Healthy Andy

Those living with heart failure have an interesting new potential addition to their treatment regimen… the potent antioxidants Pycnogenol and CoQ10. While the use of CoQ10 with heart failure has been getting kicked around for a while (it is an extremely common therapy for congestive heart failure in Japan), the addition of pycnogenol (which we’ve talked about quite a bit on this site) seems to make for a potent one-two punch.

It seems this way because of a recent study in which researchers studied the effects of a pycnogenol/CoQ10 combo used as an adjunct (additional therapy) to a standard treatment regimen for those with congestive heart failure.  This sort of experimental design is nice, because you’re not withholding treatment from anybody… you essentially find a bunch of people who are doing the standard therapy, split them in two, and give half of them a little something extra (rather than give one group a treatment, the other a placebo, and sit back and cackle evilly as you wait to see if the sugar pill group dies).

First a quick overview of the condition, and then we’ll go over the study in detail.

Congestive Heart Failure

CoQ10 and Pycnogenol can help the symptoms of heart failure

CHF or just plain old “heart failure” is pretty much what is sounds like… a condition in which the heart isn’t able to keep up with the demands on it.  It isn’t sudden like a heart attack; it’s a slow, grinding sort of process, in which the heart keeps trying and trying to keep up, but lags behind just a little bit.

Don’t forget, the heart has to push your blood forward against an already existing pressure from the fluid that’s sitting just in front of the valves.  If the heart is damaged, or perhaps has some issues with the valves being damaged, it may not be able to move that blood around as well, and so fluid tends to accumulate in various areas as the blood flow starts to stagnate.  

For example, one sign of heart failure is swelling in the lower legs, since the heart can’t push that fluid back up the legs (against gravity) to the torso to be dealt with properly.  It’s called distal edema (edema just means swelling, distal just means further away from the torso), or if it gets really bad, pitting edema (because if you push it in with your finger it stays dented in for a bit).

It tends to get worse over time, at varying rates, depending on the patient.  As the heart tries harder and harder to pump enough blood through the system, it starts to enlarge, like a bodybuilder’s bicep.  This can make the underlying cause even worse. 

For example, if it’s a faulty heart valve that’s caused all this mess to start with, as the heart enlarges, the valves will be spread out more, making it even harder for those valves to come back together and form a seal… leading to more leakage, which makes the job of the heart harder, which leads to more heart failure, which makes the heart get bigger, which makes the valves spread out even more… you’re getting the picture.

Of course, exertion becomes harder and harder, to the point where the patient can be exhausted even at rest.  The swelling can start to occur in the abdomen or around/inside the lungs.  Overall, this is a condition that causes a massive decrease in quality of life, as well as posing a risk of mortality.

Depressing, hunh?  Okay, now for the good news.

Pycnogenol and CoQ10 Help Heart Failure

In this study, the researchers took a bunch of people with fairly advanced heart failure, and gave half of them a Pycnogenol and CoQ10 supplement in addition to their regular treatment.  The other half got a placebo in additon to their regular treatment.  This went on for twelve weeks.

What they found was encouraging.  Blood pressure was reduced in the pycnogenol group.  Heart ejection fraction (that’s a measure of how much blood you squirt out of your heart on each beat) increased in the pycogenol group by nearly 25% compared to only about 4% in the placebo group.  That’s a pretty obvious sign of heart failure improvement.

Further, the pycnogenol and CoQ10 group had an increase in their walking distance (remember, people with advanced heart failure have trouble even just walking what most people would think of as a trivial distance) and also a reduction in distal edema (that’s the swelling of the legs we mentioned earlier).  The placebo group… not so much.

The first thing this study tells me is that conventional treatment of heart failure, by itself, doesn’t accomplish very much.  However, with the addition of the potent antioxidants Pycnogenol and CoQ10, some real progress starts to get made.

How Antioxdidants Help Heart Failure

So how come?  What’s so great about Pycnogenol and Co Q10 that people are seeing such a significant benefit with their heart failure symptoms? 

