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MONDAY, Oct. 31, 2022 (American Heart Association News) -- The longer a person's blood pressure levels remain under control, the lower their risk may be for dementia, new research shows.The findings add to evidence suggesting that good heart and brain health is best achieved by keeping systolic blood pressure (the upper number) consistently under control, compared to having levels that vary, even if the average falls within the target range.The work will be presented Saturday at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions conference being held in Chicago and virtually. The findings are considered preliminary until full results are published in a peer-reviewed journal."This study clarified that time in target range has an incremental value beyond mean systolic blood pressure...

MONDAY, Oct. 31, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- A bad marriage can break your heart -- literally.Heart attack survivors in a stressful relationship are more likely to have a rocky recovery, a new study reports."We found there's an independent association between severe marital stress and worse outcomes within their first year of recovery," said lead researcher Cenjing Zhu, a doctoral candidate in chronic disease epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health.Compared to people in healthy relationships, heart patients under severe marital stress were 67% more likely to suffer recurring chest pain during the first year of their recovery, Zhu and her colleagues found.Severe marital stress also increased a person's chances of rehospitalization by nearly 50%, and affected their quality of life...

MONDAY, Oct. 31, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- People trying to adopt a healthier diet probably aren't the best judges of how well they're actually eating, a new study discovers.Only about 1 in 4 people could accurately estimate how healthy they were eating when asked to assess their diet after a year spent trying to lose weight, researchers found.Worse, only 1 in 10 people understood how their diet had actually changed during that year, with most assuming they’d made much greater strides than they actually had."There's not very good agreement between what they perceive their diet quality to be and what we've calculated their diet quality to be. They're also overestimating the amount of change that they've made in their diet quality," said lead researcher Jessica Cheng. She's a...

MONDAY, Oct. 31, 2022 (HealthDay News) -- A person with heart failure in dire need of a new heart may have faced delays in getting one during the pandemic when potential donors tested positive for COVID-19. As some centers began accepting these hearts for transplant anyway, data from a new study shows that hearts from COVID-19 positive donors may be as safe to transplant as those from someone without the virus."These findings suggest that we may be able to be more aggressive about accepting donors that are positive for COVID-19 when patients are in dire need of an organ for heart transplantation," said study author Samuel Kim, a third-year medical student at the David Geffen School of Medicine at University of California, Los Angeles.The study, to be presented at the American Heart...