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Category: Heart Disease
A New Heart Disease Test That Could Save Your Life
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….
Coated Stents Show Huge Promise
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. The setback generally goes something like this: Having experienced a chest pain or heart attack, the patient undergoes a procedure to open up the clogged…
Ties That Bind Help Stroke Patients
Fred Kemp, 38, a former restaurant manager in Atlanta, Ga., has one simple goal: To open a refrigerator door with his left hand. Five years ago, Kemp suffered a stroke as he dozed in front of his TV. When he woke up, he recalled, “I couldn’t get up. I tried again and again. I couldn’t…
Plaque can gum up the works in legs
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…
Picturing heart disease another way
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. Still, doctors are fascinated by his heart, and those of a…
Stress of surgery hard on the heart
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…
Mining veins – Endoscopy emerging as safer, less painful way to gather grafts for coronary bypasses
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. 2:10…
The other heart attack risks – Anger, grief, fear
But just as you can protect against physical triggers, you can protect against the dangers of emotional stress 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…
Loneliness Can Be The Death Of Us
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…
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