December 18, 2007, 9:16 PM CT

Study of young women with heart disease

The largest, most comprehensive study of young women with heart attacksVIRGO (Variation in Recovery: Role of Gender on Outcomes in Young AMI patients)was recently launched at Yale School of Medicine with a $9.7 million National Institutes of Health grant.

This is the first study to focus on this high riskand highly unstudiedgroup. said Yale School of Public Health Associate Professor Judith Lichtman, co-principal investigator of the study. There have been no large, prospective studies of this population, even though the death toll is comparable to that from breast cancer.

She said the research team is exploring what accounts for premature heart disease in women and why they experience worse outcomes than men of similar age with heart disease.

The four-year grant will support the study of 2,000 women age 55 and younger with 1,000 men for comparison. The multi-site study bridges disciplines from basic biology and clinical sciences to psychology and health services research.

Eventhough women under age 55 with heart attacks represent a small proportion of all patients with heart disease, they account for about 40,000 hospitalizations each year. About 8,000 women under the age of 55 die of heart disease annually, ranking it among the major causes of death in this group. While most women in this age group are protected from heart disease, notes Lichtman, previous research indicates that young women have a much greater risk of dying after a heart attack than men of the same age......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source

December 10, 2007, 10:46 PM CT

Abdominal fat distribution predicts heart disease

Abdominal obesity is a strong independent risk factor for heart disease, and using the waist-hip ratio rather than waist measurement alone is a better predictor of heart disease risk among men and women, researchers reported according to a research findings published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

In the study, researchers also looked at whether the association between fat distribution and heart disease risk was independent of body mass index (BMI), which assesses body weight relative to height, as well as other heart disease risk factors, such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

The size of the hips seems to predict a protective effect, said Dexter Canoy, M.Phil., M.D., Ph.D., lead author of the study and a research fellow in epidemiology and public health at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. In other words, a big waist with comparably big hips does not appear to be as worrisome as a big waist with small hips.

The research was based on 24,508 men and women ages 45 to 79 in the United Kingdom who participated in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer cohort study (EPIC-Norfolk) which is based at the University of Cambridge in the UK. Researchers measured participants weight, height, waist circumference, hip circumference and other heart disease risk factors from 1993 to 1997. They then followed up with participants for an average 9.1 years......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source

December 5, 2007, 8:54 PM CT

Implanting embryonic cells into damaged hearts

When scientists at Cornell, the University of Bonn and the University of Pittsburgh transplanted living embryonic heart cells into cardiac tissue of mice that had suffered heart attacks, the mice became resistant to cardiac arrhythmias, thereby avoiding one of the most dangerous and fatal consequences of heart attacks.

The discovery, reported in this week's issue of Nature, has profound implications for using cell-transplant therapies to restore damaged heart tissue.

The researchers, including Michael Kotlikoff, the Austin O. Hooey Dean of Cornell's College of Veterinary Medicine, one of the paper's senior authors, discovered that a protein called connexin43, expressed by the transplanted embryonic heart cells, improved electrical connections to other heart cells. The scientists showed that the improved connections helped activate the transplanted cells deep within the damaged section of the heart tissue. The technique reversed the risk of developing ventricular arrhythmias after a heart attack, the number one cause of sudden death in the Western world.

In the past, researchers have transplanted a variety of cell types into failing hearts with modest improvement of function, eventhough transplanting skeletal muscle cells made things worse and led to more arrhythmias. Surprisingly, when co-author Bernd Fleischmann at the University of Bonn and his colleagues transplanted embryonic cardiac cells, the hearts' electrical stability and function returned to normal......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source

December 3, 2007, 10:08 PM CT

Genes protect against heart damage

A series of genes that protect cells from the powerful, common chemotherapeutic agent doxorubicin has been identified by scientists working to understand how the drug also can destroy the heart.

We found a series of genes that are very important for cell survival in the face of doxorubicin, says Dr. Hernan Flores-Rozas, cancer researcher at the Medical College of Georgia Cancer Center. At the moment you start inactivating these genes, the cells become very sensitive and dont grow any more. So now we know which genes we need to inactivate in the cell to make it very sensitive to the drug.

Doxorubicin is widely used to treat solid tumors from breast cancer to prostate and ovary cancer. A slightly modified version, daunorubicin, is a powerful fighter of leukemia and lymphoma and often is used in children.

