Absolute and Attributable Risks of Heart Failure Incidence in Relation to Optimal Risk Factors

Epidemiologic studies have shown that a large proportion of coronary heart disease and stroke events are explained by borderline or elevated risk factors, and that adults with optimal risk factors greatly avoid these events. The degree to which this applies to heart failure incidence is not well documented

Randomized controlled trial for an effect of catechin-enriched green tea consumption on adiponectin and cardiovascular disease risk factors

Previous observational studies have indicated that green tea (GT) consumption is associated with reduced mortality from cerebral infarction but not with mortality from cerebral hemorrhage. Therefore, we hypothesized that GT exerts a direct antiatherosclerotic effect without any effect on hypertension. To investigate this hypothesis, we focused on adiponectin that seems to be among the several key players in atherosclerosis.The objective of this randomized controlled trial (RCT) was to assess whether the consumption of catechin-enriched GT affects serum adiponectin levels and cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk factors among apparently healthy subjects.A total of 51 individuals participated in the study. Eligible participants were randomly assigned into GT consumption groups with either high catechin (400 mg/day) or low catechin (100 mg/day). The study participants were asked to stop GT consumption for 2 weeks (washout period), following which they were to start drinking the provided GT beverages everyday for 9 weeks. The outcome measures were changes in the adiponectin levels and CVD risk factors (body weight, body mass index, waist circumference, blood pressure, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol, high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, triglyceride, fasting plasma glucose, as well as aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase, gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase, uric acid, and high-sensitive C-reactive protein).After intervention for 9 weeks, we found no significant difference between the high- and low catechin group with respect to changes in the serum adiponectin level: 0.35 µg/ml (95% confidence interval (CI): −1.03, 1.74). Also, no significant difference was observed between the high- and low catechin groups with respect to changes in any of the measured CVD risk factors.This RCT showed no significant difference between the high- and low catechin groups with respect to changes in the serum adiponectin level and any CVD risk factors

Green tea consumption and the risk of incident functional disability in elderly Japanese: the Ohsaki Cohort 2006 Study123

Background: Previous studies have reported that green tea consumption is associated with a lower risk of diseases that cause functional disability, such as stroke, cognitive impairment, and osteoporosis. Although it is expected that green tea consumption would lower the risk of incident functional disability, this has never been investigated directly

Using spin to understand the formation of LIGO's black holes

With the detection of four candidate binary black hole (BBH) mergers by the Advanced LIGO detectors thus far, it is becoming possible to constrain the properties of the BBH merger population in order to better understand the formation of these systems. Black hole (BH) spin orientations are one of the cleanest discriminators of formation history, with BHs in dynamically formed binaries in dense stellar environments expected to have spins distributed isotropically, in contrast to isolated populations where stellar evolution is expected to induce BH spins preferentially aligned with the orbital angular momentum. In this work we propose a simple, model-agnostic approach to characterizing the spin properties of LIGO's BBH population. Using measurements of the effective spin of the binaries, which is LIGO's best constrained spin parameter, we introduce a simple parameter to quantify the fraction of the population that is isotropically distributed, regardless of the spin magnitude distribution of the population. Once the orientation characteristics of the population have been determined, we show how measurements of effective spin can be used to directly constrain the underlying BH spin magnitude distribution. Although we find that the majority of the current effective spin measurements are too small to be informative, with LIGO's four BBH candidates we find a slight preference for an underlying population with aligned spins over one with isotropic spins (with an odds ratio of 1.1). We argue that it will be possible to distinguish symmetric and anti-symmetric populations at high confidence with tens of additional detections, although mixed populations may take significantly more detections to disentangle. We also derive preliminary spin magnitude distributions for LIGO's black holes, under the assumption of aligned or isotropic populations

Body mass index and colorectal cancer risk : A Mendelian randomization study

Traditional observational studies have reported a positive association between higher body mass index (BMI) and the risk of colorectal cancer (CRC). However, evidence from other approaches to pursue the causal relationship between BMI and CRC is sparse. A two-sample Mendelian randomization (MR) study was undertaken using 68 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) from the Japanese genome-wide association study (GWAS) and 654 SNPs from the GWAS catalogue for BMI as sets of instrumental variables. For the analysis of SNP-BMI associations, we undertook a meta-analysis with 36 303 participants in the Japanese Consortium of Genetic Epidemiology studies (J-CGE), comprising normal populations. For the analysis of SNP-CRC associations, we utilized 7636 CRC cases and 37 141 controls from five studies in Japan, and undertook a meta-analysis. Mendelian randomization analysis of inverse-variance weighted method indicated that a one-unit (kg/m2) increase in genetically predicted BMI was associated with an odds ratio of 1.13 (95% confidence interval, 1.06-1.20; P value <.001) for CRC using the set of 68 SNPs, and an odds ratio of 1.07 (1.03-1.11, 0.001) for CRC using the set of 654 SNPs. Sensitivity analyses robustly showed increased odds ratios for CRC for every one-unit increase in genetically predicted BMI. Our MR analyses strongly support the evidence that higher BMI influences the risk of CRC. Although Asians are generally leaner than Europeans and North Americans, avoiding higher BMI seems to be important for the prevention of CRC in Asian populations