Heart Diseases

Step away from the beer pong table! College binge drinking may leave you with more than just embarrassing memories and excruciating hangovers. In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology , researchers found that four years of heavy drinking between the ages of 18 and 25 may be enough to permanently increase a person's risk of heart attack, stroke and atherosclerosis. Researchers at the University of Illinois recruited 38 nonsmoking young adults and split them into two groups: alcohol abstainers and binge drinkers.

Described as the first facility of its kind in the Southeast area, a special institute to treat and examine heart ailments has opened at the La Mirada Medical Center. The $4-million Southern California Heart Institute, a joint venture between Nu-Med Hospitals Inc. and more than 40 physicians, opened last week at the 146-bed medical center.

The long-established link between red meat consumption and heart disease may have less to do with the fat in the meat than many have assumed, researchers said Sunday.  Writing in the journal Nature Medicine , a team led by Dr. Stanley Hazen of the Cleveland Clinic in Cleveland pointed instead to the nutrient L- carnitine -- a substance involved in the digestion of fat and also a popular dietary supplement -- as a key artery-hardening culprit. ...

Fern Schiff was not worried about the health of her 14-year-old daughter, Judy, when she sent her to summer camp in August, 1979. The Palms Junior High School ninth-grader was a healthy, athletic youngster, "a tomboy, really," her mother recalls. But in just five months, Judy had succumbed to a form of cardiomyopathy believed to have been caused by a viral infection she contracted at camp. In the 6 1/2 years since Judy's death on Jan.

The hit hurt. It was a solid, crunching blow to the chest that came as swift and sudden as lightning. Reggie Perry's angular body buckled. His heart pounded like a drum machine. And although spring passing drills had only begun, he felt an uncompromising and unyielding fatigue. Despite the signs, Perry thought nothing was wrong. "Like the idiot that I am, I didn't realize what it was," he said.

The hit hurt. It was a solid, crunching blow to the chest that came as swiftly and suddenly as lightning. Reggie Perry's angular body buckled. His heart pounded like a drum. And although spring drills had only begun, he felt an uncompromising and unyielding fatigue. Despite the signs, Perry believed that nothing was wrong. "Like the idiot that I am, I didn't realize what it was," said the USC senior who has switched from quarterback to safety.

A newly identified gene has been linked to about 55% of cases of an inherited heart disorder that can kill young, otherwise healthy people. It's the third gene to be found for the inherited form of the illness known as long QT syndrome, which affects an estimated 20,000 Americans and is thought to cause 50 to 200 deaths a year. People with the disorder have an increased risk for episodes in which their heart races at 300 to 400 beats a minute, too fast to pump blood effectively.

Before newborns leave the hospital, they should receive a simple, pain-free test to check for signs of congenital heart disease, one of the most common types of birth defects, according to a recommendation by a federal advisory panel. In a report published online Sunday in the journal Pediatrics, the doctors propose nationwide screening for critical congenital heart disease using pulse oximetry, a probe placed on a hand and a foot that uses a light source and sensor to measure oxygen in the blood.

Nearly half of all adult Americans have high cholesterol, high blood pressure or diabetes, all conditions that increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, researchers from the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Monday. One in eight Americans has at least two of the conditions and one in 33 has all three, sharply increasing their risk. Of those with at least one condition, 15% have not been diagnosed, according to the report released online. "The number that really surprises me is the penetration of these conditions into the U.S. population," said Dr. Clyde Yancy of Baylor University Medical Center, president of the American Heart Assn.

The financial toll of caring for Americans with dementia adds up to at least $159 billion a year, making it more expensive than treatments for patients with heart disease or cancer, according to a new report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dementia is characterized by a group of symptoms that prevent people from carrying out the tasks of daily living. Reduced mental function makes it impossible for them to do things like keep track of their medications or their finances.