Unfortunately, just as cancer therapy ends, heart problems can begin for some patients who get these drugs. Heart cells, called cardiomyocytes, can commit suicide, or apoptosis, says Dr. Ling Xia, a graduate student at the Department of Cardiology at Chinas Wuhan University who is part of an exchange program with MCG. The result is dilative cardiomyopathy, in which the heart becomes a boggy organ that can no longer pump blood out to the body. Damage can even show up years after therapy, she says noting there is no known way to prevent or treat it, short of a heart transplant......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source

November 27, 2007, 10:39 PM CT

Mature Heart Cell Potential In Embryonic Stem Cells

In a new study, UC Davis scientists report the first functional evidence that heart cells derived from human embryonic stem cells exhibit one of the most critical properties of mature adult heart cells, an important biological process called excitation-contraction coupling.

The finding gives researchers hope that these cells can one day be coaxed into becoming functionally viable cells safe for transplantation into the damaged hearts of patients with end-stage disease, potentially avoiding the necessity of a heart transplant. Currently, there are nearly 3,000 people on heart transplant lists around the nation, including more than 300 in California.

UC Davis research scientist Ronald Li and colleagues write in their study, "Functional Sarcoplasmic Reticulum for Calcium-Handling of Human Embryonic Stem Cell-Derived Cardiomyocytes: Insights for Driven Maturation," that they observed cells that had begun the maturation process toward becoming heart cells. The article, available online in Stem Cell Express, http://stemcells.alphamedpress.org/, would be reported in the recent issue of the journal Stem Cells.

"Prior experiments were able to derive heart cells from human embryonic stem cells," said Li, who is an associate professor of cell biology and human anatomy at UC Davis School of Medicine and senior author of the study, "but those cells always remained too immature to be of any therapeutic use and actually could cause lethal arrhythmias in animal models. Now, what we've been able to do is push the therapeutic potential of human embryonic stem cells further so that eventually they might be used safely, and with enhanced efficacy, in transplantation cases"......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source

November 19, 2007, 8:13 PM CT

Progress in coronary disease death rates

Before you plop in front of the television for a day of football, pizza and beer, you might consider this: New research shows that in young adults, decades of hard-won progress in reducing the risk of heart disease appears to be stalling, as recent death rates from coronary disease remain almost unchanged in young men and may even be increasing in women.

The research, conducted at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, appears in the November 27, 2007, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (JACC).

The worrisome plateau in death rates comes at a time when young Americans are increasingly likely to be obese and suffer from diabetes, hypertension and other cardiovascular risk factors.

Young adults should take stock of their lifestyles, said Earl S. Ford, M.D., M.P.H., a medical officer in the U.S. Public Health Service. If youre smoking, you should quit. If youre doing less than 30 minutes of physical activity per day, its time to find ways to be more active. If you need to lose weight, you should burn more calories than you take in.

For the study, Dr. Ford and his colleague, Simon Capewell, M.D., of the University of Liverpool, U.K., analyzed United States vital statistics data between 1980 and 2002 for people aged 35 and older. Overall, the news was good: The death rate from coronary disease fell by 52 percent in men and 49 percent in women. When considered from a different perspective, the death rate from coronary disease among men declined, on average, by 2.9 percent per year during the 1980s, 2.6 percent per year during the 1990s, and 4.4 percent per year from 2000 to 2002. Among women, the average annual death rate declined by 2.6 percent, 2.4 percent, and 4.4 percent, respectively......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source

November 12, 2007, 10:13 PM CT

Nitrate-rich foods may help in heart attack survival

Nitrite/nitrate found in vegetables, cured meats and drinking water may help you survive a heart attack and recover quicker, as per a pre-clinical study led by a cardiovascular physiologist at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston. Findings are reported in the Nov. 12 early online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mice fed an extra helping of nitrite and nitrate fared much better following a heart attack than those on a regular diet. The mice with extra nitrite had 48 percent less cell death in the heart following heart attack. Mice with a low nitrite/nitrate diet had 59 percent greater injury.

Mice with extra nitrite were also more likely to survive a heart attack or myocardial infarction. They had a survival rate of 77 percent in comparison to 58 percent for the mice that were nitrite deficient.

