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The human heart twists and turns as it beats, and a German study shows how the twisting and turning differs between men and women, and young and old.

In the study, published in the Dec. 8 online edition of Circulation: Cardiovascular Imaging, researchers at University Hospital Freiburg describe the different heartbeats they saw in 29 men and 29 women, all healthy, using an advanced imaging technology called MRI tissue phase mapping. The participants ranged in age from 20 to 60-plus.

The healthy heart doesn’t just contract as it pumps blood. The base of the left ventricle, the chamber that pumps blood to the body, changes its direction of rotation up to six times for each beat.

“The left ventricle doesn’t just shorten or get narrower,” said Dr. Thomas C. Gerber, associate professor of medicine and radiology at the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. “It really twists like a dishrag, a very effective way of getting the blood out.”

Clear differences by age and gender emerged from the study, the report said. Among them:
The rotation speed of the apex of the heart decreases with age.
Younger women have higher up-and-down motion velocities along the long axis of the ventricle than younger men, but those differences were reversed in older men and women.
Compared to men, women demonstrated reduced twisting of the ventricle, apex rotation and muscle velocity toward the center of the left ventricle during contraction.

The study could lead to the use of such coronary imaging in diagnosing heart problems, cardiologists say.

“To understand what is abnormal, we have to understand what is normal, and that can differ by gender and age,” said Gerber. Full knowledge of those normal differences could help physicians understand “which abnormalities correspond to a particular disease phase,” he said.

“This information could change the diagnosis and assessment of heart disease from its earliest stages,” the lead author of the report, Dr. Daniela Foell, a senior consultant in cardiology at the University Hospital Freiburg, said in a news release.

But there’s a long way to go before that happens, Gerber noted.

“At this stage of the game, it is a nice proof of principle paper, but to make it clinically useful, other groups would have to use the same tools to see if they get the same results and in a much larger group of patients,” he said.

Also, the study included only a selected group of Germans, Gerber pointed out. “This was a fairly small group and to accept this as normal findings across the world would be premature,” he said.

While the study “hasn’t uncovered anything breathtakingly new,” it has provided very detailed information about the normal heartbeat and sets the stage for more detailed future studies, Gerber added.

“If we had a large data base for different ages and genders, we could establish what is normal and then we could tell for a particular patient whether a particular aspect of cardiac rotation was abnormal, and that would tell the physician that something was wrong,” Gerber said. “But there are no abnormalities we know now that are specific for a particular disease.”

The levels of vitamin D in patients with a type of lymphoma appear to be connected to cancer progression and the likelihood of survival, researchers have found.

“These are some of the strongest findings yet between vitamin D and cancer outcome,” said lead investigator Dr. Matthew Drake, an endocrinologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “While these findings are very provocative, they are preliminary and need to be validated in other studies. However, they raise the issue of whether vitamin D supplementation might aid in treatment for this malignancy, and thus should stimulate much more research.”

The study authors looked at 374 patients who had been newly diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Tests suggested that half of the patients didn’t have enough vitamin D in their systems, and those patients had a 1.5-fold greater risk of disease progression. After the researchers adjusted their figures to account for the influence of other factors, the risk of death among patients with vitamin D deficiency during the study period was doubled compared to patients with ideal levels of vitamin D.

“The exact roles that vitamin D might play in the initiation or progression of cancer is unknown, but we do know that the vitamin plays a role in regulation of cell growth and death, among other processes important in limiting cancer,” Drake said.

What to do? “It is fairly easy to maintain vitamin D levels through inexpensive daily supplements or 15 minutes in the sun three times a week in the summer, so that levels can be stored inside body fat,” Drake said.

States cut funding for tobacco prevention programs by more than 15 percent in the past year, even though they’re receiving record amounts of money from tobacco taxes and from the 1998 state tobacco settlement, says a report released Wednesday.

“Fully funded tobacco prevention and cessation programs stop addiction before it starts, and improve the health of our nation’s communities. States must do better at funding programs that help reduce tobacco use and protect the health of children, 3,500 of whom try their first cigarette every day,” John R. Seffrin, chief executive officer of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network, said in a news release.

“Despite their current budget challenges, the states lack excuses for failing to do more. They are collecting record amounts of tobacco money, more of which should be used to fight the tobacco problem,” Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said in the release. “And there is overwhelming evidence that tobacco prevention programs not only reduce smoking and save lives, they also save money by reducing tobacco-related health-care costs. Those states that make short-sighted decisions to cut tobacco prevention will pay a steep price in lives and dollars.”

The American Heart Association, the American Lung Association and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are the other groups involved in the release of the report, “A Broken Promise to Our Children: The 1998 State Tobacco Settlement 11 Years Later.”

