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21 April, 2007

Reducing salt intake 'cuts heart disease risk'

Cutting back on the amount of salt eaten could reduce a person's chances of developing cardiovascular disease by a quarter, according to a new report published in Telegraph UK.
Scientists have also discovered that reducing the amount of salt consumed could lower the risk of death from cardiovascular diseases by up to a fifth.
The research provides some of the strongest objective evidence to date that lowering the amount of salt eaten reduces the long-term risk of future cardiovascular disease, according to the report's authors.
Researchers who carried out the study, published on the British Medical Journal's website, followed up participants from two trials completed in the 1990s staged to analyse the effect that reducing salt in the diet had on blood pressure.
All of the people studied by the US team from Boston had high-normal blood pressure - pre-hypertension - and were therefore at greater risk of developing conditions like a stroke or heart disease.
Scientists examined 744 people in the first study in 1990 and 2,382 in the second, which ended in 1995.
In both trials participants reduced their sodium intake by 25 per cent-35 per cent alongside a control group who did not cut back on their intake.
Detailed information about cardiovascular and other health problems was collected from the people taking part in the trials.
Researchers found that participants who had cut back on salt during the study tended to stick to a lower salt diet compared to the control group.
In total, the scientists collected information from 77 per cent (2,415) of the participants, 200 of whom had reported some sort of cardiovascular problem.
The results showed these pre-hypertensive individuals were 25 per cent less likely to develop cardiovascular problems over the course of 10 to 15 years following the trial.
There was also a 20 per cent lower mortality rate. At present, the average salt consumption in the UK is around 9g per day, far higher than the recommended maximum of 6g.
This is a very important study because for the first time it shows that reducing salt intake does reduce the number of people suffering and dying from strokes and heart attacks, the biggest causes of death and disability in the UK.
Previous studies have predicted that reducing salt intake by 6g a day will reduce the number of heart attack and strokes by approximately 70,000 events (35,000 deaths) a year in the UK alone, and this new research confirms these results.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is a very old news. I have cut the salt intake since ages. See salt is recommendable.