A Chat with Dr. Devi Shetty (Heart Specialist) - Very Useful!

A chat with Dr.Devi Shetty, Narayana Hrudayalaya
(Heart Specialist) Bangalore was arranged by WIPRO for its employees .
The transcript of the chat is given below. Useful for everyone.


Qn: What are the thumb rules for a layman to take care of his heart?

Ans:
1. Diet - Less of carbohydrate, more of protein, less oil
2. Exercise - Half an hour's walk, at least five days a week; avoid lifts and avoid sitting for a longtime
3. Quit smoking
4. Control weight
5. Control blood pressure and sugar

Qn: Is eating non-veg food (fish) good for the heart?

Ans: No

Qn: It's still a grave shock to hear that some apparently healthy person
gets a cardiac arrest. How do we understand it in perspective?

Ans: This is called silent attack; that is why we recommend everyone past the age of 30 to undergo routine health checkups.

Qn: Are heart diseases hereditary?

Ans: Yes

Qn: What are the ways in which the heart is stressed? What practices do you suggest to de-stress?

Ans: Change your attitude towards life. Do not look for perfection in everything in life.

Qn: Is walking better than jogging or is more intensive exercise required to keep a healthy heart?

Ans: Walking is better than jogging since jogging leads to early fatigue and injury to joints

Qn: You have done so much for the poor and needy. What has inspired you to do so?

Ans: Mother Theresa , who was my patient

Qn: Can people with low blood pressure suffer heart diseases?

Ans: Extremely rare

Qn: Does cholesterol accumulates right from an early age
(I'm currently only 22) or do you have to worry about it only after you are above 30 years of age?

Ans: Cholesterol accumulates from childhood.

Qn: How do irregular eating habits affect the heart ?

Ans: You tend to eat junk food when the habits are irregular and your body's enzyme release for digestion gets confused.

Qn: How can I control cholesterol content without using medicines?

Ans: Control diet, walk and eat walnut.

Qn: Can yoga prevent heart ailments?

Ans: Yoga helps.

Qn: Which is the best and worst food for the heart?

Ans: Fruits and vegetables are the best and the worst is oil.

Qn: Which oil is better - groundnut, sunflower, olive?

Ans: All oils are bad .

Qn: What is the routine checkup one should go through? Is there any specific test?

Ans: Routine blood test to ensure sugar, cholesterol is ok. Check BP, Treadmill test after an echo.

Qn: What are the first aid steps to be taken on a heart attack?

Ans: Help the person into a sleeping position , place an aspirin tablet under the tongue with a sorbitrate tablet if available, and rush him to a coronary care unit since the maximum casualty takes place within the first hour.

Qn: How do you differentiate between pain caused by a heart attack and that caused due to gastric trouble?

Ans: Extremely difficult without ECG.

Qn: What is the main cause of a steep increase in heart problems amongst youngsters? I see people of about 30-40 yrs of age having heart attacks and serious heart problems.

Ans: Increased awareness has increased incidents. Also, s edentary lifestyles, smoking, junk food, lack of exercise in a country where people are genetically three times more vulnerable for heart attacks than Europeans and Americans.

Qn: Is it possible for a person to have BP outside the normal range of 120/80 and yet be perfectly healthy?

Ans: Yes.

Qn: Marriages within close relatives can lead to heart problems for the child. Is it true?

Ans : Yes, co-sanguinity leads to congenital abnormalities and you may not have a software engineer as a child

Qn: Many of us have an irregular daily routine and many a times we have to stay late nights in office. Does this affect our heart ? What precautions would you recommend?

Ans : When you are young, nature protects you against all these irregularities. However, as you grow older, respect the biological clock.

Qn: Will taking anti-hypertensive drugs cause some other complications (short / long term)?

Ans : Yes, most drugs have some side effects. However, modern anti-hypertensive drugs are extremely safe.

Qn: Will consuming more coffee/tea lead to heart attacks?

Ans : No.

Qn: Are asthma patients more prone to heart disease?

Ans : No.

Qn: How would you define junk food?

Ans : Fried food like Kentucky , McDonalds , samosas, and even masala dosas.

Qn: You mentioned that Indians are three times more vulnerable. What is the reason for this, as Europeans and Americans also eat a lot of junk food?

Ans: Every race is vulnerable to some disease and unfortunately, Indians are vulnerable for the most expensive disease.

Qn: Does consuming bananas help reduce hypertension?

Ans : No.

Qn: Can a person help himself during a heart attack (Because we see a lot of forwarded emails on this)?

Ans : Yes. Lie down comfortably and put an aspirin tablet of any description under the tongue and ask someone to take you to the nearest coronary care unit without any delay and do not wait for the ambulance since most of the time, the ambulance does not turn up.

Qn: Do, in any way, low white blood cells and low hemoglobin count lead to heart problems?

