Health
LAKEPORT, Calif. – The Sutter Lakeside Hospital Foundation announced the kickoff its 2013 Heart Health fundraising appeal on Feb. 1, the first day of National Heart Month.
The foundation’s appeal will focus on raising $85,000 to purchase a new Philips IE33 Vision Echocardiogram and complementing software.
Echocardiogram technology is routinely used to diagnose, manage and monitor patients with possible heart diseases and remains the most common cardiology diagnostic test.
“Lake County has the unfortunate distinction of having one of the highest rates of diagnosed heart disease in the state,” said Dr. Diane Pege, director of Medical Affairs at Sutter Lakeside Hospital. “We also have the highest occurrence of hypertension. The echocardiogram that we currently use was purchased over ten years ago. We want to offer our patients the latest technology available, particularly as heart disease is so prevalent in our community.”
While Sutter Health is financially strong, every hospital is tasked with making responsible spending and medical technology is notoriously expensive.
“As our community and staff witnessed last year, Sutter Lakeside had to make a lot of difficult financial decisions in 2012,” said Krista Touros, Sutter Lakeside’s chief finance officer. “And while being affiliated with the Sutter Health system is advantageous for us in so many ways, no health system has an endless supply of funds. That’s why the matching grant program that’s available to Sutter’s smaller hospitals is such an advantage for Lake County.”
Sutter Health gives the communities their hospitals serve the opportunity to work together to raise money for items that are relevant to their particular area, offering a guaranteed match up to a certain dollar amount if donors can gather funds by a set deadline.
Foundation Board Chair Dr. Mark Buehnerkemper, explained, “Sutter’s matching grant program has a solid, successful history in our community. We funded the Mobile Health Services Unit with the help of a matching grant from Sutter back in 2008 and our Stroke Telemedicine equipment was purchased with a matching grant, as well. Our Mobility Park was the result of a successful matching grant fund drive and proceeds from the 2012 Women’s Imaging campaign will purchase a new DexaScanner and a MammatomeÒ Breast Biopsy system for the hospital’s Imaging Department this summer.”
Cash and pledges to the Heart Health fund drive must be committed by Dec. 31, 2013, pledges are payable through Dec. 14, 2014.
If you would like to make a gift to the Heart Health restricted fund, please visit www.sutterlakeside.org/giving and click on “Ways to Give” or call Rebecca Southwick in the Foundation Office at 707-262-5121.
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The risk of hospitalization or death from heart disease is 32 percent lower in vegetarians than people who eat meat and fish, according to a new study from the University of Oxford.
Heart disease is the single largest cause of death in developed countries, and is responsible for 65,000 deaths each year in the UK alone.
The new findings, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, suggest that a vegetarian diet could significantly reduce people's risk of heart disease.
“Most of the difference in risk is probably caused by effects on cholesterol and blood pressure, and shows the important role of diet in the prevention of heart disease,” explained Dr. Francesca Crowe, lead author of the study at the Cancer Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford.
This is the largest study ever conducted in the UK comparing rates of heart disease between vegetarians and non-vegetarians.
The analysis looked at almost 45,000 volunteers from England and Scotland enrolled in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC)-Oxford study, of whom 34 percent were vegetarian.
Such a significant representation of vegetarians is rare in studies of this type, and allowed researchers to make more precise estimates of the relative risks between the two groups.
The EPIC-Oxford cohort study was funded by Cancer Research UK and the Medical Research Council and carried out by the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford.
Professor Tim Key, co-author of the study and deputy director of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit, University of Oxford, said, “The results clearly show that the risk of heart disease in vegetarians is about a third lower than in comparable non-vegetarians.”
The Oxford researchers arrived at the figure of 32 percent risk reduction after accounting for factors such as age, smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, educational level and socioeconomic background.
Participants were recruited to the study throughout the 1990s, and completed questionnaires regarding their health and lifestyle when they joined.
These included detailed questions on diet and exercise as well as other factors affecting health such as smoking and alcohol consumption.
Almost 20,000 participants also had their blood pressures recorded, and gave blood samples for cholesterol testing.
The volunteers were tracked until 2009, during which time researchers identified 1235 cases of heart disease.
This comprised 169 deaths and 1066 hospital diagnoses, identified through linkage with hospital records and death certificates. Heart disease cases were validated using data from the Myocardial Ischaemia National Audit Project (MINAP).
The researchers found that vegetarians had lower blood pressures and cholesterol levels than non-vegetarians, which is thought to be the main reason behind their reduced risk of heart disease.
Vegetarians typically had lower body mass indices (BMI) and fewer cases of diabetes as a result of their diets, although these were not found to significantly affect the results.
If the results are adjusted to exclude the effects of BMI, vegetarians remain 28 percent less likely to develop heart disease.
The findings reinforce the idea that diet is central to prevention of heart disease, and build on previous work looking at the influence of vegetarian diets, the researchers say.
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