The proportion of American adolescents who exercise regularly, eat a healthy diet and are free of risk factors for future heart disease is "alarmingly low," says a major new survey of teen health. The comprehensive five-year assessment of teens' health status warns that the "disconcertingly high" rate of poor health habits among the nation's youth "may contribute to unacceptably high rates of adult-onset cardiovascular disease" as this cohort matures into adulthood. The new survey , published Monday in the American Heart Assn.'s journal Circulation, culled data on teens from a yearly gauge of the nation's health called the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES)

The long-awaited results of a study gauging the benefits of a controversial heart disease therapy have once more pitted the alternative medicine community against mainstream cardiologists. A clinical trial that cost taxpayers $30 million and took researchers more than a decade to complete suggests that chelation -- the removal of heavy metals from the body -- may offer some benefits to patients who have suffered a heart attack . But those findings were immediately discounted by the editors of the influential journal that published the study's findings.

These days, thanks to advances in treatment and detection, millions of women survive breast cancer.   But surviving the disease doesn't necessarily mean the entire battle is over, a population-based study of breast cancer survivors in Sweden and Denmark, published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine , seems to suggest. Assessing a total of 2,168 women whose breast cancer was treated with radiation therapy between 1958 and 2001, a team of researchers found that women's chances of having a major coronary event - a heart attack, bypass surgery or heart disease death - rose in proportion with the radiation dose they received, even at the lower doses of radiation delivered in newer treatments.

As medical director of the MemorialCare Heart & Vascular Institute at Long Beach Memorial Hospital, preventive cardiologist Dr. Gregory Thomas counsels modern-day patients, urging them to eat right, exercise and quit smoking to keep their hearts healthy. But for the last five years or so, Thomas and a 19-member "dream team" of cardiologists, anthropologists and radiologists from all over the world have also been spending a lot of time focusing on a different set of patients, long-deceased: mummies.  Traveling from Egypt to Peru to the hallways of great American museums, they have been seeking permission to place the preserved bodies of ancient people in CT scanners to look for evidence of hardened arteries.  Their hope is to figure out why it is that so many people today develop the vascular blockages that lead to heart attacks and strokes.

People tend to think of heart disease as a scourge of modern life, brought on by vices such as greasy fast food, smoking and the tendency to be a couch potato. But 21st century CT scans of 137 antique mummies gathered from three continents show that hardened arteries have probably plagued mankind for thousands of years - even in places like the Aleutian Islands, where hunter-gatherers subsisted on a heart-healthy marine diet and occasional snacks of berries. Fully a third of the mummies examined - who lived in the American Southwest and Alaska as well as Egypt and Peru as much as 5,000 years ago - appeared to have the same vascular blockages that cause heart attacks and strokes in Americans today.

People tend to think of heart disease as a scourge of modern life, brought on by vices such as greasy fast food, smoking and the tendency to be a couch potato. But 21st century CT scans of 137 antique mummies gathered from three continents show that hardened arteries have probably plagued mankind for thousands of years - even in places like the Aleutian Islands, where hunter-gatherers subsisted on a heart-healthy marine diet and occasional snacks of berries. Fully a third of the mummies examined - who lived in the American Southwest and Alaska as well as Egypt and Peru as much as 5,000 years ago - appeared to have the same vascular blockages that cause heart attacks and strokes in Americans today.

There are some risk factors for heart disease--heredity, for one--that you simply cannot change. But there are risk factors that you can do a lot to remove: excessive weight, smoking, too little exercise. If you want to find out whether you are at high risk for heart disease, you can visit a hospital-based fitness center today to get a free screening and consultation.

People who volunteer are often known to say they get more out of the experience than those who are being helped. A study in Canada concurs that that may be true: Researchers say that high school students who volunteered improved their own health. The researchers recruited and assessed 106 10 th graders from western Canada. Half were assigned to volunteer weekly with elementary school children for two months. At the end of that time, the high school students showed significantly lower markers for cardiovascular disease risk, including body mass index and cholesterol levels when compared with students in a control group.

Younger women who ate at least three servings per week of strawberries or blueberries reduced their likelihood of suffering a heart attack by one-third compared with their sisters who incorporated fewer of the colorful berries into their diet, a new study says. The berry benefit was sufficiently strong that it held even after researchers adjusted for age, high blood pressure, family history of heart attack, body-mass index, exercise, smoking, and caffeine or alcohol intake. Researchers suggested that a group of dietary flavenoids called anthocyanins, which give blueberries and strawberries their jewel-like colors, may be responsible for the health benefits seen in the study's large sample of subjects.