Ans : No. But it is ideal to have normal hemoglobin level to increase your exercise capacity.

Qn: Sometimes, due to the hectic schedule we are not able to exercise. So, does walking while doing daily chores at home or climbing the stairs in the house, work as a substitute for exercise?

Ans : Certainly. Avoid sitting continuously for more than half an hour and even the act of getting out of the chair and going to another chair and sitting helps a lot.

Qn: Is there a relation between heart problems and blood sugar?

Ans: Yes. A strong relationship since diabetics are more vulnerable to heart attacks than non-diabetics.

Qn: What are the things one needs to take care of after a heart operation?

Ans : Diet, exercise, drugs on time , Control cholesterol, BP, weight.

Qn: Are people working on night shifts more vulnerable to heart disease when compared to day shift workers?

Ans : No.

Qn: What are the modern anti-hypertensive drugs?

Ans : There are hundreds of drugs and your doctor will chose the right combination for your problem, but my suggestion is to avoid the drugs and go for natural ways of controlling blood pressure by walk, diet to
reduce weight and changing attitudes towards lifestyles.

Qn: Does dispirin or similar headache pills increase the risk of heart attacks?

Ans : No.

Qn: Why is the rate of heart attacks more in men than in women?

Ans : Nature protects women till the age of 45.

Qn: How can one keep the heart in a good condition?

Ans : Eat a healthy diet, avoid junk food, exercise everyday, do not smoke and, go for health checkup s if you are past the age of 30 ( once in six months recommended) ....

Google searches to find alternative to coal

Googlecommitted hundreds of millions of dollars to renewable energy projects on Tuesday.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google co-founders, announced its RE<C initiative to produce electricity from renewable energy sources rather than coal.

Mr Page said: "Our goal is to produce one gigawatt of renewable energy capacity [enough to power San Francisco] that is cheaper than coal. We are optimistic this can be done in years, not decades."

If Google achieved this, he said, the world would have the option of significantly reducing the greenhouse gases created by burning coal, a fuel used for 40 per cent of electricity supply at present.

The internet company said it expected to spend tens of millions of dollars in 2008 on research and development and related investments. It also anticipated investing hundreds of millions of dollars in breakthrough renewable energy projects that generate positive returns.

The Google founders were asked, during a conference call with reporters, if they were straying from their core mission.

Mr Brin said energy was already critical to Google's operations, referring to the energy-hungry data centres built by the company.

Google said it expected a pay-off of hundred of millions of dollars in the near-term.

This could be realised in energy savings and licensing of the technology that is developed. Google's move reflects growing interest in renewables in Silicon Valley. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, one of the venture capital companies behind the dotcom boom, formed a partnership with Al Gore's fund management business this month to target low-carbon energy.

More than $4bn (£1.9bn, €2.7bn) of venture capital was invested last year in environmental technologies such as renewable energy, water technologies and carbon reduction technologies.

The sector is now the biggest recipient of venture capital funds in the US.

Can Hotmail co-founder take Office online?

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/15494/1103/

Sabeer Bhatia, famous for co-founding Hotmail and then selling it Hotmail to Microsoft for US $400 million in 1997, has just announced that his new company, InstaColl, is releasing “Live Documents”, an online Office service that sounds similar to Microsoft’s own ‘Live’ services, and has logos that look impossibly similar to Microsoft’s own Office logos.

Whether the name and logos will raise the ire of Microsoft’s lawyers is, at this point, still unknown, although we can be pretty sure that if Microsoft doesn’t like it, we’ll hear about it pretty quickly.

Unfortunately, despite sounding quite impressive, the service isn’t actually live as yet, offering only an invitation program to sign up to a pre-release beta service, after which you’ll receive the message: “Thank you for signing up! We will contact you with an account activation mail once your account has been provisioned for”. That said, general availability is promised ‘soon’.

So, what does Live Documents offer?

According to their website, Live Documents is “how all Office applications will look like one day - a platform that marries the strengths of the desktop and the web into a synchronized solution that leverages the best of both worlds”. The document types to be supported at first are the triumvirate of a Word, Excel and PowerPoint clone.

Live Documents promises to let you access your documents on the web or on the desktop, and view and edit your documents from anywhere at any time in your browser in a rich user interface that provides the functionality and responsiveness that you expect in your familiar desktop applications.
It also promises to let you use “your existing desktop Office application (Microsoft Office currently and Open Office promised soon) as a smart client that permits offline access to your document - the next time you go online, Live Documents automatically synchronizes all changes to ensure that there is a single version of the truth”.

Bhatia is hoping to repeat his success with Hotmail a decade later, and says that: “Live Documents offers a unique perspective on Office productivity and collaboration that merges the best of two worlds - the richness and familiarity of desktop software with the collaborative capabilities of the web. It provides a reliable bridge between the online and offline worlds that consumers and businesses can count on”.

