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Cardiovascular disease and stroke will cost the United States an estimated $503.2 billion in 2010, an increase of nearly 6 percent, and many cases could have been prevented, the American Heart Association said on Thursday.

The figure includes both health care costs and lost productivity due to death and disease, according to an update published online in the journal Circulation.

The heart association says obesity and other risk factors, like too little exercise and poor diet, are fueling the expected increase in health care costs associated with heart disease and stroke.

“Current statistical data show Americans to be on average overweight, physically inactive and eating a diet that is too high in calories, sodium, fat and sugar,” said Dr. Donald Lloyd-Jones, head of the American Heart Association Statistics Committee.

Lloyd-Jones, a cardiologist at Northwestern University in Chicago, said too many people do not take cholesterol-lowering medicines that could lower their risk.

“One reason it will cost us more to treat tomorrow’s patients is because there will be more of them if current trends continue,” Lloyd-Jones said in a statement.

According to the heart association, 59 percent of adults who responded to a 2008 national survey described themselves as physically inactive.

The report also says fewer than half of people with heart disease symptoms are receiving cholesterol-lowering drugs, like statins.

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of men and women in the United States and in most industrialized countries. According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular diseases and diabetes accounted for 32 percent of all deaths globally in 2005.

The heart association said the number of inpatient cardiovascular operations and procedures jumped 33 percent from 1996 to 2006, from 5.4 million to 7.2 million.

By 2020, the American Heart Association hopes to reduce U.S. deaths from cardiovascular diseases and stroke by 20 percent.

“To reach the 2020 goals, Americans must start making healthier lifestyle choices,” Lloyd-Jones said.

Taking folic acid supplements doesn’t appear to prevent colon polyps from coming back, new research shows, although it may be helpful for people who have low levels of the B vitamin in their blood.

These polyps, or adenomas, can develop into cancer if they are not detected and removed. While there’s evidence that folate, the natural form of this nutrient, might help protect people from developing colon cancer, studies looking at whether folic acid supplements can ward off adenoma recurrence have had mixed results.

In fact, according to Dr. Kana Wu of the Harvard School of Public Health and colleagues, one study actually found that people who took folic acid supplements were more likely to have recurrent adenomas than people given placebo.

To investigate further, Wu and colleagues assigned nearly 700 men and women participating in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study and the Nurses’ Health Study, two large ongoing studies, to take 1 milligram of folic acid daily or a placebo. All of them had previously been diagnosed with colon polyps.

During follow-up, which lasted for up to six-and-a-half years, 72 people in the placebo group developed recurrent polyps, while 62 in the folic acid group did. This wasn’t a statistically significant difference.

However, for people with low concentrations of folate in their blood at the study’s outset, taking folic acid reduced recurrent adenoma risk by about 40 percent. The protective effect was particularly strong among people who consumed more alcohol; alcohol is known to deplete a person’s folate levels.

This suggests, the researchers conclude, that folic acid supplementation “may be beneficial” among people with low vitamin B levels who drink a lot of alcohol.

Right now, Wu noted in an email to Reuters Health, the Institute of Medicine says adults should consume no more than 1 milligram of folate daily.

While folic acid supplements are recommended for pregnant women, as well as people with folate deficiency and those taking drugs that interfere with folate metabolism, Wu added, “more research is needed to establish what effect taking additional high dose folic acid supplements would have on healthy adults with regard to preventing certain diseases or whether it may even be harmful.”

Kidney transplant patients with sleep apnea are at increased risk for high blood pressure, heart disease and stroke, Hungarian researchers say.

The study of 100 kidney transplant recipients found that 25 percent had moderate to severe sleep apnea, a rate similar to that seen in kidney disease patients on dialysis awaiting a transplant. This means that both types of patients who have the breathing-related sleep disorder should be considered at high risk for serious heart-related complications, the study authors noted.

Transplant recipients with sleep apnea were more than twice as likely as those without the syndrome to be taking three or more anti-hypertensive drugs, but still had higher blood pressure than those without the sleep disorder. Obesity increased a transplant patient’s risk of developing sleep apnea.

When the researchers calculated risk scores, they found that kidney disease patients with sleep apnea were twice as likely to suffer heart disease or stroke than those without sleep apnea.

“We propose that sleep apnea is a new risk factor for hypertension and cardiovascular events in kidney-transplanted patients,” said Dr. Miklos Zsolt Molnar, of Semmelweis University in Budapest, in a news release from the American Society of Nephrology.

“Physicians should screen transplant patients for obstructive sleep apnea and offer appropriate treatment,” the study authors concluded.

Extreme temperatures and heavy air pollution boost heart attack risk, according to a major new study.

And on days when the air is extra dirty and the temperature is unusually hot or cold, the effects are likely to be particularly bad, given that temperature and pollution seem to harm the body in different ways, Dr. Krishnan Bhaskaran of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK, the lead author of the research, told Reuters Health.

