Low Vitamin D Levels Lead to Poor Physical Performance in the Elderly!

In a recent study, researchers examined the association between Vitamin D status and physical performance. Among subjects with low Vitamin D levels, physical performance and grip strength were significantly lower than that of participants who did not have reduced levels.

In addition to its role in bone health, vitamin D is thought to play a role in musculoskeletal function. In a recent study, researchers examined the association between vitamin D status and physical performance in a sample of 976 persons over the age of 65.

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26.7 % of Americans are Obese!

Obesity Costs $147 Billion a Year!

More than 72 million U.S. adults, or 26.7 percent, are obese, up 1 percentage point in two years, the U.S. government reported on Tuesday.

Obesity has become “a major public health threat” and is steadily worsening, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

“We need intensive, comprehensive and ongoing efforts to address obesity,” CDC director Dr. Thomas Frieden said in a statement.

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Heart attack rates fell 24 percent in California between 2000 and 2008, probably because of better care, U.S. researchers reported Wednesday.

The study, in the New England Journal of Medicine, is the first large survey since the adoption of new treatments and medicines for preventing heart attacks. It examined more than 46,000 heart attack hospitalizations.

Dr. Robert Yeh of Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston and colleagues said the 24 percent drop was seen even though doctors can better detect heart attacks and despite the growing rates of diabetes and obesity, both of which raise the risk of heart attack.

“We would expect an increase in heart attacks because we’re picking up more heart attacks than we used to,” Yeh said in a telephone interview. “We found that, despite that, they are still going down.”

His team used data from the 3 million people in the Kaiser Permanente Northern California health system.

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