Heart Disease

If you want to live longer -- avoid heart disease, Alzheimer's disease and cancer -- then pick and choose your foods with care to quiet down parts of your immune system. That's the principle promoted by the founders and followers of anti-inflammatory diets, designed to reduce chronic inflammation in the body. Dozens of books filled with diets and recipes have flooded the market in the last few years, including popular ones by dermatologist Dr. Nicholas Perricone and Zone Diet creator Barry Sears.

It turned a whole town into a research lab. It was the first to show the world that high cholesterol and obesity put people at risk for heart disease -- the first, in fact, to coin the very term "risk factor." And it still hasn't run out of juice. The longest-running heart health study in the world, the 60-year-old Framingham Heart Study, continues to mine its vast data set for causes or signs of heart trouble.

Former First Lady Barbara Bush and actor-comedian Robin Williams this month joined the thousands of Americans who have come to need an artificial valve implanted to regulate the blood flow out of the heart to supply the rest of the body. Bush, 83, had aortic valve replacement surgery March 4 after experiencing shortness of breath and being diagnosed with a hardened valve.

Ate too many nachos? Consider a banana chaser -- your heart might thank you for it. A new study suggests that consuming twice as much potassium as sodium can halve your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. The study is the first to show that the ratio of these nutrients in your diet matters more than exactly how much you get of either one. The best strategy for good health, experts are quick to stress, is to eat less sodium and more potassium.

Not long ago, Jesus Araujo, a cardiology researcher at UCLA, parked a cage full of transgenic mice alongside the 110 Freeway. As a control, he placed another group in a less-polluted space on the Westside. Araujo was interested in learning more about how smog affects the heart and whether bad air could help explain the persistence of heart disease after 25 years of cholesterol management, statins and endless lifestyle advice.

Roche Holding's Tamiflu lowered the risk of heart attacks and other cardiac problems in those who had heart disease, according to a study. An analysis of 37,482 people covered by the military health plan and diagnosed from 2003 to 2007 with flu showed those who filled a prescription for Tamiflu had a 58% lower risk of cardiac events within 30 days, compared with those who didn't receive a prescription. The research was published in the March issue of the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes.

Anxiety, depression and stress over work and the economy are all unhealthful in their own right; they're also hard on the ticker. Some of the evidence: Depression, anxiety, chronic life stress and blood pressure all raise the risk of cardiovascular disease. Job pressure and excessive work hours were linked to smoking in men in a study of 1,101 Australian workers. A 33% to 40% increase in systolic blood pressure was reported among white-collar Canadian workers with high levels of cumulative work stress.

Major league pitcher Joe Kennedy was afflicted with a condition that caused his heart to suddenly stop beating at his in-laws' home in November, when he collapsed and later died. A final report on the 28-year-old player's death Nov. 23 has not been issued. But an autopsy found he had hypertensive heart disease, a condition that hardens the heart's walls and can cause it to stop beating, a medical examiner said.

At his home just off Sheik Said Road, Ala Thabit Fattah waits for word from America about whether doctors can save his 2-year-old daughter, Amenah. Iraqi doctors had known since she was only a few weeks old that Amenah had an oxygen deficiency problem in her heart that probably would prove fatal before she reached school-age. But her doctor told Fattah that the only surgeons he knew who could save Amenah had fled Iraq in the turmoil since the toppling of the Saddam Hussein regime.

Contradicting unexpected findings released last week by American researchers, an Australian team Wednesday said it found no evidence that aggressive treatment of diabetes in patients with heart disease increased their risk of death. Physicians and patients were shocked by last week's announcement because it seemed to contradict a long-held tenet of diabetes treatment: that reducing blood glucose levels as much as possible improves health.