NEW YORK, Jul 05 (Reuters Health) - Good news for women who exercise, eat
well and don't smoke: New study findings show that a healthy lifestyle can
reduce the risk of heart disease in women by more than 80%.
The bad news: Just 3% of over 84,000 women in the study met the researchers'
definition of a healthy lifestyle.
Even though heart disease has been on the decline, it remains the number-one
killer of both men and women in the United States. Many studies have found that
lowering cholesterol and blood pressure with medication can reduce the risk of
heart disease, but many of these drugs are expensive and have harmful side
effects, according to Dr. Meir J. Stampfer and a team of researchers at Harvard
Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
Previous studies have examined the effect of a single aspect of a healthy
lifestyle, such as exercising or not smoking, but Stampfer's team evaluated an
overall healthy lifestyle. They considered women to be at low risk if they did
not smoke, were not overweight, drank at least half an alcoholic drink a day,
spent at least 30 minutes a day exercising moderately or vigorously, and ate a
high-fiber diet low in saturated fats.
Even after the investigators took into account factors that could influence
the risk of heart disease--including age, high blood pressure, high cholesterol
and a family history of heart disease--all aspects of a healthy lifestyle were
linked to a lower risk of heart disease. In the study of 84,129 healthy female
nurses who were followed for 14 years, those in the low-risk group were more
than 80% less likely to have a heart attack or die from heart disease, according
to the report in the July 6th issue of The New England Journal of Medicine. In
fact, the researchers estimate that 82% of heart attacks and heart-related
deaths could have been prevented if all of the women had adopted the low-risk
lifestyle.
"Closer adherence to a more healthful lifestyle might reduce the risk of
coronary heart disease still further," the authors write. Although the
researchers do not dispute that drugs to lower cholesterol and high blood
pressure can prevent heart disease, "adopting a more healthful lifestyle could
prevent a substantial majority of coronary disease events in women," they
conclude.
