Heart disease is a general term used to describe several different conditions, all of which are potentially fatal, but are also treatable and/or preventable. This disease is the number one killer of both men and women in the world. The most common form of heart disease is coronary heart disease, also known as coronary artery disease (CAD). Other types of heart disease include cardiomyopathy, cardiac arrhythmias, congestive heart failure, and stroke.

Do you like Fried fish? If you have heart disease, you better stop eating that! Even if you can’t give up Fried fish, stop recycling frying oil. If you don’t want to waste the oil used for frying, you will be wasting your body. Recycled frying oil is not good for your heart.

It’s always better idea to check your cholesterol level every year even if you are healthy. It would help if you reduce your stress level, exercise regularly and watch the food you eat. Following links give you more information.

American Heart Association

Checkout this link also. You will never forget this quote from 10-year-old-boy “It’s about how you should value life and how fast it can change.”

Protecting Women’s hearts

Heart Disease 101 from Mayo Clinic

National Institutes of Health

From About.com

Latest Development to improve heart pumping:

Using stem cells to repair damaged organs is still more dream than reality. But researchers are getting close with heart disease, especially when they use progenitor cells that are derived from stem cells found in the patients’ bone marrow.

Embroyonic stem cells can develop into many tissues, including bone, muscle or heart. But in experiments they have proved difficult to control — whereas adult progenitor cells seem to obey the orders. In a study involving 204 patients at 17 medical centers in Europe, a team led by Dr. Volker Schachinger of Goethe University in Frankfurt infused progenitor cells into the hearts of half of group while the other half received placebo infusions. After four months, the hearts of patients who received the cells showed twice as much pumping activity as the control group. And the benefits were most pronounced in those patients who had suffered the most damage from heart attacks.

Human Heart Valves from Stem Cells:

Nov 16, 2006:

Scientists for the first time have grown human heart valves using stem cells from the fluid that cushions babies in the womb — offering a revolutionary approach that may be used to repair defective hearts in the future.

The idea is to create new valves in the lab while the pregnancy progresses and have them ready to implant in a baby with heart defects after it is born.

The Swiss experiment follows recent success growing bladders and blood vessels and suggests people may one day be able to grow their own replacement heart parts — in some cases, before they’re born.

It’s one of several sci-fi tissue engineering advances that could lead to homegrown heart valves for infants and adults that are more durable and effective than artificial or cadaver valves.

“This may open a whole new therapy concept to the treatment of congenital heart defects,” said Dr. Simon Hoerstrup, a University of Zurich scientist who led the work, which was presented yesterday at an American Heart Association conference.

Also at the meeting, Japanese researchers said they had grown new heart valves in rabbits using cells from the animals’ own tissue. It is the first time replacement heart valves have been created in this manner, said lead author Dr. Kyoko Hayashida.

One percent of all newborns, or more than one million babies born world-wide each year, have heart problems. These kill more babies in the U.S. in the first year of life than any other birth defect, according to the National Institutes of Health.

Heart-valve defects can be detected with ultrasound tests at about 20 weeks of pregnancy. At least one-third of afflicted infants have problems that could be treated with replacement valves, Dr. Hoerstrup said.

Conventional procedures to fix faulty heart valves all have drawbacks. Artificial valves are prone to blood clots and patients must take anticlotting drugs for life. Valves from human cadavers or animals can deteriorate, requiring repeated open-heart surgeries to replace them, Dr. Hijazi said. That’s especially true in children, because these valves don’t grow along with the body. Valves made from the patient’s own cells are living tissue and might be able to grow with the patient, said Dr. Hayashida, a scientist at the National Cardiovascular Center Research Institute in Osaka .

The Swiss procedure has another advantage: using cells the fetus sheds in amniotic fluid avoids controversy because it doesn’t involve destroying embryos to get stem cells.

Other Developments:

Recent studies have shown an increased risk of heart disease and stroke in people with gum infections, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The risk appears to increase with the severity of the infection. Gum disease produces a tremendous amount of bacteria, if a patient has heart valve problem, the bacteria can invade and infect the heart.

