Hearts

Race cars often don't have a speedometer. What they do have is a tachometer that shows how fast the engine is revving. A heart rate monitor is a tachometer for the human body -- it tells a user how quickly the heart is beating during exercise. Sports- and fitness-related use of the device has mushroomed since its invention in 1977, but many people don't know how to use one effectively. For starters, simple formulas to determine heart rate training zones aren't reliable.

Heart transplant patients are as much as 25% more likely to survive if the sex of the donor is the same as the patient's, researchers said Wednesday. The results surprised experts because, for most types of transplants, sex differences are irrelevant as long as a good immunocompatability is achieved.

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. Scattered findings from smaller studies have already suggested that the drugs pose a risk, but the two new papers in the New England Journal of Medicine show that the risk is much higher than suspected. "This is not a rare side effect," said Dr. Bryan L.

Overturning a century of conventional medical wisdom, Japanese researchers reported Thursday that simple chest compressions without mouth-to-mouth ventilation save twice as many heart attack victims as traditional CPR. The findings could have important implications in emergency medicine. As many as three-quarters of bystanders who observe a heart attack in a stranger decline to perform CPR, fearing infectious diseases.

The increasingly popular high-caffeine beverages called energy drinks may do more than give people a jolt of energy -- they may also boost heart rates and blood pressure. The drinks generally have high levels of caffeine and taurine, an amino acid that can affect heart function and blood pressure. "We saw increases in both blood pressure and heart rate in healthy volunteers who were just sitting in a chair watching movies. They weren't exercising.

She steered with one knee, reached into the back seat and stroked the tears from her little boy's cheek. Drivers honked and shouted behind their rolled-up windows. One gave her the single-finger salute. She hardly noticed. She had something more important to worry about: saving her babies. "Please, Nate," she begged. "Hey, baby. Hey, baby Nate. Please don't cry. Just hold on. Please, baby. Nate, please." It was a bright morning in November.

People who survive a toxic encounter with carbon monoxide, one of the most common types of accidental poisoning in the United States, appear to run a risk of death years later because of damaged heart muscle. The Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation said a look at 230 patients treated for moderate to severe poisoning from the colorless, odorless gas found that 37% suffered heart muscle injury. Of that group nearly a quarter died within the next seven years.

EAT your fatty fish and hang on, if you wish, to that bottle of tasty fish oil -- but don't expect them to protect you from cancer. A new study says that foods and supplements containing omega-3 fatty acids do not offer such protection, dashing some earlier hints that they might.

The radical idea that the amino acid homocysteine might play an important role in the onset of heart disease was first proposed three decades ago by Dr. Kilmer McCulley of Harvard Medical School. His unorthodox theory, coming at a time when cardiologists were just beginning to focus on the adverse effects of cholesterol, earned McCulley a great deal of derision and got him ejected from the faculty of Harvard.

Nate Draper, the 10-month-old twin born with a deadly heart condition, has improved so much without receiving a new heart that his surprised doctors at UCLA Medical Center plan to release him from the hospital today. For months, doctors said Nate needed a new heart as soon as possible, probably by the time he walked, when his body would need better circulation.