This is a very significant finding given the fact that simple components of our diet nitrite and nitrate that we have been taught to fear and restrict in food can now protect the heart from injury. Simple changes in our daily dietary habits such as eating nitrite and nitrate rich foods such as fruits and vegetables and some meats in moderation can drastically improve outcome following a heart attack, said lead author Nathan S. Bryan, Ph.D., an assistant professor at UT-Houstons Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human Diseases (IMM)......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source

November 7, 2007, 7:57 PM CT

Pollution from Marine Vessels Linked to Heart and Lung Disease

Pollution from marine shipping causes approximately 60,000 premature cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths around the world each year, as per a report scheduled to appear in the Dec. 15 issue of Environmental Science and Technology, the journal of the American Chemical Society.

The report benchmarks for the first time the number of annual deaths caused globally by pollution from marine vessels, with coastal regions in Asia and Europe the most affected.

Conducted by James Corbett of University of Delaware and James Winebrake from Rochester Institute of Technology, the study correlates the global distribution of particulate matter-black carbon, sulfur, nitrogen and organic particles-released from ships' smoke stacks with heart disease and lung cancer mortalities in adults. The results indicate that approximately 60,000 people die prematurely around the world each year from shipping-related emissions. Under current regulation, and with the expected growth in shipping activity, Corbett and Winebrake estimate the annual mortalities from ship emissions could increase by 40 percent by 2012.

Corbett and Winebrake's results come in the midst of current discussions by the International Maritime Organization to regulate emissions from ships.

"This study will help inform policymakers about some of the health impacts linked to ship emissions and the long range transport of those emissions to population centers," says Winebrake, chair of RIT's Department of Science, Technology and Society/Public Policy. "We now have a benchmark by which we can begin to evaluate the benefits of emission reduction policies."........ Posted by: April      Read more         Source

November 4, 2007, 9:01 PM CT

Aging heart changes shape, shrinks

Scientists at Johns Hopkins have evidence to explain why the supposedly natural act of aging is by itself a very potent risk factor for life-threatening heart failure.

In a study to be presented Nov. 4 at the American Heart Associations (AHA) annual Scientific Sessions in Orlando, Fla., the Hopkins team analyzed more than a half-dozen measurements of heart structure and pumping function to assess minute changes in the hearts of 5,004 men and women, age 45 to 84, of different ethnic backgrounds and with no existing symptoms of heart disease.

Scientists observed that each year as people age, the time it takes for their heart muscles to squeeze and relax grows longer, by 2 percent to 5 percent.

Test results were obtained from study participants who had undergone high-tech magnetic resonance imaging of the heart - tagged MRI - which measures individual muscle segment changes with each heartbeat.

The findings, scientists say, offer insight into the root causes of heart failure. They are particularly valuable now as millions of baby boomers in America move into their 60s, a time when most signs and symptoms of heart problems first appear.

Estimates show that more than 5 million Americans have some from of congestive heart failure, marked by symptoms such as shortness of breath and fatigue......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source

November 4, 2007, 2:45 PM CT

Quality of care for heart attack

Implementation of a program in North Carolina to increase the rate of coronary reperfusion (restoring blood flow to the heart muscle) for heart attack significantly improved the quality of care these patients received, as per a research studyin JAMA being released early online to coincide with its release at the American Heart Associations annual meeting. The study would be reported in the November 28 print issue of JAMA.

ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI; a certain pattern on an electrocardiogram during a heart attack) is a potentially lethal condition for which specific therapies, administered rapidly, can reduce the risk of death and illness. Despite more than two decades of clinical trial evidence demonstrating significant benefits from prompt coronary reperfusion, registries continue to show that most patients are still treated too slowly for reperfusion to be of maximal benefit, and a number of are not treated at all, as per background information in the article. The reasons for this are largely correlation to systematic barriers.

James G. Jollis, M.D., of Duke University, Durham, N.C., and his colleagues conducted a study to determine if establishment of a coordinated statewide system of reperfusion treatment for STEMI (Reperfusion of Acute Myocardial Infarction in North Carolina Emergency Departments [RACE] study), as exists for trauma, would overcome systematic barriers and both decrease delays in administering reperfusion treatment and increase the frequency with which reperfusion was provided to eligible patients. The scientists focused on the coordination of each aspect of care from the initial emergency medical response to reperfusion itself, whether is was fibrinolytic treatment (medicine for dissolving blood clots) or primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI; procedures such as balloon angioplasty or stent placement used to open blocked coronary arteries), whichever was most appropriate for a given setting......... Posted by: April      Read more         Source