All Heart health Articles

Music can help ease recovery from a cardiac procedure, heart attack or stroke, relieve stress and maybe lower blood pressure a bit, a U.S. newsletter says. The November issue of the Harvard Heart Letter says researchers have found that listening to music can lower blood pressure, slow the heart rate and lessen anxiety in people hospitalized for heart ailments. "Music can ease pain Read more...

EDMONTON -- The gender difference between men and women is a lot smaller than we've been led to believe when it comes to heart attack symptoms, according to a new study presented to the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2009, co-hosted by the Heart and Stroke Foundation and the Canadian Cardiovascular Society. "Both the media and some patient educational materials frequently suggest that Read more...

NEW YORK -- It seemed like a great idea -- doing bypass surgery while the heart is still beating, sparing patients the complications that can come from going on a heart-lung machine. Now the first big test of this method has produced a surprise: Bypass has fewer problems and is more successful done the old way. Most surprisingly, there were no signs of mental decline in those on the machines. Read more...

A Swedish doctor says everyone can do something to help prevent stroke risk, including learning to recognize symptoms and how to take action. Dr. Lars Ryden of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, speaking on behalf of the European Society of Cardiology, says there are many opportunities to reduce the incidence and mortality rate of stroke. Stroke is not an inevitable consequence of aging, Read more...

Scientists at the Medical College of Wisconsin will conduct experiments involving reprogramming of stem cells in pursuit of a new frontier in heart therapy thanks to a five-year, $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health. The work will attempt to develop a tool doctors have never before possessed: the ability to replace damaged heart tissue. Up to now, researchers have been Read more...

EDMONTON -- When it comes to heart disease, lifestyle usually trumps genetics, says noted genetic researcher Dr. Robert Hegele, Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada Lecturer at the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress 2009. Dr. Hegele's work is unraveling the nature vs. nurture debate that has intrigued scientists for years. He says that for about 5 percent of patients, the effect of genetics is Read more...

CHICAGO -- Most hospitalized heart failure patients are sent home without widely recommended inexpensive pills, despite a program to get more doctors to follow treatment guidelines, a study suggests. Only one-third of 12,565 patients eligible for the drugs got them -- even though they were treated at 201 hospitals that had voluntarily enrolled in the American Heart Association's Get with the Read more...

Warfarin, one of the most inconvenient, dangerous, and disliked drugs in the world, has remained vitally important for more than 50 years. That tells you how much difficulty scientists have had coming up with safer, easier pills to do what warfarin does -- fight life-threatening blood clots. Now, at long last, better oral blood thinners are on the horizon. In July, the Food and Drug Read more...

Whether someone can reach his or her toes from a sitting position on the floor may be an indicator of heart risk, U.S. and Japanese researchers said. Among people age 40 and older, performance on the sit-and-reach test could be used to assess the flexibility of the arteries. Arterial stiffness often precedes cardiovascular disease and the results suggest that this simple test could become a Read more...

Dark and bitter or milky and sweet ... there's nothing quite like chocolate to make a bad day better. Luckily there are loads of reasons to enjoy the stuff, especially as this is National Chocolate Week. Swedish scientists say people eating chocolate after a heart attack may be less likely to have another one. And the fact that chocolate boosts brain power and lifts depression can Read more...

WASHINGTON -- Scientists have grown a piece of heart muscle -- and then watched it beat -- by using stem cells from a mouse embryo, a big step toward one day repairing damage from heart attacks. Think of Dr. Kenneth Chien as a heart mechanic. "We're making a heart part and (eventually) we're going to put the part in," is how he describes the work by his team of Harvard and Read more...

Divorce could give you more than a broken heart -- it could also give you a heart attack. The finding emerges in one of a number of pieces of research which remind us that emotional and mental states can have a dramatic effect on health. The study suggests that the effects of divorce on physical health are significant, negative and long lasting. Another study found that the pain Read more...

An inexpensive combination of a cholesterol-lowering drug and one to reduce blood pressure can reduce the incidence of heart attacks and strokes by as much as 60 percent, but prompting patients to begin the regimen and then to stay on it is an extremely difficult task, researchers say. Giving the drugs to nearly 70,000 people with cardiovascular disease or diabetes prevented an estimated Read more...

Data do not support the suggestion that taking B-vitamin supplements prevents heart disease, researchers in Venezuela say. Lead researcher Arturo Marti-Carvajal of the Iberoamerican Cochrane Network in Valencia, Venezuela, says it has been suggested that giving B-vitamin supplements could help regulate levels of homocysteine, thereby reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease and death. Read more...

A common, over-the-counter pain cream rubbed on the skin during a heart attack may prevent or reduce heart damage, U.S. researchers said. Keith Jones, a researcher in the department of pharmacology and cell biophysics at the University of Cincinnati, and scientists in his lab found applying capsaicin to specific skin locations in mice caused sensory nerves in the skin to trigger signals in Read more...

A meta-analysis found banning smoking in public places can reduce heart attack hospitalizations by up to 36 percent over time, U.S. researchers say. James Lightwood of the University of California in San Francisco and Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the university's School of Medicine, pooled 13 studies from North America, Italy, Scotland Read more...

Diabetes increases the likelihood that women will develop an abnormal heart rhythm that can lead to stroke or heart failure, according to a Portland-based Kaiser Permanente researcher. Diabetes increases the likelihood that women will develop atrial fibrillation by 26 percent, said Greg Nichols, lead author of a study published in the October issue of Diabetes Care. Nichols is an Read more...

Red alert: It's time to wear your heart on your sleeve, or your skirt, your pants, your dress, your tee-shirt, your lapel... Friday, February 6th, marks the sixth annual Wear Red Day. It's all part of The Heart Truth, a national awareness campaign designed to alert women about their risk of heart disease and motivate them to take action. Beyond symbolizing the heart, red is a color that Read more...

NEW YORK -- Score another victory for the cheap, cholesterol-lowering wonder drugs known as statins. People getting an artery unclogged or repaired were much less likely to die or have a heart attack afterward if they took preventive doses of the pills before and after their operations, a Dutch study showed. Patients given Lescol had half the risk of having a heart attack or dying of a heart Read more...