First off, there’s CoQ10.  Like any other antioxidant, it protects the cells of the body from damage caused by toxins or toxic metabolic by-products (more on how antioxidants work here).  However, in the case of CoQ10, it seems to do its best work in the area of the mitochondria, which are the power generators of the cell.  As you can imagine, since the heart keeps beating, beating, beating (we hope), it uses up a ton of energy, so the mitochondria are extra important to a heart muscle cell.  Protect the generator from rusting, basically speaking, and the cell can keep doing its work without trouble.

Plus, CoQ10 pulls double duty and is also used inside of that mitochondria (cell generator) as a chemical used in the actual production of energy for the cell.  So it’s almost like a self-cleaning fuel additive (experts will find that metaphor a bit strained, but hey, it’s close enough). For more on how CoQ10 helps generate energy, there’s this article on CoQ10 and statins or this video on the benefits of CoQ10.

Since heart failure is basically a tuckered-out, overworked heart failing due to chronic fatigue, anything that supports energy production in the heart cells is going to be helpful.  Makes sense, right?

Now let’s talk Pycnogenol.  This extra-powerful antioxidant has a well-documented and interesting side effect beyond protecting the cells from toxins:  it seems to keep arteries elastic.

Keeps what, hunh? you ask.  Your arteries aren’t just static, inflexible, glorified garden hoses.  Quite the contrary.  Each one is surrounded by a circular smooth muscle wall that contracts or relaxes to make the hole in the middle bigger or smaller (according to the changing needs for blood flow in that area).  They’re surprisingly responsive… or at least, they’re supposed to be. 

Years of a typical American crap-food diet tends to make those responsive, springy, flexible arteries turn into stiff, lazy, inefficient lumps.  And if the downstream delivery system for your blood isn’t very responsive, that means the heart has to push that much harder to get blood where it needs to go… contributing to exhausting what may be an already failing heart.

On the other hand, responsive arteries will not only make the heart’s job easier, but it will feed the heart more effectively as well… the heart has a blood supply too!  That may seem weird… there’s tons of blood shooting through the middle of the heart, after all… but the heart itself is fed by a system of coronary arteries.  These are the guys that get clogged up and trigger a heart attack for those of us who love bacon just a little too much.  As you can imagine, the more pliable and responsive these arteries are, the better the blood flow to your heart, which will combat the effects of fatigue and overworking. Read more on antioxidants and elastic arteries.

So, it’s probably not too surprising that a combination of these two antioxidants can help in the treatment of congestive heart failure.  What is surprising, is that it isn’t used more often!  So if you or someone you know is having troubles with CHF, tell your doctor about this study (a link to the official study is supplied below) and give yourself the best chance possible for recovery!

Stay healthy!

Article source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20657530

A recent study shows some postitive results for the use of the supplement pycnogenol and tinnitus relief.  Tinnitus is a condition usually just called “ringing in the ears“, which affects a suprisingly large number of people.

TINNITUS

Usually, tinnitus is just annoying.  It’s not really a disease all by itself, but more of a symptom.  A rushing, hissing, or ringing sound is heard, even though there isn’t anything creating such a sound.

It’s more of a concern as a sign of another underlying disease process than anything else, but the ringing sensation itself can also become a problem.  Think about it.  If you constantly have an annoying ringing sound in your ears, how well are you going to sleep? Or focus?

One of the causes of tinnitus is a problem with blood flow in the area of the ear.  This is where our old friend pycnogenol comes in.

PYCNOGENOL AND TINNITUS

Pycnogenol is a supplement based on a pine bark extract that has been shown to have a number of beneficial properties.  If you’ve looked around this site much, you’ve probably seen me mention it here and there… like in this article on how pycnogenol helps asthma symptoms or this one on reducing inflammation with pycnogenol. 

