Heart Disease News and Research

Latest Heart Disease News and Research

Experts call for more resources worldwide to deal with mental illness

Experts in Britain are calling for better recognition of the impact of mental illness on other health problems and for more resources worldwide to deal with mental health issues.

5 Sep 2007

Secondhand smoke affects pets too

The threat of secondhand smoke to the health of non-smokers has been known for years but now researchers say pets can also suffer from the effects of secondhand smoke.

5 Sep 2007

Blood pressure pill offers diabetics a longer life

A team of Australian researchers say a once-a-day pill to lower blood pressure should be given routinely to people with diabetes to prevent heart disease, strokes and other medical complications.

5 Sep 2007

New blood pressure drug Tekturna benefits heart failure patients too

A new blood pressure drug called Tekturna made by Novartis has been found to benefit heart failure patients also.

4 Sep 2007

Patients with depression may not recover their heart rate variability following heart attack

Patients with depression appear to have an impaired ability to recover their heart rate variability following acute coronary syndromes such as heart attack, a factor that could increase their risk of coronary death, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

4 Sep 2007

Hamburg to become Europe's hub of drug discovery

Hamburg is on its way to becoming a leading hub of Europe's academic drug discovery, with the northern German city's town hall today announcing the foundation of European ScreeningPort GmbH, a company that will run a state-of-the-art drug discovery service centre.

4 Sep 2007

Low salt foods just as safe as conventionally processed ones

Low salt foods are just as safe or safer than high salt level products in spite of expectations that cutting salt levels in food would increase the risk of spoilage by bacteria, say scientists today (Tuesday 4 September 2007) at the Society for General Microbiology¡¦s 161st Meeting at the University of Edinburgh, UK, which runs from 3-6 September 2007.

4 Sep 2007

Drug eluting stents should be used with caution in acute myocardial infarction

Drug-eluting stents are extremely effective devices to prevent restenosis following angioplasty. Yet, since last year, there is some debate and persistent uncertainty regarding the long term safety of these devices. Specifically, there is concern that some of these stents may occlude abruptly more than 1 year after placement, due to "late stent thrombosis".

3 Sep 2007

Gender (dis)advantages in cardiac remodeling

The topic of gender-related differences in cardiac care is an extremely complex one. Unfortunately women have been neglected in several fields of medicine for too long. I think that cardiology is only one of the many fields in the past where the male predominance was obvious.

3 Sep 2007

Imaging is everything: What the clinician needs to know

In recent years, the concept of multimodality imaging has emerged coincident with advances in the newer technologies of Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (CMR) and Coronary Computed Tomography (CCT).

3 Sep 2007

Imaging and percutaneous valve therapy

The scope of percutaneous cardiac therapy has expanded from percutaneous coronary and peripheral intervention to percutaneous valve intervention, first used in the mid- eighties. Today mitral regurgitation represents the second most important native valve disease in Europe (30%) as shown by the Euro Heart Survey.

3 Sep 2007

Fat: An active player in the regulation of many processes in health and disease

Why should we be interested in doing obesity-related research? Emphasis is put on this type of research simply because of the fact that the epidemiological data and predictions are alarming. Worldwide it is estimated that one person in every eight is overweight and more than 300 millions are obese

3 Sep 2007

Take the stairs messages in shopping malls work

What would it take to get you to use the stairs instead of the escalator at your local mall? A team of British researchers has found that healthy messages printed on stair risers attract climbers and might even encourage them to descend the stairs later.

3 Sep 2007

Secondhand smoke and pets

It has been in the news for years about how secondhand smoke is a health threat to nonsmokers. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that secondhand smoke is attributed with killing thousands of adult nonsmokers annually.

3 Sep 2007

Red wine for prostate cancer

Researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have found that nutrients in red wine may help reduce the risk of developing prostate cancer. The study involved male mice that were fed a plant compound found in red wine called resveratrol, which has shown anti-oxidant and anti-cancer properties.

3 Sep 2007

Lowering homocysteine with B-vitamins does not reduce cardiovascular risk

Secondary prevention with homocysteine-lowering B-vitamins does not reduce risk of death or major cardiovascular events, according to the WENBIT study.

3 Sep 2007

OPTIMIST: The Outcome of PCI for stent-ThrombosIs MultIcentre STudy

Stent thrombosis is a recognized complication occurring in 1-2% of patients with coronary artery disease treated by percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with stent implantation. Its occurrence is expected to increase with the number of stent implantation procedures done worldwide. Moreover, stent thrombosis is a hot topic in the cardiology community.

3 Sep 2007

getABI study finds that even mild atherosclerosis in the legs increases mortality substantially

Patients with atherosclerosis in the leg arteries face a substantially increased all-cause and cardiovascular mortality risk, according to a large study presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Vienna.

3 Sep 2007

New ESC-ESH guidelines on arterial hypertension

In 2000, 26% (972million) of the adult population worldwide had hypertension and this figure is estimated to rise by 2025 to 1.56billion.

3 Sep 2007

How to influence the risk profile of a nation

Professor Geoffrey Rose was a pioneer in the field of prevention of coronary heart disease (CHD). He emphasized in his works how CHD prevention calls for general reduction in risk factor levels in the population, i.e. population based approach. Geoffrey Rose wrote: "It makes little sense to expect individuals to behave differently form their peers, it is more appropriate to seek a general change in behavioural norms and in the circumstances which facilitate their adoption."

3 Sep 2007