Health bulletin

Blood pressure rising among American kids

Blood pressure levels among American children are on the rise, an alarming trend linked to climbing obesity rates that reverses decades of decline, researchers reported.

The study, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, adds to a growing body of evidence linking swelling juvenile waistlines with rising blood pressure and other cardiovascular problems.

The researchers looked at data from seven U.S. government surveys conducted from 1963 to 2002 on youngsters aged 8 to 17.

Just over 11 percent of children and teens had high blood pressure in 1980. That fell to 2.7 percent in the 1988-94 survey, but rose to 3.7 percent in the latest survey done in 1999-2002.

The trend was most pronounced among Mexican-American males. The survey found that 5.3 percent of these young men had high blood pressure in 1999-2002.

"Unless this upward trend in high blood pressure is reversed, we could be facing an explosion of new cardiovascular disease cases in young adults and adults," said Dr. Rebecca Din-Dzietham of Morehouse School of Medicine in Atlanta, Ga.

Vitamin E may reduce blood clots

Regular doses of vitamin E may reduce the risk of life-threatening blood clots in women, researchers reported.

But they cautioned that more research is needed to confirm the link in the prevention of the clots, known as venous thromboembolism, and said patients should not stop taking prescribed blood thinners.

"The data indicated that, in general, women taking vitamin E were 21 percent less likely to suffer a blood clot," the American Heart Association, which published the finding in its journal Circulation, said in a statement.

"This is an exciting and interesting finding, but I don't think it's proven," Dr. Robert Glynn of Harvard Medical School said.

The American Heart Association generally does not recommend antioxidant vitamins such as vitamin E for the prevention of cardiovascular diseases or conditions, which include blood clots.

Life expectancy climbs to 78 years

The life expectancy for Americans is nearly 78 years, the longest in U.S. history, according to new government figures from 2005 released last week.

That age, based on the latest data available, was still lower than the life span in more than three dozen other countries, however.

More bad news: The annual number of U.S. deaths rose from 2004 to 2005, a depressing uptick after the figure had dropped by 50,000 from 2003 to 2004. In 2005, the number of deaths increased by about that same amount.

U.S. life expectancy at birth inched up to 77.9 from the previous record, 77.8, recorded for 2004. The increase was more dramatic in contrast with 1995, when life expectancy was 75.8, and 1955, when it was 69.6.

The improvement was led by a drop in deaths from heart disease and stroke -- two of the nation's leading killers, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, which released the new life expectancy report Wednesday.

Life expectancy for women continues to be five years longer than for men, the report found.

The United States continues to lag behind at least 40 other nations. Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, has the longest life expectancy, at 83.5 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Japan, Macau, San Marino and Singapore ranked second, third, fourth and fifth.

Seniors quit drugs when cost goes up

Some elderly Americans simply stop taking their prescribed drugs when insurance plans cease paying for them, researchers reported.

And when the benefits reset at the beginning of a new year, many fail to resume taking their drugs, the team at the nonprofit Rand Corporation found.

The findings suggest the same may happen when patients enrolled in Medicare's new "part D" prescription plan hit gaps in coverage popularly known as the doughnut hole, they said.

In the study, published in the journal Health Affairs, between 6 percent to 13 percent of patients enrolled in drug plans with caps reached their spending limits in each of the years studied. They were more likely to forgo prescription drugs than those in plans with no cap.

This ranged from 15 percent of people taking cholesterol-lowering drugs to 28 percent of people on heart drugs. To the surprise of the researchers, few of the patients switched to cheaper generic drugs.

Drug caps are a way to save money, but could lead to higher costs such as hospitalizations, researchers said.

Susan Stevens