Cardio Round-up: Artificial Intelligence and ECGs; Heart Disease Deaths Rising; and More

This week’s edition features a worrying trend in heart disease deaths, a report on what machine learning can glean from an ECG, and the important take-away from different dieting strategies.

Total Heart Disease Deaths On The Rise

A new research letter in JAMA provides some sobering news, in that the total number of deaths from heart disease has slowly been on the rise again after years of declining, and a brief plateau period. The increase, in large part, was related to increases in obesity. “These findings demonstrate a continued but slower decline in age-adjusted mortality rates from heart disease, a plateau in mortality rates from stroke and diabetes, and an increasing age-adjusted mortality rates for hypertension between 2010 and 2017,” the authors wrote in their letter.

https://www.docwirenews.com/cardiology/heart-disease-deaths-rise/

Type of Diet Less Important Than Healthy Food

When it comes to carbohydrate-, protein-, or unsaturated fat-focused diets, a new analysis in the International Journal of Cardiology suggests that the benefits derived from each are similar, and that the important through-line is healthy food. “Our findings support flexibility in food selection for people attempting to eat a healthier diet and should make it easier, the researchers wrote. “With the average American eating fewer than two servings of fruit and vegetables a day, the typical American diet is quite different from any of these diets, which all included at least four to six servings of fruits and vegetables a day.”

https://www.docwirenews.com/docwire-pick/cardiology-picks/diet-macronutrients-heart-disease/

Can AI Help Predict Age and Sex by ECG?

This study looked at what artificial intelligence (AI) can teach us about the information obtained during the average electrocardiogram (ECG). “A trained neural network can determine an individual’s age from a 12-lead ECG alone within seven years of their actual age,” they researchers wrote. “When the convolutional neural network-predicted age exceeds a patient’s actual age by at least seven years, there is a higher incidence of cardiovascular comorbidities, potentially suggesting that the convolutional neural network–predicted age from 12-lead ECGs may correlate with physiological health.”

https://www.docwirenews.com/cardiology/ecg-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning/

In Case You Missed It!

This DocWire News Homepage story about social media addiction being fueled by stress on from time spent using social networking sites found its way to the front page of r/science on Reddit yesterday! See what all the hype is about!

https://www.docwirenews.com/latest-general-medical-news/socialmedia-stressandaddiction/