Saturday, August 25, 2012

Health Articles, 08-25-12

6 Quit-Smoking Tips for COPD
How to quit smoking, starting today, if you have COPD.
Quitting smoking is a top priority for all smokers, but if you have COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) it's even more urgent.

Here's why: If you quit, it might be possible to slow down the disease and lessen the toll it takes on your breathing, but only if you cut out cigarettes permanently -- and soon.

Here's how to do it, starting today. [...]


Partner Depression Common After Heart Attack
Anxiety and Even Suicide Risk Higher Than for Other Spouses
[...] Depression is common among heart attack survivors, and now a new study finds that this is also the case for spouses.

Depression, Anxiety Common in Spouses

When researchers compared the spouses of people in Denmark who had heart attacks to the spouses of people who had other major health issues, they found that the husbands and wives of heart attack patients were at higher risk for depression, anxiety, and even suicide after the event -- even if their spouse survived the heart attack.

Cardiologist and researcher Emil L. Fosbol, MD, PhD, of Denmark’s Gentofte University Hospital, says the suddenness of a heart attack may be a factor.

“These are usually events that come out of the blue,” he says. “One minute the partner may appear perfectly healthy and the next minute they may be critically ill or dead.”

The study was conducted using data from a comprehensive Danish health registry when Fosbol was a research fellow at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina.

The analysis revealed that more than three times as many people whose partners died from heart attacks were using antidepressants in the year after the event compared to the year before.

Spouses of people who survived heart attacks were 17% more likely to have a prescription for an antidepressant in the year following the event, whereas spouses of patients surviving other health scares were no more likely to be prescribed antidepressants. [...]

     

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