Tag Archives: heart failure

Heart

Angiogram of Healthy Heart

The picture of health, an angiogram of a human heart shows blood vessels in sharp detail. To take an angiogram, or arteriogram x-ray, doctors must first inject the patient with a special opaque dye that allows a clear view of the heart’s blood vessels, including the large left and right coronary arteries. Narrowed arteries indicate the presence of coronary artery disease. Blockages of either of the coronary arteries could lead to a heart attack. Such x-rays help doctors determine a course of treatment.

Ageing heart can be prevented, say scientists

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Ageing heart can be prevented, say scientists

Scientists in Japan said they have uncovered evidence that shows it may be possible to delay or prevent heart failure in humans.

In a paper published in the journal Circulation, Tetsuo Shioi, lead researcher and assistant professor of medicine at Kyoto University Graduate School of Medicine in Kyoto, and his team described how they managed to suppress a variety of the P13K gene in a group of elderly mice.

The gene regulates the lifespan of cells and plays a role in the aging of tissues. In previous studies, suppression of this gene extended the lifespan of the roundworm and kept the hearts of old fruit flies healthy.

Compared with another group of mice in which the gene was left intact, mice with the suppressed gene had improved cardiac function, less fibrosis (which makes the heart inflexible) and fewer biological markers of aging.

“This study showed that aging of the heart can be prevented by modifying the function of insulin and paves the way to preventing age-associated susceptibility to heart failure,” Shioi said.

Old age is a major risk factor for heart failure, a condition when the heart is unable to pump enough blood around to supply the oxygen the body needs, the World Health Organization says.

According to the American Heart Association, 5.7 million Americans have heart failure, and nearly 10 out of every 1,000 people over age 65 suffer heart failure every year.

Mariell Jessup, professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia, said older people experience a slow but gradual loss of heart cells and a host of other cellular abnormalities which make the remaining cells contract less efficiently.

“This early work in a mouse model, clarifying the role of PI3K in cardiac aging, could ultimately allow scientists to understand if human hearts are similarly influenced,” he said.

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Defibrillators may not save women, study finds

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Defibrillators may not save women, study finds

Despite their widespread use, implantable defibrillators to protect against deadly heart rhythms do not prevent deaths in women with advanced heart failure, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

They said implantable defibrillators — which detect abnormal heart rhythms and offer a life-saving shock to restore a regular heartbeat — do not appear to protect men and women equally.

“There seems to be much less significant benefit” in women, said Dr. Christian Machado of Providence Hospital Heart Institute and Medical Center in Michigan, whose study appears in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“Implantable cardioverter-defibrillators are being implanted in hundreds of thousands of women without substantial evidence of benefit,” Dr. Rita Redberg of the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in a commentary in the journal.

Nearly 22 million people worldwide suffer from heart failure, a chronic condition in which the heart struggles to pump blood. Heart failure affects about 5.3 million Americans, and nearly half are women.

People with heart failure are six to nine times more likely than most people to suffer sudden cardiac death, a dangerous heart rhythm in which the heart quivers but does not pump blood to the organs. Implantable defibrillators can detect this rhythm and deliver a shock to restore a normal heart beat.

Many clinical trials have found implantable defibrillators save lives and are cost-effective; but too often, the studies are overpopulated with men, Machado said.

He and colleagues searched published clinical trials data on implantable defibrillators from 1950 to 2008.

“Our trials are biased toward males. Seventy to 80 percent are made up of male subjects,” Machado said.

His team analyzed five trials with a total of 934 women with advanced heart failure. None showed defibrillators significantly decreased the rate of death from any cause compared with drug therapy alone.

Among the 3,810 men in the studies, however, there was a significant reduction in the rate of death among those who had a defibrillator.

Machado said many women with heart failure are routinely offered defibrillators to safeguard against sudden cardiac arrest, even though the device may not help them live longer.

He said it would not be ethical to do a randomized clinical trial to prove women do not benefit, but said ongoing studies should be sure to focus on the effects in both men and women.

“We need to do a better job in trials recruiting at least the same amount of women as we do men. We have failed to do that,” he said.

Implantable defibrillators, which cost between $20,000 to $30,000 to implant, represent a $6 billion global market for companies such as Medtronic Inc, Boston Scientific Corp and St. Jude Medical Inc.

Dr. Mark Carlson of medical device maker St. Jude Medical said in a statement that women enrolled in clinical studies evaluating heart failure have tended to be sicker than men in the same studies, and they have tended to be undertreated in general.

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