Here’s yet another reason to catch those Zzzzs.
Sleepless teens risk high blood pressure. Teens who don’t get enough sleep or have poor-quality sleep run the risk of elevated blood pressure, a new study finds. It’s the first study to make such a connection, said the study’s senior author, Dr. Susan Redline, director of the University Hospitals Sleep Center at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “In adults, there has been evidence that less than six hours of sleep a night was associated with high blood pressure levels,” said Redline, who is professor of medicine and pediatrics at Case Western Reserve. “No study has been done in adolescents.” Redline and her colleagues studied 238 boys and girls, ages 13 to 16, asking about their sleep habits. They found that 11 percent of them slept less than 6.5 hours a night, and 26 percent had poor “sleep efficiency,” with frequent awakenings at night. One of every seven teens in the study had either hypertension, which is high blood pressure, greater than 120 over 80, or borderline high blood pressure called pre-hypertension. Teens with less than 85 percent sleep efficiency had nearly three times the odds of high blood pressure, the researchers reported. “That was one of the more unique findings, that poor sleep quality is associated with high blood pressure,” Redline said.

Don’t drink too much Red Bull. Too much of a good thing isn’t always good, scientists in Australia found. Too much of the popular Red Bull energy drink may lead to heart damage, they say, after studying 30 university students, ages 20 to 24. The researchers found that drinking just one 250 ml sugar-free can of the caffeinated drink boosted the “stickiness” of the blood and increased the risk of blood clots. After drinking Red Bull, the students had a cardiovascular profile similar to that of someone with heart disease, The Times of London reported. The results were alarming and suggest that older adults with symptoms of heart disease shouldn’t drink too much Red Bull, said study author Scott Willoughby, of the Cardiovascular Research Center at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and Adelaide University. In a statement, Red Bull officials said the drink had been proved safe by numerous scientific studies, and that it had never been banned from anywhere it had been introduced, the Times reported. Red Bull is sold in 143 countries but is banned in Norway, Denmark and some other countries due to health concerns.

Chemical used in baby bottles is safe. A chemical used in the making of baby bottles and other food containers is not dangerous, U.S. Food and Drug Administration researchers have decided. FDA scientists have confirmed the agency’s original decision that the chemical bisphenol A, which hardens plastic, is not a threat to either infants or adults. The European Food Safety Authority made a similar finding in late July. Trace amounts of bisphenol A have been found to leach into food containers, the FDA acknowledged, but the agency’s scientists said they found no evidence that such small amounts were harmful, The Associated Press reports. The FDA findings are not the final word, according to AP. A September meeting is scheduled, at which experts outside the FDA will debate bisphenol A’s safety. The FDA itself has kept the issue open. More research is needed because “there are always uncertainties associated with safety decisions,” AP quotes the FDA as saying.

Exercise thwarts high blood pressure.

For people with high blood pressure, exercise can be the most important lifestyle change they can make, researchers say. Yet two-thirds of doctors don’t take the time to tell their patients with high blood pressure about the importance of exercise and physical activity, a new study finds. “Patients do follow physician recommendations to exercise when instructed to, and patients who follow exercise recommendations tend to have lower systolic blood pressures than those who do not,” lead researcher Dr. Josiah Halm, a hypertension specialist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, told HealthDay. The findings are published in the summer issue of Ethnicity & Disease. For the study, Halm’s team collected data on 17,474 people who participated in the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Among these people, 4,686 reported having high blood pressure. The researchers found that only slightly more than one-third of the people with high blood pressure said their doctor had told them to increase physical activity as a way of bringing down their blood pressure. Yet, 71 percent of patients with high blood pressure saw a drop in their blood pressure when they increased their physical activity, which means that they listened when doctors told them to exercise more, according to the report. “Non-pharmacological methods, such as exercising, are important in improving blood pressure control on a population level as this study looked at the cross-section of the U.S. population,” Halm said.

Black Americans need more sun.

There is a growing body of scientific and medical research suggesting that concerns about skin cancer may have been exaggerated and that most Americans, especially African Americans, actually need greater exposure to sunshine and the valuable vitamin D it helps to produce, reports EURWeb. The most recent in a series of studies was released on Tuesday by the prestigious Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. The researchers used data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to conclude that not getting enough of the so-called “sunshine vitamin” appears to increase the risk of an early death by as much as 26 percent. Johns Hopkins cardiologist Dr. Erin Michos said low levels of vitamin D appear to “confer an increased risk of dying from any cause.” For African Americans, Jean Mayer of the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston concluded in an earlier report: “Vitamin D insufficiency is more prevalent,” especially for Blacks living in the North. “Most young, healthy Blacks to not achieve optimal” levels of vitamin D from sunshine,” he says. That’s mostly because the natural pigment protection African Americans have against harmful ultra-violet rays reduces vitamin D absorption in North American environments, researchers say.  Studies show the sunshine vitamin offers a broad range of health benefits including boosting bone and muscle strength to offering protection against both cancer and diabetes. But Michos said more clinical studies were needed before that conclusion could be definitively made. Meanwhile, in 2007 a team from Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., found that the lower the levels of vitamin D in a woman’s body the greater is the risk of her developing breast cancer.

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Borderline high blood pressure a threat for young people
Young adults with borderline high blood pressure, known as pre-hypertension, are more likely later in life to have calcium deposits in their coronary arteries, a new study finds. “They’re too young to have very many heart attacks and strokes,” lead author Dr. Mark J. Pletcher said of the 3,560 participants whose ages were 18 to 30 when the study started. “But looking at coronary calcium is a way of measuring atherosclerosis, which is a strong predictor of heart attacks.” Almost 20 percent of the people in the study developed pre-hypertension – blood pressure higher than the recommended 120 over 80 but below the 140 over 80 reading of treatable high blood pressure – before the age of 35, HealthDay.com reports. Heart scans showed accumulation of calcium deposits in their heart arteries during the 20-year study. “What we have shown is that these low-level elevations, above 120 over 80, appear to be associated with atherosclerosis later in life and probably with heart attacks and stroke,” said Pletcher, an assistant professor of epidemiology, biostatistics and medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. The findings were published in the July 15 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.