So, can Bhatia's creation break the Microsoft Office hegemony and become the next online hit? Please read onto page 2 for the conclusion...

Satyam game for cricket

After football, Hyderabad-based IT major Satyam Computer Services, is eyeing Indian cricket and American soccer to augment its revenues. As part of its effort to focus on sports segment, the company is all set to leverage on its partnership with the Fidiration Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and has signed up as an official sponsor and information technology services provider for the next two editions of the FIFA Worldcup in 2010 and 2014. The new strategy is expected to establish Satyam as a global brand on the similar lines of Accenture and IBM.

"Sports is one of our growing sub vertical under the media and entertainment segment. Along with other emerging verticals, including energy & utilities, retail, transport & logistics, it contributes about 12% of the company’s revenues. Considering the huge business potential in the sports segment, we expect it to emerge as a separate vertical in the future,” said Dr Keshab Panda, senior V-P & director (energy & utilities), Europe, Satyam Computer Services.

>The company has also set up a team of about 10 people from various sports fields to focus on developing new technology solutions for different games. "These domain experts will help us tap new business opportunities. Some of the IPs developed for football are generic and can be extended to other games as well. This will help us enter other markets including the US and India,” said Dr Panda.

According to Hari Thalapalli, head (global marketing & communication), Satyam, the new multi-million dollar deal for sponsorship will help enhance the company’s brand visibility abroad. ``As football is the most popular game in Europe and Latin America, an increased brand appeal will in turn lead to new businesses in other segments such as manufacturing. Besides, it will also help grab new opportunities in the sports segment in these markets,” he said.

Dr Panda estimates that business opportunity in the sports segment to be about $1 trillion, of which Europe accounts for about $400 billion. ``Our aim is to tap the opportunities in the IT area and it is estimated that IT spend in the sports segment in Europe is about $40 billion and it is growing at about 7% per annum. As we are targeting 42% Y-o-Y growth, sports could play a major revenue earning segment,” he said.

In fact, Satyam had signed two multi-million contracts with FIFA in July this year for developing event management and logistics solution for the Worldcup 2010 and building an extranet and intranet for the association in a year. With the new deal, the company has taken its partnership to the new level and has has extended its software support to the Worldcup in 2014 to be held in Brazil as well.

As the official IT services provider to the 2010 and 2014 FIFA Worldcups, Satyam will play a crucial role in developing the core IT event management system for FIFA and its service partner for IT, accommodation and hospitality - MATCH AG, as well as local organizing committees during the next seven years. Satyam serves over 570 clients worldwide and has development and delivery centers in the US, Canada, Brazil, the UK, Hungary, Egypt, UAE, India, China, Malaysia, Singapore, and Australia. The company is also looking at consolidating its presence in South Africa. Next fiscal, the company is planning open offices in Ghana and Kenya.

The top global technology brand for 2007

The top global technology brand for 2007 is (drum roll, please) ... um, I'm not sure. One market research firm says Google, the other says Microsoft. This is embarrassing.

How about this: you're the tie-breaker. You're all buyers of technology products and services; which do you think is the better brand? Which one commands your loyalty and recurring business? I hear so much admiration for Google and so much vitriol toward Microsoft, it's hard to believe there's even a question here. But still, the question remains. Which one is it going to be?

Bragging rights aside, you can learn a lot from these reports. Trends are important to understand. Trends are the leading edge of change. Brand trends point to changes in consumer and corporate buying behavior.

Although the research firms had completely different criteria and methods, eight companies--Cisco Systems, Google, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Nokia, and Oracle--made the top 10 on both lists. Samsung Electronics and Sony rounded out Interbrand's top ten, while Apple and SAP adorned Millward Brown's.

Both reports cited Google and Apple as tech firms gaining the most ground. The reasons for that should be obvious to all.

Intel and Dell, on the other hand, were both seen heading in the wrong direction. Dell's decline reflects market-share losses to rivals HP and Apple, as well as a well-publicized accounting scandal and abrupt management change. As for Intel, we've definitely seen chinks in the chip giant's once-impenetrable competitive armor. Archrival AMD has gained market-share and Intel's Viiv entertainment PC brand failed to excite consumers.

Also notable was a slight reversal of Sony's multiyear brand plunge, although both reports show Samsung is now ahead of its Japanese rival.

The most revealing change, however, is all about Google. Whether you believe the Internet search advertising giant belongs in the No. 1 spot or not, just a few short years ago that name wasn't on anyone's list, long or short.

The technology world changes fast. When we see obvious signs that rapid change is afoot, it's a good idea to pay attention. I don't think any of us needed a report to tell us about this one. But it does make you wonder what name we might see in the 2010 brand report.