I found this to be interesting as I know family members with just such a crease and indeed they have heart problems, therefore if you find you have the dreaded earlobe crease it may be time to seriously rethink your diet and life style to try to avoid a possible later on heath problem.
If you have a crease in your earlobe, one very concerned scientist wants you to learn more about your risk of heart disease.
University of Chicago researcher Dr William J. Elliott on Friday will present new evidence that appears to link people`s earlobes to their chances of dying from heart attacks.
Elliott first ignited controversy in 1984, when he reported a link between earlobe creases and coronary artery disease. Now, after eight years of observing 108 carefully matched patients, he has found that people with a diagonal crease in at least one earlobe were significantly more likely to die from heart disease than those without a crease.
These include hypertension, diabetes, smoking, obesity, high serum cholesterol and a family history of heart disease.
A researcher urged physicians to look for earlobe creases-particularly diagonal creases that start where the ear attaches to the head and angle down toward the edge of the earlobe as risk factors for heart disease.
His warning was by and large ignored, he said. Anecdotal evidence has linked earlobe creases and heart disease since at least 1958, but the topic remains highly controversial.
Doctors suspect that creases are merely a phenomenon of ageing. Women who wear heavy earrings may develop creased earlobes. Merely sleeping on an ear can cause a crease.
In the new study, to be presented Friday in Seattle at the annual meeting of the American Federation for Clinical Research, Elliott tried to test the earlobe hypothesis with greater precision and to remove age as a variable.
He divided his study into 27 sets of 4 patients each who had been admitted under his care in St. Louis. Each patient-set had four people of the same age, sex and race, and known risk factors were distributed evenly across the groups. Ages ranged from 54 to 72.
Half the patients had creases, half did not. Half had coronary artery disease, while the rest showed no evidence of it. One person in each group had both an earlobe crease and established heart disease.
Another had heart disease but no crease. A third had a crease but no disease. And the fourth had neither.
Elliott followed the 108 patients for eight years, periodically phoning their families to see how things were going.
By the study`s conclusion, 54 of the 108 patients had died, including 34 of the 54 patients with earlobe creases.
Only 20 people without creases had died.
The most startling finding was that patients with coronary artery disease and an earlobe crease were almost three times as likely to experience a
cardiac event-sudden death, a non-fatal heart attack or emergency bypass surgery as those with established heart disease but no earlobe crease. And those patients with a crease, but without coronary artery disease, were nearly eight times as likely to experience a cardiac event as those who had neither a crease nor diagnosed disease, Elliott said.
He hastened to point out that the subjects in his study were not representative of the general population. Only hospital patients were involved, many of them elderly.
Unlike his patients, heart disease does not afflict one out of every two Americans. And no one knows how many people have ear creases.
Elliott speculates that anatomical similarities between the blood vessels that supply the earlobes and the heart may enable the former to reflect the health of the latter.
Worth a check anyway.
All the above information was on the public domain.