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Daily Mail
25 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
The exact workout that can lower blood pressure as effectively as medication - and it only takes 12 minutes
I never thought much about my blood pressure, but recently my doctor suggested I start monitoring it more closely due to some of the medications I take. While it is still well within the normal range, it has slowly crept up, making me wonder what I can do to keep it in check. After all, high blood pressure is one of the most common health problems, affecting an estimated 1.28 billion adults. Left unmanaged, it raises the risk of various conditions, such as heart attack and stroke. Exercise is widely recognised as one of the most effective ways to lower blood pressure. Most public health organisations recommend 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity a week, such as jogging or cycling, to help keep it in check. Yet many recent studies suggest this may not actually be the most effective approach. One of the most convincing findings comes from a 2023 analysis of 270 randomised controlled trials, involving almost 16,000 adults. Each trial investigated the effects on blood pressure of an exercise regime lasting at least two weeks. The analysis showed that every type of workout – from aerobic activity to resistance training – significantly reduced blood pressure compared with control groups. However, isometric exercises such as wall sits and hand grips, in which a muscle is tightened in a static position, reigned supreme. On average, they lowered systolic and diastolic blood pressure by 8.24 and 4 mmHg, respectively, an effect similar to blood pressure medication. A drop of this magnitude is associated with up to a 22 per cent lower risk of a major cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack or stroke, for at least a few years. Aerobic exercises had almost half the impact. The difference is probably to do with how isometric exercises affect blood flow. Think of wall squats and planks: they involve holding muscles in a contracted position for a minute or two. Squeezing muscles for that long temporarily reduces blood flow to them. When they are then relaxed, vessels widen, allowing blood to rush back in. This lowers blood pressure for several hours, and the drop becomes sustained with repeated exercise. What makes isometric workouts even more appealing is that they are relatively easy to fit into your routine. A 2023 study found that just 12 minutes of these exercises three times a week for 12 weeks was enough to significantly reduce blood pressure. Now, I don't want to suggest we forget about other types of workout. Aerobic exercise and resistance training are still important for cardiovascular health and building muscle. But if you aren't seeing your blood pressure budge, it may be worth adding an isometric move or two to your workout routine. I, for one, will definitely start incorporating wall squats into my leg day.
Telegraph
36 minutes ago
- Telegraph
‘I almost had my leg amputated because of medical malpractice'
When Grace Ofori-Attah was a teenager, she was a keen netball player with a big group of friends. She was involved in student film, and she loved to write, having her first novel picked up by an agent when she was just 20. Then, as she was studying for her final exams at the University of Cambridge, she became 'increasingly out of breath', with pain in her legs and across her hips so severe it prevented her from sleeping at night. As a medical student, she respected the judgement of the GP she consulted, who wrote her symptoms off as stress, anxiety, asthma, sciatica, and then just 'that I wasn't healthy'. But 'you know when your body is dying,' she says, 20 years on. 'I was very, very ill, but these doctors were telling me that there was nothing wrong.' Eventually Ofori-Attah was left unable to walk, and was given a wheelchair by her college. The day before her medical exams began, 'my next door neighbour, who was this wonderful mathematician who I'd never spoken to, carried me with another student to the GP'. This time she was seen by a different doctor. 'He said, 'You have to go straight to the hospital. You can't sit your exams.'' It was deep vein thrombosis (DVT). There were clots all over her body, a 'huge one' near her heart. 'As someone who's a real geek, I just started crying. He said, 'If you don't go to the hospital now, you probably won't live to the end of the week.'' Today, Ofori-Attah know s that what happened to her as a student was medical malpractice. Her college doctor's negligence could have cost her a limb, or even her life. For a time, doctors at the hospital she was treated in 'thought I had lung cancer, because the clots were so extensive,' she says. 'They were also unsure whether or not they were going to have to amputate the leg.' Her parents had cause to sue, but the family took no action, and accepted the practice's apology. 'They're both very Christian. Eventually they just said to me, 'Look, you're going to be a doctor, and you're going to make mistakes too.'' Ofori-Attah recovered, without losing her leg, and she did go on to qualify as a doctor. She moved to the University of Oxford to finish her medical degree and eventually became a consultant psychiatrist, specialising in addiction. Experiencing malpractice herself, 'really did inform how I felt about medicine going forward, and how I saw the medical education I'd had,' she says. She decided to leave the profession five years ago. There was no dramatic exit. She became a doctor for the same reason that she is now a full-time screenwriter: that she was 'always interested in people, and why they do the things they do,' she says. Her most successful drama, ITV's Malpractice, is directly inspired by what she saw over the course of her medical career. At the start of the hit series, a man walks into the reception of West Yorkshire Royal Hospital with a gun. Angry and covered in blood, he demands that main character, Dr Lucinda Edwards, immediately treats a man who lies motionless on the floor next to him, with a bullet hole in his chest. It sounds far-fetched, but when Ofori-Attah was in Dr Edwards' shoes as a junior doctor working in A&E, 'there were two bodies, not one', she says. She declines to go into