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.
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.
Many individuals with type 2 diabetes are diabetic because the cells of their body no longer respond to the hormone insulin, which is crucial for lowering blood sugar levels (blood glucose levels). However, before individuals become clinically diabetic their body tries to compensate for the increasing resistance to the effects of insulin by increasing both the amount of insulin secreted and the mass of insulin-secreting cells (beta cells) in the pancreas.
A new report urges parents and children’s doctors to change their thinking about homesickness among children, to see it as a nearly universal, but highly preventable and treatable phenomenon — rather than an unavoidable part of childhood.
Young adults (ages 20 to 44) with normal lung function who later develop chronic cough and phlegm have a fourfold higher risk of developing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
During periods of fasting, brain cells responsible for stimulating the appetite make sure that you stay hungry. Now, a new study of mice reported in the January issue of the journal Cell Metabolism, published by Cell Press, reveals the complex series of molecular events that keep those neurons active.
Health of working aged Finns pet owners tend to be more unhealthy and overweight (with more body mass index BMI) than others, revealed in a research from the University of Turku, Finland. Perceived health of pet owners was weak more often than that of those not having a pet.
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.