How Laughter Can Help People With Diabetes Avoid Heart Disease

A good laugh does wonders for defusing stress and slashing heart disease risk.

By Beth Howard
From Reader's Digest
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Keep your heart happy by turning on a comedy.
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Diabetes drastically raises your risk of heart disease, but you may be able to laugh off some of the danger.

Researchers prescribed a daily "dose" of humor -- 30 minutes of a favorite sitcom or video -- to diabetes patients, along with standard medication. Other diabetics got the medical treatment but not the shot of fun. Blood tests taken before and after the study showed that patients who tickled their funny bones lowered their heart risk substantially: They had about a 26 percent increase in HDL ("good" cholesterol), compared with a bump of just 3 percent among patients in the control group. And levels of C-reactive protein, a marker for heart-harming inflammation, dropped by 66 percent, compared with a 26 percent decrease in the other patients. "Stress can be deadly," says study coauthor Lee Berk, DrPH, at Loma Linda University in California. "And laughter suppresses stress hormones -- it really is the best medicine."

See 79 Instant Stress-Busters

From Reader's Digest - July 2009
 
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