specifics, out of doctorly respect for her former patients' privacy, 'but whatever you see in Malpractice, the truth is probably worse.' The crisis leads to the death of a young woman under Dr Edwards' care who has had a drug overdose, leading the doctor to be investigated for malpractice, despite her impossible position. Ofori-Attah's parents were right: under the pressure of acute disasters, or just the day-to-day churn of patients who desperately need help, real-life doctors do make mistakes. It has only become more frequent since their daughter left university. Between 2023 and 2024, the NHS received 13,784 new clinical negligence claims and reports of incidents, compared with the 11,945 cases reported in the year up to 2014. Serious mistakes are common. Research suggests that one in twenty hospital deaths are avoidable, and are therefore a result of malpractice. Doctors have called for the General Medical Council (GMC), which investigates complaints about practitioners, to be scrapped. The British Medical Association (BMA) – the union that represents two-thirds of doctors in Britain – has pushed for the overhaul as it believes that the GMC is 'failing to protect patients'. At the same time, victims of malpractice often want to see doctors be held responsible publicly. The families of three people murdered in Nottingham in June 2023, have asked that the doctors who approved the release of killer Valdo Calocane from a psychiatric ward be named in the press, to provide accountability for 'poor leadership and bad decision-making'. Ofori-Attah believes that doctors should not be named 'until proven guilty'. The GMC will never be scrapped, she believes, but 'the way that they investigate doctors seriously needs to be looked at'. The process 'goes on for months', she says. 'It's not uncommon for doctors to commit suicide before the end of an investigation. Often when that happens, they're found not to have committed malpractice in the first place. It is so, so stressful.' Then there is the ordeal of the coroners' courts, which most doctors must face at some point. Here, grieving family members can cross-examine doctors who give evidence. So extreme is the situation that 'people assumed I must have made it up when it happened to Dr Edwards in Malpractice,' Ofori-Attah says. She would know. While working in a psychiatric hospital, Ofori-Attah herself was criticised by the grieving family of a patient who had taken their own life following a stay in the hospital where she worked. 'It was one of those situations where the whole team had been in agreement that this patient could leave the hospital. It was my job to approve a more junior doctor's assessment,' she says. After the patient was discharged, they were admitted to a private hospital, which they later left, before they died. Their parents wrote a letter to the hospital, which 'singled out my name in the notes due to its origin,' she says. 'They queried my competence and ability to speak English, and my qualifications, having never met me, and assumed that these factors must have contributed to their relative's suicide. 'It was unusual, and hurtful, that the parents took objection to me specifically. They wrote to the trust about this 'foreign doctor', who presumably didn't have good qualifications, and they wanted to know where I'd studied. I had to go to the coroner's court to give evidence on the stand, knowing that this family was going to be there with all these presumptions about my lack of ability.' Once her patient's parents heard her speak in the stand, however, they came to her and apologised. 'Because they had now heard me speak, they knew that I was not what they had imagined, and they understood that I had done my best for their child. I was so shocked, because I was only expecting anger from them.' In the end, no claim of medical negligence was ever pursued. Her ITV drama showed viewers what she knows about malpractice: that doctors inevitably make mistakes under pressure, no matter how well-trained and experienced they may be. But she also wanted lay people to know that 'anyone can be accused of anything', including a doctor whose Old Bailey trial she sat as a juror for, before she quit the profession. 'I was sitting there listening to the evidence, and I knew that there was no physiological way that what that doctor was accused of could have happened.' The doctor had already been named in the press. 'It's so unfair that this can happen, until there's evidence to support it.' How the public sees doctors has shifted dramatically in the last few years, Ofori-Attah says. Once, she and her colleagues were put on a pedestal. Now – thanks to a combination of an increase in real failures caused by pressure on the NHS, and pay strikes by junior doctors – 'we don't have the same support any more'. It's part of why many of her Oxbridge-educated colleagues have left the profession, or have moved abroad to continue practicing. 'You're there for patients, and if patients don't trust you, then it's very difficult to do your job.' As a writer, Ofori-Attah now finds that she can speak to patients in a way that she never could as a doctor. At the end of one exhausting day early in her career, 'I went to see a short film about depression that some of my sisters' friends had made,' she recalls. 'I'd been in the hospital all day, trying to get patients to follow treatment plans, and it's a function of being a doctor that they're not often that interested in what you have to say.' Seeing how her sister and her friends could reach people through their work 'was life-changing'. She then turned her hand to writing dialogue, having never been able to finish her novel. The script she wrote in two weeks, in a 'kind of creative manic flurry', became Malpractice. Despite all of her own trials as a doctor, and as a patient, Ofori-Attah can see herself going back to medicine one day. 'Leaving in the pandemic made it easier, because everything was so awful, but I really miss speaking to so many people from different walks of life, being there with them in some of their hardest or most important moments,' she says. 'There's no way of quantifying what that feels like. It's a real privilege.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘Could become a death spiral': scientists discover what's driving record die-offs of US honeybees