One of its more impressive characteristics is its ability to aid circulation, both in the major arteries and the smaller arterioles and capillaries.  Remember, your circulatory system looks like a tree branch… a large vessel branching out into progressively smaller, more complex, and more delicate structures.

Pycnogenol helps to make those arteries more elastic and pliable, which in turn makes them more capable of adapting to changes in demand for blood flow.  Not every part of your body needs the same amount of blood flow all of the time or the same as every other body part.  Demand varies, and the more responsive your circulatory system is, the better those demands are met.

THE STUDY

For this particular study, subjects rated their tinnitus symptoms and also had their blood flow velocities measured (side note:  it is super cool that we can actually measure blood flow velocities).  Some subjects were in a control group, some on a low dose of pycnogenol, and some on a high dose.

After four weeks, the results were pretty obvious.  Blood flow velocity increased proportionally to the amount of pycnogenol used in supplementation, and tinnitus symptoms reduced in a similar manner.  No changes were noted in the control group, so there wasn’t any Jedi Mind Trick placebo effect.

So, this study is a pretty strong indicator of the use of pycogenol for tinnitus relief, and the circulatory-enhancing effects of pycnogenol in general.

Stay healthy!

 Source article: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-10/mg-sdp101310.php

Antioxidant Info Week continues with a fantastic study showing just how powerful and far-reaching the effects of antioxidants can be.  In this study, levels of NF-kB (Nuclear Factor- “kappa” B; sorry, I don’t have Greek symbols at my disposal) were significantly reduced within five days of supplementing with pycnogenol.

Levels of who, were what, by hunh?  Let me explain.

NF-kB is basically a chemical on/off switch for inflammation inside the cell.  If this stuff gets activated by something, pow, you get inflammation. 

Inflammation is pretty important business.  It kicks off the healing and immune response in the body; without it, you’d never fix yourself when you got hurt. I don’t just mean that in the sense of, if something is inflamed and painful, you’ll avoid using it and let it rest and heal.  While that’s true, it goes way beyond that.

The inflammatory response actually physically signals and kicks off the chemical changes in the body that we call healing and the immune system.  So as a short-term response to injury, inflammation is absolutely vital. 

The problem arises when inflammation becomes chronic.  Now we run into situations where we’re getting all inflamed over nothing.  Arthritis?  Chronically inflamed joints.  Crohn’s Disease?  Chronically inflamed intestines.  Asthma?  Chronically inflamed breathing tubes.  The list goes on and on, but the bottom line is, you don’t want to have All Inflammation, All the Time.

How does NF-kB fit in?  Think of NF-kB as a trigger, that sets off inflammation, just like the trigger of a gun, sets off… well, the gun.  Something bumps against the trigger of a gun, and boom, you get a discharge.  Something “bumps” into NF-kB, chemically speaking, and boom, you get inflammation.

Just like any other trigger, NF-kB varies in how sensitive it’s going to be (how easily it’s “activated”).  Ever hear of a hair trigger?  That’s a gun trigger that is so sensitive, the tiniest bump sets it off.  Guess what?  Same thing can happen in your cells.

If NF-kB is super-sensitive, the tiniest little jolt from the surroundings will set it off, and start up the inflammatory process.  So over-active NF-kB, is like the hair trigger of a gun for you to swell up and get inflamed.

Can you see how that could lead to chronic inflammatory diseases like asthma?  If the cells lining your respiratory system get all excited and inflamed at the drop of a hat (chemically speaking), the littlest bit of pollen or mold or dust or whatever is going to set off the hair trigger, time and time again.

Chronic inflammation has other consequences, too (I’ll be posting a video on its role in weight problems tomorrow), and NF-kB does more than just regulate inflammation (it’s involved in cancer too) but I don’t want this post to turn into an 800 page textbook on biochemistry, so let’s just stick with this:  NF-kB is the trigger for inflammation, and if it’s too sensitive, it “goes off” super-easy and leads to chronic inflammatory diseases.

