Exercise News of Olympic Proportions for Cardiovascular Marketers

Exercising at less than an Olympic pace could pay big dividends in preventing heart disease and stroke. 

“Every four years, the summer Olympics get people excited to exercise,” says Glenn Gaesser, a professor and director of the Healthy Lifestyles Research Center at Arizona State University, who oversaw a new study about exercise and high blood pressure that was inspired in part by this year’s games in London.

Historically, gyms and neighborhood streets get busy as the Olympics start and people are inspired by athletes going for gold. But we all know that once the excitement wears off, most people resume their sedentary lives.

Dr. Gaesser and his colleagues hoped to determine whether breaking up exercise into small, manageable segments performed throughout the day would work as well as one longer, continuous Olympic-training-like bout.

They studied a group of adult volunteers that was generally healthy, except for some early symptoms of high blood pressure, or prehypertension.

Prehypertension is known to respond well to exercise. But most studies of exercise and blood pressure have employed uninterrupted 30-minute exercise sessions, a commonly recommended standard for improving health.

In Dr. Gaesser’s study, subjects walked briskly for 10 minutes three times during the day. On a separate day, the volunteers completed one 30-minute supervised session of brisk walking in midafternoon, while on a final day, they did not exercise at all.

Their blood pressure was monitored continuously.

The results showed that breaking up the exercise into three short sessions led to lower average 24-hour blood pressure readings. It also resulted in fewer episodes of unhealthy spikes in blood pressure through the day.

According to Dr. Gaesser, the results “are really encouraging,” he says. “For people who think that 30 minutes of exercise is too hard or takes up too much time, we can say, just do 10 minutes” three times during the day. And, conversely, if someone is tempted to dismiss a mere 10 minutes of walking as too meager to be meaningful, “it seems clear that, at least for blood pressure control, fractionized exercise is actually more effective” than a single 30-minute bout.

Interesting. I may have to rethink my own routine.

Cardiovascular Marketing Focus: A-Fib Growth Projected to Soar

Atrial fibrillation may represent a huge growth opportunity for cardiovascular marketers.

A new report estimates that the AF market is estimated to reach $4.1 billion by 2015.

AF-related market growth is being spawned primarily by an uptick in therapeutic treatment choices, including:

• anticoagulants
• catheter ablation
• implantable devices
• cardioversion and
• surgical ablation.

The ablation catheter market alone is estimated to cap a compound annual growth rate of 13 percent. Upcoming steerable diagnostic EP catheters equipped with mapping technology will also add to higher price tags compared to non-mapping catheters. And anticoagulant drug development is projected to continue to rise exponentially.

As we all strategize about competitive advantages, it seems that AF expertise can play a key role.  An audit of recent advertising campaigns shows many hospitals focusing on AF.

For example, the University of Kansas Hospital has implemented Yoga My Heart, a clinical trial aimed at discovering whether yoga is a potential treatment for abnormal heart rhythms. This study has been a focus of both print and broadcast advertising

I think this is a great example of integrating innovative service line programming into cardiovascular marketing content.  Do you have other examples to share?

There’s No Sugarcoating this Cardiovascular News

A new study shows that too much sugar dramatically increases heart disease risk factors.

It’s hardly earth shattering to learn that too much sugar can make people sick.  However, a new study by researchers at Emory University and the CDC is described as the first of its kind to examine the link between the consumption of added sugars and lipid measures, such as HDL-C, triglycerides and LDL-C.

Co-author Dr. Miriam Vos, who is assistant professor of pediatrics at Emory School of Medicine, told the press that:

“Just like eating a high-fat diet can increase your levels of triglycerides and high cholesterol, eating sugar can also affect those same lipids.”

For the study, Vos and colleagues looked for links between added sugar consumption, blood fat levels and cardiovascular risk factors in data on 6,113 adults who took part in the 1999 to 2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).

They did not look at natural sugars found in fruit and fruit juices, only added sugars and caloric sweeteners.

Highlights from the study showed:

•         People who received at least 25 percent of their daily calories from any type of sweetener had more than triple the normal risk of having low HDL levels than those who consumed less than five percent of their calories from sweeteners.

•         Beyond that, those whose sugar intake made up 17.5 percent or more of daily calories were 20 to 30 percent more likely to have high triglycerides.

•         The links between sweets and blood fats were independent of the fat and cholesterol provided in high-fat foods and other risk factors for heart disease.

Overall, they concluded that Americans consume an average of 21.4 teaspoons of added sugars daily – about 16 percent of total calories.

For more specifics, click here.

Does Physician Involvement in Social Media Pose a Threat to Cardiovascular Marketing?

Physicians’ online activity is on the rise.

• In a recent study by Google, 86% of U.S. physicians said they use the Internet to gather health, medical or prescription drug information.
• They’ve joined the social networking revolution too. According to a survey by Mediamix International, 34% of physicians now use social media.

For the most part, I’m excited by these statistics.   Most of the heart and vascular marketers I know have been trying to encourage physician involvement in online activities for a long time.

But is there a downside?

I’ve been hearing a few horror stories lately.

• A marketing director friend recently told me about a patient who appeared at a cardiologist’s office without an appointment.  When the office staff politely told him that he must have his dates mixed up, the patient said, “Oh no, I’m supposed to be here.  I’ve been chatting with Dr. Jones on Facebook, and he told me to stop by.”
• Cases of doctors being sued for giving online advice in venues such as Facebook are also starting to surface.

Should these fears discourage marketers from involving physicians in social media efforts?

I hope not.

Physician and staff involvement adds credibility and knowledge that is hard to find in other sources. Online physician discussions offer amazing opportunities for both patient acquisition and retention.

But, it’s important to use common sense.

American Medical News recently published a post by Arthur R. Derse, MD, on this subject in its ethics forum.

I plan to share this with some of our clients as we plan for future campaigns.   I think it offers some great reminders that communications must be HIPAA compliant and that they should avoid giving specific advice to individual patients.

As Dr. Derse says, the bottom line is that online physician involvement in social networks should begin with the tweetable Hippocratic aphorism, “First, do no harm.”