Two drugs once commonly used to treat Parkinson’s disease, pergolide and cabergoline, produce heart valve defects in as many as a quarter of the patients who use them, Italian and German researchers reported today.
Most of us think of chromium as the shiny metal in the bumpers of cars. Chrome bumpers are long gone, but the metal plays a crucial role in human health, reports the January 2007 issue of Harvard Men?s Health Watch.
This year, tens of thousands of heart patients will have high-tech devices implanted in their chests. Called ICDs or implantable cardioverter defibrillators, the expensive devices are designed to shock damaged hearts back into rhythm and save patients from sudden cardiac death. But a new study finds that while many of these patients will benefit from their ICDs, a large number won’t — and a simple heart-rhythm test can tell who’s who.
Men with high blood pressure who have a drink or two per day may be at lower risk for heart attack than men who don’t drink at all, new research suggests.
Four of five hospital performance measures for heart failure do not appear to accurately reflect the quality of care provided, according to a study in the January 3 issue of JAMA.
Use of the drug pexelizumab immediately before and for 24 hours after stent placement or angioplasty for certain heart attack patients did not have any significant treatment effect compared to placebo, according to a study in the January 3 issue of JAMA. The medication had shown promise in preliminary studies.
Researchers reported that all five standard hospital-based performance measures used to gauge quality-of-care for hospitalized heart-failure patients may not be the best benchmarks since none were significant predictors of patient mortality during the critical first 60 to 90 days immediately following hospital discharge.
In work with mice, researchers at the University of California, San Diego, School of Medicine discovered a factor that could be responsible for many unexplained cases of elevated triglyceride levels.
Drugs known as beta blockers help reduce the heart’s workload during heart failure via their action on beta-adrenergic receptors in cardiac cells. However, doctors remain puzzled by the variable responses to beta blockers among patients. Researchers now show that the key to this variation lies in a single amino acid change in the beta1-adrenergic receptor, that may differ from person to person, which alters the receptor’s conformation and the receptor’s response to certain beta blockers.
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Dutch research institute TNO Quality of Life and Wageningen University, the Netherlands, found that, among hypertensive men, moderate alcohol consumption was associated with a decreased risk of fatal and non-fatal heart attack.