Heart Disease

Heart disease

Click Date to read brief description	Click Short Title to read column
05/15/06	Carotid Stents Get Better, But Proof They Work is Scant
10/05/04	Diabetes and heart Disease are Closely Linked
09/21/04	Pump Head - a Possible Outcome of Coronary Bypass Surgery
08/24/04	Cinnamon Joins Cholesterol Battle
03/11/03	Blood Pressure Drugs - Confusing but Crucial
12/31/02	Our Columnist Goes Under the Knife
12/17/02	New Fixes for Electrical Problems in the Heart
11/19/02	A New Heart Disease Test That Could Save Your Life
05/07/02	Coated Stents Show Huge Promise
11/21/00	Ties That Bind Help Stroke Patients
09/13/99	Plaque can gum up the works in legs
07/19/99	Picturing heart disease another way
02/08/99	Stress of surgery hard on the heart
05/25/98	Endoscopy emerges as safer way to gather grafts for bypasses
06/24/96	The other heart attack risks - Anger, grief, fear
04/22/96	Loneliness can be the death of us

Stents, long famous for their success in propping open clogged arteries in the heart, are now being used in neck arteries in an effort to reduce strokes. Technical advances have made the stents safer to insert in neck arteries, and some experts now fear that doctors may adopt the procedure — and patients may clamor for it — before there is sufficient research to support it.

More than 30 years ago, when Dr. David Heber was an intern at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he asked the senior doctors the same question over and over. "How come all my patients have high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes? Are these things linked?" His mentors would shrug and say, "Dave, common things occur commonly. Go back to work," he said.

When Bill Clinton, 58, underwent quadruple coronary bypass surgery on Labor Day, the former president, like most Americans who have similar operations, spent time – in his case, 73 minutes - hooked up to a heart-lung machine while surgeons re-routed blood vessels to his heart. With luck and his relative youth and health going for him, Clinton will hopefully rebound fit in both heart and mind from the bypass surgery, in which doctors replace clogged arteries to the heart with veins and arteries taken from elsewhere in the body.

A common spice already enjoyed by many Americans appears to lower blood sugar and cholesterol, a potential boon to millions of people with diabetes and millions of others with high cholesterol. The spice is cinnamon. In a paper published in December in Diabetes Care, researchers from the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center in Maryland, part of the US Department of Agriculture, reported on a small, but encouraging study of 60 people with Type 2 diabetes in Pakistan.

In December, a study of more than 42,000 white and black Americans found that old-fashioned, cheap diuretics – “water pills” – work at least as well and sometimes better than more expensive drugs to treat high blood pressure and certain heart problems. The study, dubbed ALLHAT, was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association

I was very scared, shivering as much from fear as from the chilly room temperature. I was waiting on a gurney at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to be wheeled in for a catheter ablation, an invasive cardiac "procedure." (Ah, the euphemisms.) In a totally bizarre twist of fate, I had several weeks earlier interviewed Dr. Laurence Epstein, chief of the cardiac arrhythmia service, in preparation for a column I was working on about new treatments for arrhythmias.

Until last winter, Joseph Moniz, 50, a Fall River man with congestive heart failure was waiting, like 4,000 other Americans, for a heart transplant to save his life. He never got it. But he got something better: a small device called an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) like the one Dick Cheney got, a familiar gadget but with a new twist.

A new test called high sensitivity CRP, catapulted into the headlines last week by a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, appears to be better than cholesterol at predicting the risk of heart attack and stroke. The test measures levels of an inflammatory substance, C-reactive protein that plays a role in cardiovascular disease.

Vice President Dick Cheney made the problem famous, but thousands of Americans each year need a new round of treatment to fix a heart problem they thought was already solved.

Fred Kemp, 38, a former restaurant manager in Atlanta, Ga., had one simple goal: To open a refrigerator door with his left hand five years ago, Kemp was watching TV when he dozed off, then woke up to go to the bathroom.

Dr. Zdan Korduba, an anesthesiologist at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York, wound up having one toe amputated, losing months of work and feeling like a total chump for missing symptoms he'd have spotted right away in a patient. Beginning five years ago, he says ruefully, he began noticing that his legs hurt after tennis: ``I got tremendous cramps, but I put it off as being out of shape.'' Before long, he found he ``couldn't walk the same distance as before. I kept denying this to myself.

Richard Knorr's heart is making medical history. But there's actually not much that's unusual about it. Though two of his coronary arteries are partially blocked, the 64-year-old Framingham man has never had a heart attack and he can control his chest pain with medications.

Dorothy Teixeira, a 76-year-old Peabody woman who had a history of chest pains, got even more bad news last summer: She had colon cancer and needed surgery. In many hospitals, Teixeira would have been taken off her heart medications during and after surgery because of the fear that the drugs -- called beta-blockers -- might make her heart too sluggish.

WORCESTER -- It's early afternoon, a perfect spring day. Outside the UMass Medical Center, employees savor the last of their lunch break, faces tipped toward the sun, legs splayed on the grass. Inside, in operating room 3, Evelyn Kolat, 74, lies inert, dwarfed by a vast array of surgical instruments, anesthesia paraphernalia, and a heart-lung machine.

Fifteen years ago, at 10:53 on a February evening, the people of Athens were jolted by an earthquake that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. Within an hour of the quake and for three days afterwards, terrified Athenians were dropping dead at more than twice the normal rate. This suggested, at least to Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist Dimitrios Trichopoulos, that mental stress had triggered the increased deaths, most of them from heart attacks

A little over 100 years ago, a small band of Italians left Roseto Val Fortore, a village in the foothills of the Apennines, in hopes of a better life amid the slate quarries of eastern Pennsylvania. Naming their new village Roseto, the group soon recreated the strong community ties they had nurtured in Italy. They lived in three-generation households, centered their lives on family and built their houses so close together that all it took to have in a neighborly chat was a walk to the front porch.