Genetics and family history play a large role in a person?s risk for heart disease, but factors in diet, lifestyle and the environment are also thought to influence susceptibility to the disease.
Tai chi chih, the Westernized version of the 2,000-year-old Chinese martial art characterized by slow movement and meditation, significantly boosts the immune systems of older adults against the virus that leads to the painful, blistery rash known as shingles, according to a new UCLA study.
Ex-smokers achieved non-smokers? level of arterial stiffness after a decade of smoking cessation, in a cross-sectional study reported in Hypertension: Journal of the American Heart Association.
The amount and formulation of an adult heart drug given to children with congenital heart failure varies widely across the UK, reveals a survey published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Doctors at the University of Maryland Medical Center had a mystery on their hands. A 51-year-old physician colleague who looked the picture of health?no cardiovascular risks, a marathon runner who had exercised vigorously each day for 30 years?had just flunked a calcium screening scan of his heart.
An analysis of state Emergency Medicaid spending contradicts assumptions about emergency care provided to recent immigrants, researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Carolinas Center for Medical Excellence have found.
Patients with heart failure who received the heart medication carvedilol suffered fewer heart attacks and strokes and were less likely to die of these and other vascular events than patients prescribed another beta blocker, metoprolol tartrate, according to a retrospective analysis of COMET (the Carvedilol or Metoprolol European Trial) published in the March 6th issue of The Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Almost 60 percent of pacemaker patients had undiagnosed sleep apnea — possibly contributing to their heart disease — researchers reported in a small study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.
The health benefits of epicatechin, a compound found in cocoa, are so striking that it may rival penicillin and anaesthesia in terms of importance to public health, reports Marina Murphy in Chemistry & Industry, the magazine of the SCI.
Fasting glucose levels may independently predict the risk of being hospitalized with congestive heart failure in heart attack survivors and others who are at high risk of developing the disorder, researchers reported in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.