Among the findings:
In the past year, states have cut funding for tobacco prevention by $103.4 million (15.4 percent). Including cuts approved last week, New York made the largest cut — $25.2 million (31 percent) — even though the state has a successful program that’s reduced smoking to well below the national rate. Colorado, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Washington are other states that have made large cuts to tobacco prevention programs.
In fiscal year 2010, states will collect $25.1 billion in revenue from the tobacco settlement and from tobacco taxes, but will spend just 2.3 percent ($567.5 million) of that on tobacco prevention and cessation programs. Many states are expected to hike tobacco taxes next year.
North Dakota is the only state that currently funds a tobacco prevention program at the level recommended by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Only nine states fund tobacco prevention at even half the CDC-recommended level, while 31 states and the District of Columbia provide less than one-quarter of the recommended funding.
For every dollar states spend to discourage tobacco use, tobacco companies spend $20 to market their products. In total, tobacco companies spend $12.8 billion a year on marketing, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

Decreases in smoking have slowed and even stalled in the United States, according to recent surveys. For example, the adult smoking rate in 2008 was 20.6 percent, compared with 20.9 percent in 2004, the CDC reported in November. While smoking among high school students has declined from a high of 36.4 percent in 1997, 20 percent of high school students still smoke and the rate of decline has slowed in recent years.

Along with calling for states to significantly increase funding for tobacco prevention and cessation programs, the new report calls on Congress to ensure that health-care reform legislation provides adequate funding for anti-tobacco programs and makes it mandatory for Medicaid and other health insurance programs to cover medications and counseling for people trying to quit smoking.

“The inadequate funding of tobacco prevention and cessation programs is a powerful example of misplaced priorities in our nation’s health-care system,” Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said in the news release. “We spend too much time on treating people after they get sick and too little on keeping them healthy in the first place. Investing more in proven tobacco prevention programs and policies, like smoke-free restaurants and workplaces, will help people lead healthier lives and reduce health-care costs.”

Tobacco use — the leading preventable cause of death in the United States — claims more than 400,000 lives and $96 billion in health-care dollars each year. Every day, another 1,000 children or teens become regular smokers and one-third of them will die prematurely as a result of their tobacco use.

Supplements containing soy isoflavones may do little to preserve women’s bone mass after menopause.

In a study of more than 200 women ages 46 to 65, researchers found that the soy supplement did not appear to ward off bone-density loss over 3 years. In general, women on the supplement showed the same degree of bone loss as those given a placebo — though there was some evidence that a higher dose helped protect bone density in the hip.

The findings, reported in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, add to a conflicting body of research on soy and postmenopausal bone health.

Some studies have suggested that soy-based foods, isolated soy protein or isoflavone-containing supplements may be beneficial, while others have found no advantage.

Isoflavones are natural chemicals found in soybeans and certain other plant foods that are structurally similar to estrogen, and may have certain estrogen-like effects in the human body. Since declining estrogen levels after menopause spur bone-density loss, isoflavone supplements could theoretically protect women’s bone mass.

The current findings, however, do not support that theory.

“I would not be able to recommend that women should take soy isoflavone tablets — extracted from soy protein — since these have not been demonstrated convincingly to be effective for prevention of bone loss,” lead researcher Dr. D. Lee Alekel, a professor of nutrition at Iowa State University in Ames, told Reuters Health in an email.

Still, she said, women should still try to eat a variety of soy-based foods — such as tofu, tempeh and soy-derived versions of cheese and yogurt — since these are “nutritionally sound” choices.

For their study, Alekel and her colleagues randomly assigned 255 postmenopausal women to one of three groups: one that took 80 milligrams (mg) of a soy isoflavone supplement each day; one that took a 120-mg dose; and one given inactive placebo pills.

All of the women also took calcium and vitamin D supplements.

Over three years, women in the isoflavone and placebo groups showed similar average declines in whole-body bone mass, as well as bone density in the spine and hip area.

Women in the higher-dose isoflavone group did, however, show less bone loss in the femoral neck — an area at the top of the thigh bone, where it meets the pelvis. But, the researchers write, because the effect was “very modest,” and limited to the femoral neck, “we cannot conclude that soy isoflavones hold potential promise in the prevention of postmenopausal osteoporosis.”

The idea that soy or soy isoflavones may protect bone mass comes, in part, from studies showing lower rates of hip fracture among women in Southeast Asia, where the traditional diet is rich in soy.

Those types of studies do not prove cause-and-effect, however. Because the current study looked only at soy isoflavone supplements, Alekel said it cannot speak to the potential effects of soy foods on women’s bone health.