Your health: Point well-taken

Acupuncture help

If the idea of being poked with needles sounds less than appealing, acupuncture may not be for you. But according to this month's Good Housekeeping, new research shows that the needles help with pain relief in some cases.

“German studies have shown that something is definitely going on, neurologically speaking, when acupuncture needles are in place: In a series of imaging experiments involving short electric zaps to the ankle, researchers found that when acupuncture needles were inserted before the zap, the pain centers in volunteers' brains were significantly calmer.”

The same study, according to The Washington Post, also compared the pain relief when acupuncture supplemented doctor-prescribed treatment with the relief delivered by traditional treatment alone. The subjects who received acupuncture along with standard care felt more improvement.

We are what we eat

Caloric intake and calories burned have a direct effect on our weight and body composition, but are some of us internally programmed to be larger?

Science writer Gary Taubes argues in “Why We Get Fat” that nature and nurture both play roles in why some people are overweight.

“Children in the womb are supplied with nutrients from the mother in proportion to the level of those nutrients in the mother's blood sugar,” he writes in The Washington Post. So if the mother is obese, the baby will tend to be that way, too, he says.

Babies born with more fat than normal are often prone to having weight problems later in life, making the cycle of obesity difficult to break.

Heart disease risk

Your likelihood of someday developing or dying from cardiovascular disease is established earlier in life than you might think, a new study suggests.

Researchers reporting last week in the New England Journal of Medicine pooled data from 18 studies from the past 50 years and analyzed it to examine the influence of heart-health risk factors throughout a lifetime. They tallied blood pressure, cholesterol level, smoking status and diabetes status for 257,384 people whose health was assessed at ages 45, 55, 65 and 75.

They found that people with one or more risk factors as early as age 45 had a higher risk of developing or dying from cardiovascular disease by age 80 than those with fewer or no such risk factors.

Participants with no risk factors at age 55 were far less likely to die from cardiovascular disease by age 80 than those with two or more risk factors.

They also had much lower risks of fatal coronary heart disease or nonfatal myocardial infarction, and fatal or nonfatal stroke than people with two or more risk factors.