to heart disease, stroke, and a shorter life expectancy, and some scientists have suggested that coffee might fuel the problem.  Despite earlier concerns, downing lots of coffee doesn't seem to increase the risk of high blood pressure, according to a new report -- but the evidence isn't conclusive.  Just more than one in five participants eventually developed high blood pressure, according to the findings, which appear in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. 

But the chance of being diagnosed with the condition was no different between people who said they chugged more than five cups of coffee per day and those who drank very little.  Still, the report "is not saying there's no risk" to drinking lots of java, Dr. Liwei Chen, who worked on the study, told Reuters Health.  Chen, from the Louisiana State University School of Public Health in New Orleans, said more data would be needed to draw a firm conclusion. 

What's more, people who drank between one and three cups per day had a slightly higher risk of high blood pressure than those who drank less -- a result the researchers couldn't explain.  Dr. Lawrence Krakoff, who studies high blood pressure at the Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, said that the question about coffee's effects "keeps popping up" among both his patients and fellow doctors.  But it has yet to be answered completely, said Krakoff, who was not involved in the new work. 

Dr. Gary Curhan, who worked on one of the studies Chen and her colleagues looked at, agreed.  "There may be other adverse effects to (drinking) large amounts of caffeine," Curhan, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, told Reuters Health.  But based on the existing data, he said there is no reason to believe that drinking coffee would lead to high blood pressure.  Chen's team could not compare the effect of drinking caffeinated versus decaffeinated coffee, as some of the studies they analyzed had participants report both together or only asked about caffeinated coffee.

The new report pools data from six previous studies that included more than 170,000 people in total. For each study, scientists surveyed the participants to find out how many cups of coffee they drank each day -- from less than one to more than five -- and then followed them for up to 33 years.

"I don't think of coffee as a risk factor for" high blood pressure, he told Reuters Health. However, "If people are drinking 12 cups a day and aren't sleeping, I assume that that's an important issue."



SOURCE: Reuters Health / bit.ly/e9ntfJ The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, online March 30, 2011.

Death rates for people with high BP dropping but still a lot higher than for those without.

Death rates among people with high blood pressure continue to decrease, but still remain far higher than people without the condition.  According to the U.S. Public Health Service at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, drugs to reduce blood pressure are widely available, but a large gap still exists between people with hypertension and those without it.

Among American adults between the ages of 25 and 74, the overall death rate was 18.8 percent for those with hypertension, which is 42 percent higher than those with normal blood pressure.  The good news is that the mortality rate fell by more than 14 percent between hypertensive participants recruited by researchers between 1988 and 1994 versus those recruited between 1971 and 1975. This is 57 percent higher than those without high blood pressure.


Men are still more likely to die from high blood pressure complications, but mortality rates among hypertensive men fell more than four times compared to women with the condition.  The researchers said in a statement that compared with men with high blood pressure, hypertensive women gained more weight, were more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes and were less likely to quit smoking.

A full report on the study appears in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

Read more: http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/90046395?Mortality%20rates%20declining%20for%20high%20blood%20pressure%20patients#ixzz1Kj3WUMxk

Pomegranate juice may lower blood pressure

New research shows that pomegranate juice may help to reduce blood pressure. The findings will be presented today at the 2011 Society for Endocrinology conference in Birmingham, UK.

Researcher Dr Emad Al-Dujaili from Queen Margaret University looked at how a daily dose of pomegranate juice might affect blood pressure. The study consisted of 20 participants: 10 took a daily dose of 500ml pomegranate juice and 10 took a placebo of 500ml water. Measurements of blood pressure and urinary hormone levels were taken before and after 30 minutes of exercise, both before starting the study and one week after pomegranate juice.

People who drank the pomegranate juice showed significant improvements in blood pressure after one week, whilst those in the placebo group showed no significant difference in any variable. After one week of daily pomegranate juice consumption, systolic blood pressure levels were lowered both before and after exercise (pre-exercise: 141±20.7 to 136.1±17.3mmHg, p=0.03 and post-exercise:156.4±17.5 to 149.5±10.2mmHg, p=0.04) as were diastolic blood pressure levels (90.9 ±11.6 to 87.1±8.7mmHg, p=0.04 and 102.6±23.9 to 94.6±20.4mmHg, p=0.05).

The ratio of cortisol to cortisone in the urine also dropped after a week of pomegranate juice consumption (1.81 ±1.24 to 0.82 ±0.56, p=0.009). Cortisol is an active steroid hormone, produced from cholesterol in the adrenal glands, which affects glucose and fat metabolism and can increase blood pressure by altering salt and water balance in the kidneys and colon. In contrast, cortisone is an inactive metabolite of cortisol which exerts no known physiological actions. The inter-conversion of active cortisol and inert cortisone is mediated within organs such as the liver and kidneys by enzymes called 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenases. The decrease in the urinary cortisol to cortisone ratio suggests that compounds present in pomegranate juice may have modified cortisol-cortisone metabolism by these 11β-hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase enzymes.

This is the first time that pomegranate juice has been shown to have a positive effect on blood pressure both before and after exercise. However, this was only a small study on healthy volunteers and the findings need to be validated by a larger trial.

Researcher Dr Emad Al-Dujaili, Senior Lecturer at Queen Margaret University said:

"Blood pressure is controlled by a complicated interaction between hormones, the nervous system and the physical properties of blood and blood vessels. Our study shows that pomegranate juice may have the potential to lower blood pressure levels both at rest and following exercise. Whilst the effects that we found were slight, they do give us an insight into how pomegranate juice and the hormone cortisol can alter this system in the human body to give health improvements.

"Our study was only on a small number of healthy volunteers, so the next step is to see if pomegranate juice might have similar effects on people with high blood pressure, a known risk factor for heart disease and stroke. We also want to look at whether pomegranate juice has an effect on other areas where glucocorticoids are known to play a part, such as BMI, fat distribution and insulin resistance."

Mothers genes may pass on tendency to high blood pressure

Mothers with a certain genetic mutation may pass the tendency to develop high blood pressure on to their children, according to a new study.  Researchers from the U.S., China, and Austria made the discovery after focusing on a five-generation Chinese family. Many of its members who descended from the same female ancestor had high blood pressure.


The researchers found in these people a genetic mutation that affects the mitochondria. These are the ''powerhouses'' of the cells that convert energy into useable forms. The discovery suggests that a mitochondrial DNA mutation could be the basis for high blood pressure in some people.  "This mutation can reduce the cellular energy production," says researcher Min-Xin Guan, PhD, a professor of genetics at Zhejiang University in China. That increases the production of free radicals, substances which can be damaging to cells, his team found.

''These mitochondrial dysfunctions may contribute to the development of hypertension," Guan writes.
More than 60 million people in the U.S. have high blood pressure, according to the American Heart Association. More than two-thirds require medication for the condition. Untreated high blood pressure increases the risk for both stroke and heart attack.

Source: WebMD
The new study is published in Circulation Research, a journal of the American Heart Association.