Judy Foreman Author & Journalist

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…

The idea is as simple as it is radical: Chronic inflammation, spurred by an immune system run amok, appears to play a role in medical evils from arthritis to Alzheimer’s, diabetes to heart disease. There’s no grand proof of this “theory of everything.” But doctors say it’s compelling enough that we should act as if…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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….

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…