Jan 4, 2007:

Two drugs once widely used to treat Parkinson’s disease sharply increase the risk of heart-valve damage, researchers have found. The studies immediately prompted calls for the treatments to be discontinued or patients more closely monitored. Patients who take the drugs, pergolide or cabergoline, are four to seven times as likely to suffer damage to their heart valves as patients who don’t take either one, according to two studies published in New England Journal of Medicine.

Jan 14, 2007:

Coated-Stent Study Shows Risk: An analysis of 14 studies of drug-coated-stent patients shows the heart devices increase the risk for dangerous clots four to five times more than the risk from bare-metal stents, the Cleveland Clinic said. The analysis covered 6,675 patients in nine trials involving Johnson & Johnson’s drug-coated stent and five trials involving Boston Scientific Corp.’s device. The study was published in the American Journal of Medicine’s December issue.

The issue of late stent thrombosis, or clots that form after a stent is implanted, has recently rocked the $5 billion-to-$6 billion market for drug-coated stents. “Our analysis found there is a small but real hazard of late stent thrombosis with drug-eluting stents more so than with bare-metal stents,” with the risk more likely when use of anticlotting drugs is stopped, said Deepak L. Bhatt, one of the study’s authors, in a release. Dr. Bhatt is associate director of the Cleveland Clinic Cardiovascular Coordinating Center.

“This does not, however, mean that drug-eluting stents should not be used, as other studies have shown that they do significantly reduce the need for repeat procedures compared with bare-metal stents,” Dr. Bhatt added.

April 14, 2007

When stents don’t make sense: Stents used to prop open arteries are known to cause blood clots and heart attacks in some patients. They are often misplaced in the blood vessel.

Standard anigograms peer into arteries from the outside, so all blood vessels narrowed by plaque look pretty much the same. As a resut, doctors simple insert stents at the narrow points.

Volcano, a medical device maker, tackles these problems with a tiny catheter that has 64 ultrasound transducers. The devices bounces sound waves off the artery walls from within, showing details angiograms don’t reveal. This system can distinguish among eight different kinds of plaque, only some of which are likely to rupture and cause heart attacks.

Volcano is also able to measure pressure differences in the vessel, showing how much a particular narrowing is affecting blood flow.

May 20, 2007:

Can you predict the likelihood of heart attack in a patient? Angiologix thinks so. This medical diagnostics venture says that it can offer that ability to doctors. It claims that it can predict heart attack or any major cardiovascular event before it occurs. Such a tool would be significant, since as many as 200,000 heart attack victims every year either have no warning signs at all or are misdiagnosed, according to Maria Merchant, the team leader in Angiologix. The medical advance of Angiologix is a test based on human coronary endothelial cells, which line the blood vessels and have been found to be the most important indicator of heart attack risk. “In the future, we believe our test will be used in all patients after a certain age,” said Merchant. Let us hope that they really make a device using this concept; that could save thousands of people, if not millions.

May 22, 2007:

An analysis by Dr. Nissen, in Cleveland, USA, linked the widely used diabetes drug Avandia to higher risk of heart attacks. “Cardiovascular disease is far and away the leading cause of death in diabetes. If you find a diabetes drug increases the risk of heart attacks, the consequences are so grave that it warrants urgent action,” said Dr. Nissen.

Jan 2, 2009:

Terumo Heart Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of major Japanese hospital supplier Terumo Corp., has a good news for patients with severe heart disease. Dr. Nojiri, chief medical officer of Terumo, has been leading an international team of more than 100 doctors and engineers to develop DuraHeart, the world’s first artificial heart-assisting device using magnetic-levitation technology for the impeller. As the impeller rotates, it pushes oxygenated blood from the heart to the rest of the body, which a weakened heart can’t adequately do. As blood flows, there is no contact between the parts of the pump, minimizing the risk of creating a blood clot.

“I was very happy that it was finally recognized by the world,” says Dr. Nojiri, who spent more than a decade developing DuraHeart after she quit as a heart surgeon at the age of 39. She had become convinced that she couldn’t save patients with serious heart problems only using surgical techniques, but that she would need a tool or an artificial heart that would be as effective as a heart transplant. While Terumo just started trial in Japan, it has implanted DuraHeart in five patients this year and plans trials in 140 patients in the U.S., where 6,000 patients with advanced heart disease are waiting for transplants. In two to three years Terumo expects to obtain U.S. FDA approval. You can read more about this development here.