Health & Beauty

A new study from the online journal Heart suggests a link between the tendency to become easily stressed in adolescents and a heightened risk of developing high blood pressure in later life.

The research looked at more than 1.5 million 18-year-old men with normal blood pressure, who had been conscripted to the army in Sweden between 1969 and 1997 until the end of 2012 and were assessed for their levels of stress resilience.

At the end of the study, those who were more prone to stress a at the age of 18 were associated with a heightened risk of high blood pressure.

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A 26-year-old engineer from Newton Abbot has lost eight stone after her doctor warned her she was 'a heart attack waiting to happen'.

Rachel Coppen, whose weight loss journey started in March 2014, has dropped from a dress size 28 to a size 12 from XXXL to a small.

Rachel said: “I had known for a long time that I needed to lose a serious amount of weight, but it never seemed to be a real priority for me. I was always playing the ‘Happy Fat Girl’ and making jokes about myself to try and deflect the looks and whispered comments.

“In February 2014, I had been engaged...

Asthma UK is urging people with asthma to be vigilant in winter as data shows the number of people who die because of an asthma attack peaks in January and remains high in February and March. Data from the Office for National Statistics highlights that asthma is the cause of proportionately more excess winter deaths than other conditions and respiratory diseases were the underlying cause of death in more than a third of all excess winter deaths in 2014/15. It’s thought that cold weather and viruses like cold and flu may be partly to blame; 90% of people with asthma report that cold and flu...

Over half of people in the South West have someone in their family with risk factors that put them greater risk of heart disease, according to new statistics released ahead of the British Heart Foundation’s (BHF) Wear it. Beat it. campaign to get the nation wearing red to fight heart disease on Friday 5th February.

The BHF poll revealed over half of people in the South West (53%) fear that a loved one could be struck down with a potentially life-threatening heart attack or stroke in the future. Over two fifths (41%) have already lost someone or know a loved one affected by heart...