Bret Adee is one of the largest beekeepers in the US, with 2 billion bees across 55,000 hives. The business has been in his family since the 1930s, and sends truckloads of bees across the country from South Dakota, pollinating crops such as almonds, onions, watermelons and cucumbers. Last December, his bees were wintering in California when the weather turned cold. Bees grouped on top of hives trying to keep warm. 'Every time I went out to the beehive there were less and less,' says Adee. 'Then a week later, there'd be more dead ones to pick up … every week there is attrition, just continually going down.' Adee went on to lose 75% of his bees. 'It's almost depressingly sad,' he says. 'If we have a similar situation this year – I sure hope we don't – then we're in a death spiral.' It developed into the largest US honeybee die-off on record, with beekeepers losing on average 60% of their colonies, at a cost of $600m (£440m). Scientists have been scrambling to discover what happened; now the culprits are emerging. A research paper published by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), though not yet peer-reviewed, has found nearly all colonies had contracted a bee virus spread by parasitic mites that appear to have developed resistance to the main chemicals used to control them. Varroa mites – equivalent in size to a dinner plate on a human body – crawl and jump between worker bees. If there are no infections present, they do not typically damage the bee. But if diseases are present, they quickly spread them. While varroa typically infects honeybees, not wild bees, the diseases that they spread can kill other pollinators – research has shown that the viral outbreaks among honeybees often spill over to wild colonies, with potential knock-on effects on biodiversity. All beekeepers in the USDA screening used amitraz, a pesticide widely used in the sector to get rid of mites. But the research showed all mites tested were resistant to it: after years of heavy use, amitraz no longer appears to be effective. This discovery underscores 'the urgent need for new control strategies for this parasite', researchers say. Mite numbers have increased to high levels in recent surveys, according to the researchers, who collected hundreds of samples from dead and living hives from 113 colonies. 'When mites become uncontrolled, virulent viruses are more likely to take over,' researchers say. Since the 1980s, varroa mites globally have developed resistance to at least four leading miticides – pesticides specifically formulated to control mites that are challenging to develop – causing significant problems for beekeepers. Norman Carreck, a senior technician at the University of Sussex, who was not involved in the research, says: 'Sadly, it was inevitable that major honeybee colony losses would again occur in the US at some point. 'It was only a matter of time before widespread resistance to amitraz, the only remaining effective synthetic chemical, would develop,' he says. But the discovery of amitraz-resistant mites in hives does not mean they alone were responsible for all of last year's record die-offs. A combination of factors is likely to be causing successive colony deaths among US bees, including the changing climate, exposure to pesticides, and less food in the form of pollen and nectar as monocrop farming proliferates. Many US beekeepers now expect to lose 30% of their colony or more every year. These wider combined factors are also devastating for wild pollinators and native bee species – and honeybees, which are closely monitored by their keepers, may be acting as a canary in the coalmine for pressures affecting insects more generally. Paul Hetherington, of the charity Buglife, says honeybees are in effect 'a farmed animal as opposed to wild bees, but they will be suffering from the same stresses as their wild cousins, in particular loss of good habitat, climate stress, chemical stress, light. Adee says: 'We had mites for 20 years, and we never had over 3% losses.' He believes there is a 'combination of things' that makes the bees more stressed and the mites more deadly. He cites the use of neonicotinoid insecticides in the US, which harm bees' nervous system, paralysing and ultimately killing them. Some researchers have warned of neonicotinoids causing another 'silent spring', referring to Rachel Carson's 1962 book on the effects of the insecticide DDT on bird populations. Dave Goulson, professor of biology at the University of Sussex, says the study provided no evidence that the viral load was higher in weaker colonies. 'Almost all bee colonies have these viruses, but they only do significant harm when the colony is stressed.' He says high levels of viral infection may be a symptom of ill health, not the cause. Due to government staffing cuts, the USDA team were unable to analyse pesticides in the hives and asked bee experts at Cornell University to carry out the research, with the results still to be published. Experts are concerned that successive loss of honeybee colonies could affect food security as the insects pollinate more than 100 commercial crops across North America. Reports of new losses this year came through before the California almond blossom season, which is the largest pollination event in the world, requiring the services of 70% of US honeybees. Danielle Downey, director of the nonprofit beekeeping research organisation Project Apis m., which conducted the die-off survey, says: 'If you like to eat, you need healthy bees to pollinate crops. Beekeepers try to rebuild each year but they are pushed to the brink as losses and input costs keep increasing. 'If beekeepers fail, there is no backup plan for the pollination services they provide in US food production,' she says. Meanwhile, beekeepers are being pushed close to ruin. When Adee was growing up, he would get upset about losses of more than 5%. Now a loss of 30% each year is standard. 'It's absolutely insane that that's an acceptable loss in a livestock industry,' he says. Like many beekeepers, Adee was unable to restock this year because the losses were so high. 'I'm just watching every nickel and dime right now, because I don't want to get rid of men that have helped me manage these bees for years.' Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage
