Welcome to Dr. Warrick's podcast channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believes educated patients get the best health care. Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love. Hi, my name is Dr. Warrick Bishop and welcome to my podcast and videocast station. Today I've got two interesting papers that I came across that I would like to share. The first is all about dog therapy. Well, what does that mean? Well, there was a group in an emergency department in Saskatchewan, Canada, who decided to check out... If having dogs in the emergency department, where people go obviously stressed and in pain and concerned about their health, these researchers wanted to see if there was a benefit in having dogs with those patients. Well, they literally put together a randomized controlled trial. in each arm of the trial so 100 people were given dog therapy and 100 people standard care what they did was use a a tool a survey tool called the Edmonton symptom assessment system to rate and rank and try and get an objective measure on patients, stress levels, pain, anxiety, and so forth. And of course, they assessed people before potential dog therapy. Then they assessed them afterwards, and they also had a control group. Well, the really interesting thing is that for the people exposed to dog therapy, and we're only talking 10 minutes, or so that there was clear and demonstrable reduction in pain and anxiety for the individuals who had that opportunity. The study authors really flagged that we should be thinking about bringing these sort of measures or manoeuvres into regular hospital practice because there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that animal-related therapies, whether it's dogs or even cats, can help individuals alleviate some of their anxieties, fears and concerns. And certainly one can imagine in not just accident emergencies, which I often think of as very busy places and where a dog or a cat might be quite out of place, but I certainly think of Ward-based therapies, day units where patients have to go in for particular treatments, perhaps even chemotherapy suites where the presence of an animal providing support and help for an individual could be really valuable. And there's no question that people at home benefit from a relationship with their pets and that calming of the nerves. Reduction of anxiety. Anyway, the group from Canada, 100 people in each arm, demonstrating a reduction in pain and anxiety by the use of dog therapy. Watch this space. I think there's every chance we might see more of that in the future. Look, the other study that I thought I'd share with you is one that I came across. And it was put together by the University of Texas, Southwest Medical Center, Dallas, USA. And the researchers wanted to ask the question for males in particular who are overweight and at high risk of heart failure, could we intervene using exercise or fish oil? to see a benefit for those individuals well the researchers from dallas decided to take 80 patients so not a huge number they randomized them to exercise or to fish oil and ran their study for approximately one year there was good maintenance of people within The study, so about 90% of people remained in, so a good retention rate. When it came to the subjects that they took, they were looking at men between 40 and 55 years of age who were at increased risk of heart failure. And in particular, they were concerned about men who were hypertensive and overweight, obese in fact. So they ran these men. through two different types of programs or two different arms of the study. One was a high intensity interval training arm and that was the exercise arm obviously and the other was supplementation of 1.6 grams of omega-3 fatty acid. To be honest I didn't get a clear indication of why they selected that exact amount and if you've listened to any of my other podcasts you'll know that there still, I think, remains a fair bit of uncertainty around the best way to supplement with omega-3 triglycerides. Anyway, for this study, what they found after one year was that the men who undertook a high-intensity interval training regime improved their physical capacity. They improved their VO2 max, they improved their strength. But really importantly, they didn't seem to drop any weight. I'm going to speak to that very briefly. The article didn't or the paper didn't. But it's important to remember that exercise alone is incredibly valuable for all sorts of heart health related issues. But if we don't get the diet right, if we're not altering the way we eat, then we... often can exercise without any change whatsoever in our weight. And I think given that there was no component of this particular intervention which focused on diet, I suspect that the men who were enrolled continued to eat exactly the way they ate to get them to the position they were in, which was high risk for heart failure. And without addressing diet with exercise, unfortunately... As these researchers demonstrated, there was just no response in that space of weight loss. So really important to get your head around that. The fish oil group, absolutely no change whatsoever. And that's sort of interesting and a bit disappointing. I think fish oil looks to be something that we think of as so important it should be in the water. And yet when we look at trials such as this one, we often get no clear indication that it's beneficial. We do have other data that supports the role of fish oil, particularly in high-risk cardiac patients and particularly in people with high triglycerides and specifically using the subfraction of fish oil that's referred to as EPA, eicosapentaic acid. But I've covered that in other podcasts and I'm sure you've had the chance to listen to that. Anyway, the long and the short of it, the high-risk individuals of cardiac failure. You're better to sweat it out than pill it out. If you do want to lose the weight, you're not only going to sweat it out, but you have to change the way you eat. Well, I hope you've enjoyed that. A quick walk of the dog. and a quick chat about exercise and fish oil. I'm going to wish you the very best. If you have any queries or questions, drop us a note at drWarrickbishop. No, drop us a note at info at drWarrickbishop.online. I hope you live as well as possible for as long as possible. If you've liked this podcast, please feel free to share it. I really do value this information getting out broadly. Until next time, take care. And bye for now.
