Mooney_Driver wrote:
but all it does tell me is that there is no “fairness” in medicine!
Indeed. The genetic lottery is often decisive and explains in great part why some “fit” people have sudden cardiac arrest at 20 (remember that Danish footballer at the Euros 2021) while other “lazy pigs” still go strong at 65 despite being overweight.
This is indeed not “fair”. But genetics is only part of the risk, most other factors apart from environmental ones can indeed by controlled by each of us at least to a degree, often with major impact not just on length but more importantly quality of life!
A cardiologist colleague over a coffee said, Steve, the heart is a pump. A flesh muscle pump. When it stops, game over.
As we discuss on this forum, engines quit all the time in our planes. Generally it is the support equipment.
In humans it is also the add ons and the support mechanisms that generally fail, the arteries, the artrial nerve system, clots jamming stuff up etc..
I think that comment by my colleague is extremely sobering and I think of it often. Life is so very fragile….On that note have a great weekend 
The graphs that LeSving posted show you what a joke the whole thing is. If Herren Menn and Kinner (whoever they are/were) can’t agree to within 10% what the national average is, what chance does anyone have of making sense of all this?
18 months ago I went to a cardio for a routine check, as advised by my GP. The machine he used measured BP every few minutes, in total maybe 8 times. There was a +/- 5 variation in the 15 minutes I was on his couch.
I did buy my own machine and measured my BP several times a day for a couple of months. There was quite a lot of diurnal variation. It was also quite influenced by how much alcohol I’d drunk the day before. For sure if you want your doc or AME to find a lower value, skipping alcohol for a couple of days is a good idea.
As for whether wine is good/bad/indifferent for health – for sure that one depends entirely on who you ask. There was a very recent UK (I think) study that basically said if you so much as look at a bottle of wine more than once a year, it takes years off your life. How much do you want to bet that the authors all went home and opened a bottle of rouge with dinner? The so-called Mediterranean diet seems to work pretty well for the people who (quite accidentally) invented it – key ingredients, olive oil, fish, red wine, not much red meat, plenty of fruit and veggies. It’s exactly how we eat (well, we can see the Med from our dining table), it’s funny that it has become a fad thing.
MedEwok wrote:
The way to check this would be via an echocardiograph (ultrasound of the heart). The “cost” of this is usually several months (3 to 6) of waiting time at a cardiologists practice or about 150€ if you are privately insured in Germany.
Yup. Easy and safe. Cost is a horribly complicated topic if you start comparing across regions let alone countries in Europe – it’s never apples to apples
LeSving wrote:
The way I was explained ECG by my AME was that what they are looking for is changes over time.
That’s certainly the most common use case – you’re basically looking for age related changes, some of which will affect everyone given enough time (eg impulse conduction velocity slowing that might indicate future problems if it appears faster and more pronounced than normal)
But ECGs also identify issues that happened at some point in time with no further progression eg a myocardial infarction that happened between your previous ECG and today’s ECG and went otherwise unnoticed (such a thing exists)
And ECGs also can be used as a single test spot diagnosis for certain conditions eg congenital arrhythmia risk like WPW or congenital hypertrophy. That’s why you get an ECG for your first medical regardless of age – to screen for those more rare conditions that usually show no symptoms until the first event which can be catastrophic – and then you’re fine until 40 for class 2 because you likely won’t develop age-related issues before that age anyway.
Not bad for a dirt cheap test that carries zero risk and was invented over 100 years ago
As for whether wine is good/bad/indifferent for health – for sure that one depends entirely on who you ask. There was a very recent UK (I think) study that basically said if you so much as look at a bottle of wine more than once a year, it takes years off your life. How much do you want to bet that the authors all went home and opened a bottle of rouge with dinner?
I think a big factor in why one week they say coffee is good and the next week they say wine is good is because there will obviously be a huge correlation between the consumption of these and how social you are / how relaxed you are / etc. And we all know that people who are chilled-out live for ever. So researching this is practically impossible.
The so-called Mediterranean diet seems to work pretty well for the people who (quite accidentally) invented it – key ingredients, olive oil, fish, red wine, not much red meat, plenty of fruit and veggies. It’s exactly how we eat (well, we can see the Med from our dining table), it’s funny that it has become a fad thing.
I think the above applies. Those cultures are pretty chilled out. They don’t work too hard. Probably the most stressful thing is working out how to spend your slice of the ~100M “incentive payment” for buying some submarines… Warm weather also helps. In reality, they eat a lot of fatty food, a lot of cakes and sweets, and in the modern world all societies where life revolves around a huge amount of food, obesity is a big problem. Look at modern Greek kids…
johnh wrote:
The graphs that LeSving posted show you what a joke the whole thing is. If Herren Menn and Kinner (whoever they are/were) can’t agree to within 10% what the national average is, what chance does anyone have of making sense of all this?
“Menn” is men (as in a male individual of the human species). “Kvinner” is women (of the same species)
MedEwok wrote:
The genetic lottery is often decisive and explains in great part why some “fit” people have sudden cardiac arrest at 20 (remember that Danish footballer at the Euros 2021) while other “lazy pigs” still go strong at 65 despite being overweight.
Doc who works with us on occasion (retired) said that quite a few cases with fitness maniacs have little to do with genetics but with overexercising and as he put it abuse of the body in the other extreme. We are not really made to run marathons on a daily basis, cycle in torrential rain over 30 miles or swim in 10 degree water over hours. Neither are we made for Veganism, those folks keep getting lack of various stuff our body needs to survive.
Some folks I know who were doing Scuba diving here in Switzerland developed massive problems with their joints. I know some canadians who go for swimming in winter in the ocean off Vancouver (2-6 degrees). Wonder how their joints will absorb that in a few years time.
Maybe a bit more normalty would help more than religion.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Doc who works with us on occasion (retired) said that quite a few cases with fitness maniacs have little to do with genetics but with overexercising and as he put it abuse of the body in the other extreme. We are not really made to run marathons on a daily basis, cycle in torrential rain over 30 miles or swim in 10 degree water over hours
Overexercising can certainly play a role for some people, although that will be a minority overall of those who die a seemingly untimely death.
Also, humans have, from an evolutionary biological perspective, evolved to reach a very high level of endurance, more than almost any other mammal. Stone Age humans, especially before they developed any useful tools for hunting, used to hunt by persistence hunting , meaning they were able to run after their (usually faster) prey until that collapsed due to running out of endurance. The human body is surprisingly durable. Of course, admittedly, those Stone Age hunters still rarely got older than 40 years and when they died their bodies were spent.
“Menn” is men (as in a male individual of the human species). “Kvinner” is women (of the same species)
Oops. How embarrassing. Where is that “feeling really silly” emoji when you need it?
Those cultures are pretty chilled out. (etc…)
I guess I was thinking more of the bit of the Med where I live – southern France, Italy. Much less obesity/overweight than in northern parts. Not THAT much fatty food – croissants but most people eat them only occasionally. It’s legendary that French women are much less likely to be overweight than others. It’s true for men also – of course not universally, but much less near-universal than e.g. the UK.