Several studies have linked changes in temperature to increases in deaths due to any cause, as well as heart disease mortality, Bhaskaran and his team note in their reports. But looking at heart attacks-not just deaths from heart disease-could offer a more accurate picture of the overall health risks of temperature changes and air pollution, they say, and might also offer clues to why they may trigger heart attack in high-risk people.

In two separate reports, the researchers reviewed 19 studies on temperature and heart attack and 26 examining air pollution and heart attack.

In the 12 temperature studies that collected winter data, eight showed short-term increases in heart attack risk with colder temperatures. Seven of the 13 studies that looked at the effects of warmer temperatures found increased heart attack risk in hotter weather.

Cold temperatures seemed to have a greater effect on heart attack risk in areas that were warmer, on average, Bhaskaran and colleagues note, suggesting that people living in colder areas may be better adapted to dips in temperature. But hot days boosted heart attack risk whether they happened in Sweden or Brazil.

In a city that normally sees 10 heart attacks a day, Bhaskaran explained, the findings show there might be an extra one to four heart attacks on the hottest or coldest days.

“There was a lot of variation in the methods and quality of the studies we reviewed, so more work is needed in this area, but we thought the results were consistent enough to suggest that these effects are real,” he added.

The evidence from the pollution studies was less clear-cut, the researcher said, but overall suggested that the risk of heart attack increases with levels of several different pollutants. Also, he noted, there appeared to be no “safe” level of air pollution at which no effect on heart attack risk was seen.

“Our findings would suggest that further lowering limits would likely further reduce the health burden associated with pollution, which is of course a desirable outcome,” he said.

Governments can also make an effort to alert at-risk people when extreme temperatures or high levels of pollution are expected, the researcher said. He noted that the UK now makes automated phone calls to people with emphysema when they are at risk due to changes in temperature; this, he said, has led to a reduction in hospital admissions for lung disease patients.

In an editorial accompanying the study, Professor David E. Newby of the University of Edinburgh and colleagues note that efforts to control air pollution are likely to help reduce carbon dioxide emissions as well, possibly helping to alleviate the effects of climate change down the road.

The self-reported health of the newly retired improves so much that most feel eight years younger, a new European study suggests.

This happy news was true of most everyone except a small minority — only 2 percent — who had experienced “ideal” conditions in their working life, anyway.

“The results really say three things: That work puts an extra burden on the health of older workers, that the effects of this extra burden are largely relieved by retirement and, finally, that both the extra burden and the relief are larger when working conditions are poor,” said Hugo Westerlund, lead author of a study published online Nov. 9 in The Lancet. “This indicates that there is a need to provide opportunities for older workers to decrease the demands in their work out of concern for their health and well-being.”

But of course, added Westerlund, who is head of epidemiology at the Stress Research Institute at Stockholm University in Sweden, “not all older workers suffer from poor perceived health. Many are indeed eminently healthy and fit for work. But sooner or later, everyone has to slow down because of old age catching up.”

Last week, the same group of researchers reported that workers slept better after retirement than before. “Sleep improves at retirement, which suggests that sleeping could be a mediator between work and perception of poor health,” Westerlund said.

This study looked at what the same 15,000 French workers, most of them men, had to say about their own health up to seven years pre-retirement and up to seven years post-retirement.

As participants got closer to retirement age, their perception of their own health declined, but went up again during the first year of retirement.

Those who reported being in poorer health declined from 19.2 percent in the year prior to retirement to 14.3 percent by the end of the first year after retiring. According to the researchers, that means post-retirement levels of poor health fell to levels last seen eight years previously.

The changes were seen in both men and women, across different occupations, and lasted through the first seven years of not punching the clock.

Workers who felt worse before retirement and had lower working conditions reported greater improvements as soon as they retired, the team found.

“Those who had low job satisfaction — a lot of burden for little satisfaction — those were the ones complaining of their health,” said Dr. Gary Kennedy, director of geriatric psychiatry at Montefiore Medical Center in New York City. “People with more authority or better education, a better sense of control over what they were doing and less demand were much less likely to complain,” he added.

“That’s not really surprising,” he said. “An old study of English civil-service workers in Britain found that those who felt they had a lot of responsibility but little control over their workplace were more likely to develop heart disease,” he added. “You can work hard but if you feel like you’re not at the mercy of a job, you still have the illusion of control. That’s an important illusion to maintain.”

A major question is whether these European findings apply to conditions in the United States.

“It’s a little bit difficult to apply directly to our workforce but … we can draw some conclusions about keeping a strong and healthy workforce through the life span,” said Angie Hochhalter, assistant professor of internal medicine at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and research scientist in geriatrics at Scott & White in Temple, Texas.

“We know that we need strong health care but also mental services because, in [the study], those people with depression really saw a dramatic change after retirement,” she explained.

“In addition to strong systems, there’s also some degree of personal responsibility for trying to keep ourselves healthy — managing stress from work and from home, healthy eating and physical activity, and staying involved with social support,” Hochhalter added.

Workers in both the United States and Europe are likely to be affected similarly by poor working conditions, Westerlund added.