Deans' stroke musings: Chocolate may decrease CAD risk

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Friday, July 24, 2020

Chocolate may decrease CAD risk

This is observational only so don't run out and start consuming chocolate. You'll have to wait at least 50 years or your death before clinical studies will occur.

Chocolate may decrease CAD risk

Consuming chocolate at least once per week reduces the risk for CAD, researchers found.
“We somewhat know from prior research that eating chocolate may reduce blood pressure,” Chayakrit Krittanawong, MD, physician-scientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told Healio. “Lower blood pressure can prevent and reduce the risks of heart diseases. We found that consumption of chocolates at least once a week is probably associated with a reduction in the risk of coronary artery disease (eg, heart disease).”

Regular chocolate consumption may reduce the risk for CAD by 8%.

In a systematic review and meta-analysis published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, researchers analyzed data from 336,289 participants from six prospective studies with an exposure of interest of chocolate consumption. These studies also assessed outcomes that included combined CAD, ACS and acute MI.
High chocolate consumption was defined as more than one time per week or more than 3.5 times per month. Follow-up was conducted for a median of 8.78 years.
Participants in this review had 21,777 diseases including CAD (n = 14,043), MI (n = 4,667), HF (n = 332) and cerebrovascular accidents (n = 2,735).
Participants with higher chocolate consumption had a decreased risk for CAD compared with those with low chocolate consumption (pooled RR = 0.92; 95% CI, 0.86-0.99; I² = 48.6%).
When excluding a study that used a cutoff of more than 3.5 times per month for chocolate consumption, participants who consumed chocolate more than one time per week had a decreased risk for CAD (pooled RR = 0.9; 95% CI, 0.84-0.97; I² = 46.6%). In a sensitivity analysis when excluding a study that was presented as an abstract, the pooled RR was 0.94 (95% CI, 0.85-1.03; I² = 52.2%).

Chayakrit Krittanawong

“This is an observational study, meaning we cannot conclude the causal relationship that eating chocolate can prevent or reduce heart disease,” Krittanawong said in an interview. “There are many confounders that we don’t have in this study. We have to ensure the results were not from those confounders before we implement it into the clinical practice. For example, people who love eating chocolate may eat more fruit and vegetables than people who don’t like chocolate.”