Small amount of dark chocolate daily reduces blood pressure without weight gain

Study volunteers ate a tiny amount of dark chocolate daily for five months - one square from a 16-square German chocolate bar called Ritter Sport (6 grams/30 calories/30 mg of polyphenols). This daily tidbit of dark chocolate lowered the blood pressure without weight gain or increase in cholesterol and blood glucose. The average decrease in blood pressure in the study participants was a 3-point drop in systolic blood pressure and a 2-point drop in diastolic blood pressure.

This is likely the most delicious "pill" (square) these volunteers have ever tasted. Speaking from personal experience, I have to confirm that both Ritter Sport Dark and Ritter Sport Dark with whole hazelnuts taste great.

The best headline award goes to: Dark chocolate helps keep arteries open for business (from a web site in New Zealand).

Chocolate could lower blood pressure but the required dose may be too much - BMJhttp://goo.gl/uoBN

Comments from Twitter:

1. SarahStewart
   @DrVes Is there such a thing as too high a dose of chocolate!!! LOL39 minutes ago via Echofon in reply to DrVes
2. bobfine
   I can take it. RT @DaphneLeigh Bring it on! RT @DrVesChocolate could lower blood pressure but required dose may b 2 much http://goo.gl/uoBN40 minutes ago via txt
3. Lin_Dolin
   RT @DaphneLeigh Bring it on! RT @DrVes: Chocolate could lower blood pressure but required dose may be too muchhttp://goo.gl/uoBN } Ditto!43 minutes ago via web
4. DaphneLeigh
   Bring it on! RT @DrVes: Chocolate could lower blood pressure but the required dose may be too much - BMJhttp://goo.gl/uoBN44 minutes ago via TweetDeck

References:
Study: Chocolate Reduces Blood Pressure. Associated Press, 07/2007.
Effects of Low Habitual Cocoa Intake on Blood Pressure and Bioactive Nitric Oxide. JAMA. 07/2007;298:49-60.
Flavor of Flavanol - It's Delicious and It Could Be Good for You. CasesBlog, 8/2005.
Dark Chocolate Improves Coronary Vasomotion and Reduces Platelet Reactivity. Circulation. 2007;116:2376-2382.
How Chocolate Can Save the Planet. NPR, 11/2007.
Chocolate could lower blood pressure but the required dose may be too much - BMJ http://goo.gl/uoBN

Photo Essay: Making Chocolate in Belize http://goo.gl/2DPi
Image source: Wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License.

Updated: 08/10/2010

WSJ Video: The Skinny on Stents

Christopher White, chief of cardiology at New Orleans’s Ochsner Clinic talks about the present and future of the cardiac stents.

Link via WSJ Health Blog.

What to do if you lose a guide wire during central line placement?

I was discussing central line placement complications with medical students a few days ago. Some of them are illustrated with horrifying details in the NEJM.

"What should you do if you lose a guide wire during central line placement?", I asked.

"We could use a strong magnet to pull it out", one of the students suggested.

Well, not really.

You should call interventional radiology immediately and the radiologist will extract the wire under fluoroscopic guidance by using another wire to hook up and pull out the lost one.

A few examples of different approaches to extract lost guide wires are listed in the British Journal of Anaesthesia.

We have published free illustrated step-by-step procedure guides to central placement with and without ultrasound. The guides are available as web pages and Windows Mobile/Palm downloads.

References:
Central Line Placement: A Step-by-Step Procedure Guide with Photos
Loss of the guide wire: mishap or blunder? British Journal of Anaesthesia, 2002, Vol. 88, No. 1 144-146.
Lost guide wire during central venous cannulation and its surgical retrieval. Kumar S, Eapen S, Vaid VN, Bhagwat AR. Indian J Surg 2006;68:33-34.
Image source: Wikipedia, public domain.

Further reading:
Lost Guide Wire. Radiology Picture of the Day.
A Big Time Mistake. Ten out of Ten: My experiences as an ER doc, 02/2008.

Improper placement of the central venous catheter - case one and case two from the Annals of Emergency Medicine

Updated: 02/09/2010

Dr. Charles' Blog Goes on Hiatus with Memorable Final Thoughts

I have enjoyed reading The Examining Room of Dr. Charles for years. He writes one of the best literary sites in the medical blogosphere and not surprisingly is the most famous Dr. Charles according to Google. Dr. Charles started his blog on Blogger.com, published a book and moved his site to Science Blogs about a year ago. Since then, his style of writing has been somewhat different and focused more on current events rather than what I think he does best -- telling compelling (if fictional) patient stories. I will stay subscribed to the feed in case he decides to bring his blog back online one day. In the meantime, somebody else took over his old blogspot URL which is sad since the blog archives seem to be lost.