So, it stands to reason that we want to keep NF-kB under control, right?  Not TOO much, mind you… if we can’t EVER pull the trigger, we’d have no inflammation at all, and remember, we do need SOME inflammation to stay alive and healthy.  We just don’t want a hair trigger.

Well, a really cool study shows that antioxidants can help keep NF-kB from becoming overly sensitive.  Actually, there’s a bunch of studies showing this, but this one is my favorite.  The researchers took some folks and measured how active their NF-kB levels were, before and after five days’ worth of supplementation with pycnogenol, which is a pine bark extract and super-duper antioxidant.  After only five days, the average inhibition of the trigger NF-kB was 15.8%.

Remember, we don’t want 100%!  That would be a complete immunosuppressant worse than HIV!  We just want to dial it down a notch, which is exactly what pycnogenol supplementation did.  And after only five days!

Imagine what the effects of this would be for someone suffering from asthma or allergies!  This is just one of the many, many reasons I advise anyone with a pulse to take antioxidants.  They offer so many powerful, far-reaching benefits, it’s literally staggering. 

If you want to know more, I discuss more about antioxidants in my free guide to choosing supplements, which you can download if you take a look at the upper right hand sidebar on this page.

Oh, and the article citation for this reference is “Grimm et al., J Inflamm 3:1-15, 2006″ in case you have a burning desire to look it up.

Did you find this article helpful?  Spread the word and send it to your friends!  Questions or comments?  Post them below!

Stay healthy!

One of my favorite studies on antioxidants involves the use of pycnogenol, a pine bark extract and super-duper powerful antioxidant, and how it dramatically reduced the need for children to use their asthma inhalers. 

Seriously, pycnogenol helps asthma sufferers- isn’t that cool?  Here’s how it went.  The researchers took about 60 kids, ages 6-18, all of whom suffered from mild to moderate asthma.  On average, these kids needed to use their albuterol inhalers about three times a day.

These kids were then given pycnogenol at a dose of one milligram per pound of body weight per day.  Of course, there was a control group who got placebo instead. 

And what were the results?  Dramatic, in a word.  After three months of supplementation with pycnogenol, those kids went from using their asthma rescue inhalers three times a day on average, to about 0.3 times a day on average.  In other words, most kids didn’t use them at all on a given day.

Isn’t that amazing?  A NINETY PERCENT reduction in the use of rescue medication, in just three months of supplementation!  Actually, if you look at a graph of the incidence of inhaler use, medication use drops off steadily starting at just one month of supplementation.  The control group had no change, indicating this was a real effect and not just a mental placebo effect.

Additionally, there was a dramatic decrease in some urine test scores indicative of asthmatic response, and a significant increase in Forced Expiratory Volume (FEV), a test of breathing function (you basically blow really hard into a tube).

Pretty amazing stuff, especially when you recall that this is a nutritional supplement, not a medication, without any of the scary side effects of medication.  Can you see why I’m huge on recommending antioxidants?

The mechanism of  action of all this is probably through the modulation of NF-kB, which is kind of a chemical on/off switch for inflammation in your body.  Since asthma is basically an over-active inflammatory response in the airways, it stands to reason that if you can return an out-of-control inflammatory response to a more reasonable response, you won’t get as bad of symptoms. 

It seems powerful antioxidants like pycnogenol have the effect of returning overactive NF-kB responses back to normal, or at least closer to normal.  This has huge implications for health overall.  Chronic or over-active inflammation is starting to look like the culprit in a whole host of the diseases that plague our society, heart disease among them. 

This article is a fantastic, powerful demonstration as to just how effective antioxidants are in promoting overall health.  The article citation is “Lau et al, J Asthma 41:  825-832, 2004″ for those of you who would like to look up the original published article.

Having read this, would you consider using pycnogenol if your child had asthma?  Comment below!  And don’t forget to use the buttons below to share this article with your friends and loved ones… who knows who might benefit from this information!

Stay healthy!