SUNDAY, Feb. 8 (HealthDay News) — Perhaps five years from now, you might actually hear your doctor casually say, “While we’re at it, let’s do a blood test to see if your genetic makeup puts you at high risk of having a heart attack.”
So says Dr. Sekar Kathiresan, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of preventive cardiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is the leader of a group that has identified three Read the rest of this entry »

, a time to raise awareness about one of the deadliest killers on the planet: heart disease.
.
But there are plenty of things Americans can do to improve their chances when it comes to heart health.
Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, the director for women and heart disease at the Heart and Vascular Institute of Lenox Hill Hospital, joined “Good Morning America” to share her top five lifestyle changes that could keep Americans just a little healthier.
Read the rest of this entry »

Eating a diet rich in fish and vegetables, while low in meat and dairy, lowers an older person’s risk of developing mild mental impairment and Alzheimer’s disease, a study showed.
Those who adhered most closely to the Mediterranean diet had a 28 percent lower risk of developing mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor to Alzheimer’s disease in many people, than those who didn’t, research in the February issue of Archives of Neurology found.
Read the rest of this entry »

Feb. 11 (Bloomberg) –
the world’s largest
maker of drugs for rare genetic disorders, said fourth-quarter
profit rose 9.8 percent on sales of Myozyme for the rare genetic
disorder Pompe disease.
Net income increased to $86.7 million, or 31 cents a share,
from $78.9 million, or 29 cents, a year earlier, the Cambridge,
Massachusetts-based company said today in a statement. Earnings
excluding some costs beat by 2 cents the average
of
analysts Read the rest of this entry »

Does it work?
We’re not sure. A big study found that people who closely followed the Mediterranean diet were less likely to die prematurely (earlier than expected) from heart disease. But we don’t how many of the people in this study had high cholesterol.
What is it?
The Mediterranean diet is eaten by people who live around the Mediterranean in countries like Greece, Italy and Spain. Researchers don’t always agree on what constitutes a Mediterranean-style Read the rest of this entry »

Marian L. Neuhouser, PhD
Sylvia Wassertheil-Smoller, PhD
Cynthia Thomson, PhD, RD
Aaron Aragaki, MS
Garnet L. Anderson, PhD
JoAnn E. Manson, MD, DrPH
Ruth E. Patterson, PhD
Thomas E. Rohan, MD, PhD
Linda van Horn, MD, PhD
James M. Shikany, DrPH
Asha Thomas, PhD
Andrea LaCroix, PhD
Ross L. Prentice, PhD
Arch Intern Med.
 2009;169(3):294-304.
Millions of postmenopausal women use multivitamins,
as cancer and cardiovascular Read the rest of this entry »

Cardiovascular disease remains the number one killer of women in the United States, claiming almost as many women’s lives each year than all forms of cancer, lung disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease combined.
The latest statistics from the American Heart Association published in January of this year indicate that one woman dies every minute from cardiovascular disease. The lifetime risk for a 40 year-old woman of developing some form of cardiovascular Read the rest of this entry »

ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2009)
— Women who have more years of fertility (the time from first menstruation to menopause) have a lower risk of developing Parkinson’s disease than women with fewer years, according to a large, new study by researchers at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University.
“These findings, involving nearly 75,000 women, suggest that longer exposure to the body’s own, or endogenous, hormones, including estrogen, Read the rest of this entry »

A Link Between Sleep and Heart Disease?
each night have less risk of having artery-clogging calcifications that can lead to heart disease, according to a study published in the December 24–31 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. That doesn’t mean that people should pop sleeping pills in order to get more rest, experts say. “We don’t know why there is an association,” Diane Lauderdale, the study’s author and an associate Read the rest of this entry »

by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, November 30, 2008
,
After decades of attacking naturopathic physicians who claimed heart disease could be cured, western medical scientists have now discovered for themselves that heart disease can, indeed, be reversed.
The discovery was made by a team studying “microRNA,” fragments of genetic material that degrade the function of heart cells and are almost always present in heart disease. These scientists were Read the rest of this entry »