Found people with the healthiest blood vessels
A team of scientists from Bolivia, Peru, Egypt and the USA found out that people from the Tsimane tribe living in the jungles of Bolivia have the healthiest vessels among all peoples in old age.
Photo from the page of The Tsimane Health and Life History Project – VM
According to According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death worldwide. About 18 million people die from them every year. Scientists decided to test the impact of people's lifestyle (in an industrial or pre-industrial society) on the health of their blood vessels. The indigenous South American Tsimane people living in Bolivia and engaged mainly in hunting, farming and gathering were chosen as the object of the study.
For the study, scientists selected 705 people over 40 years of age from the Tsimane tribe. Computed tomography showed that 85% of the subjects (596 people) there are no risk factors associated with heart and vascular diseases. 89 people had a low risk and only 20 people (3% of the total) had a moderate or high risk of exposure to these diseases. These results were typical even for very elderly people: two-thirds of the subjects (over 75 years old) had virtually no risk factors, and only 8% had a moderate or high risk of developing atherosclerosis or having a heart attack.
The researchers compared these results with previously published data from multiethnic studies in high-income countries, including the US Multiethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), German Heinz-Nixdorf Recall (HNR) and 11 other studies.
According to scientists, the results obtained for the Tsimane people are the lowest recorded levels of vascular aging among all populations known to date.
For comparison, according to the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis, out of 6814 people aged 45 to 84 years, only 14% had no risk factors for heart disease, and half of the surveyed had moderate or high risk.
In addition, the Tsimane people, even in old age, maintained other important indicators: heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol and blood glucose levels. The researchers were surprised by the high level of C-reactive protein in more than half (51%) of the studied representatives of tsimane. It is known that the level of this protein increases with general inflammation in the body, which is usually associated with an increased risk of heart disease. There was no such connection among the Tsimane people. Scientists explained this by the fact that inflammation in people of this tribe is most likely associated with some infections, of which there are many in the Bolivian jungle, and not with vascular diseases.
According to the researchers, lifestyle and eating habits became the decisive factor affecting vascular health. The people of the Tsimane tribe spend a lot of time in active movement and eat foods with a high fiber content: rice, cassava, corn, nuts and fruits. In addition, the habit of smoking is rare among representatives of this people.
The study is published in The Lancet (Kaplan et al., Coronary atherosclerosis in indigenous South American Tsimane: a cross-sectional cohort study).
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20.03.2017