Here is Dr. Charles himself:

"And If I were to make a few final requests they might be the following. Watch the swallows flying before sunset. Save the planet. Cook a meal with someone you love, and drink too much wine while you're doing it. Please don't vote for another Bush or Edwards. Support health care courts and malpractice reform. Bring your doctor a tomato from your garden, assuming you like him. Cancel you cable, buy a hammock, and get a library card. Use more basil. Beware of people selling unproven cures. Lie on your back and watch for shooting stars. Go to the beach in the off-season. Fight for justice. Fight for truth. Never take for granted the blessings of good health. Help those who are sick. And remember that you don't need things to make you happy, and that life is a bittersweet flash of a firefly at night."

Image source: Tirau Sunset, Essjay NZ, a Creative Commons license.

Updated 07/08/2009:

After a two year hiatus, the talented medical blogger Dr. Charles is back, "reopening the examining room" http://bit.ly/igKWW

Funny Ads: "Hello, I'm a Mac... And, I'm a PC"

A 7-minute collection of 15 short video ads showing the cool Apple Mac Guy vs. the loved-by-everybody PC Guy.

Update 02/04/2008: The compilation video was deleted but the individual clips are still available on iTube.

Related:
Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC? NYTimes, 02/2008.

Updated: 02/04/2008

¡Sí, Se Puede!

From the defunct Babes and Books blog where a bunch of friends challenged each other to read twenty books in one summer:

I finished Sisterhood Interrupted Friday morning and Borderlands last night before I went to sleep. Both thumbs up books.

Sisterhood Interrupted was way better than I thought it would be. As someone who has 2 minor degrees in women’s studies, I’ve read a lot of feminist history, especially second wave history. That’s also due to my obsession with the 60s and early 70s. I really didn’t think I’d learn too much new in it and while the book is NOT a history book, I did learn some new tidbits. Seigel does an excellent job at framing the intragenerational fighting during the second wave (Betty Friedan-ists vs. radical feminists) and the third wave (post-feminists vs. third wavers) AND the intergenerational fighting between second and third wavers. I went way into this with Cinnamon and wish I had recorded it because now I know I can’t do it justice again, but essentially I believe this is Seigel’s love letter to feminism as well as a plead for all of us to come together and finish the revolution. In the introduction, she asks, “How do younger women reconcile the gap between the tremendous opportunities they’ve been given and the inequalities that persist?” And that is such a fabu question to ask. I’ve been asked that plenty of times by women my age who say that we have it so good here. I usually snap back that it’s just not good enough and then rattle off a litany of wrongs in this country.

Borderlands just blew me out of the water.

Anzaldua discusses her personal journey thru what she calls the Borderlands as a Chicana who lives in a racist world and was raised to survive and work in this racist world. Far more radical than I am, Anzaldua pushed me to reconsider my own beliefs and assumptions. She also challenges us of Latina/o heritage to reclaim as much of our heritage as possible.The book also contains her poetry which I have not read yet. She writes in three languages, Spanish, English, and Spanglish, which made it difficult for me to read the book. That on top of my inability to read poetry the way it should be read scares me to dive into her poetry at this point.

I remember during graduate school a discussion about Chicana feminism and saying that I didn’t think I was there yet. A Chicana in the room waved her hand and said, “Yes, you are! Come on over!” In reality, I wasn’t. But I do think I am. There are just a few things I need to get settled in my head first. Then again, the one question I know will be the hardest to resolve is the most important. How can I balance being Chicana (a politically aware Latina invested in her heritage) and a player within the current economic and social system? There just seems to be a bit of isolationism in recovering my heritage.

Thankfully next up is So Far From God by Ana Castillo. Maybe diving into some good Latina fiction will help me answer some questions. Also on my plate will be Strange Piece of Paradise for my book club.

Medicine 2.0 -- A Blog Carnival About Web 2.0 and Medicine

Medicine 2.0 is a weekly blog carnival which collects the most interesting posts about Web 2.0 and Medicine.

A blog carnival is a blog event similar to a magazine dedicated to a particular topic. It is published on a regular schedule, often weekly or monthly. Each edition of a blog carnival is in the form of a blog article that contains links to other blog articles on the particular topic (source: Wikipedia).



Video: Using the Web 2.0 write up in Wikipedia this video is to help teach educators about Web 2.0 tools, by JuTechTips.

Image source: ScienceRoll.com, a Creative Commons license.