Michael Kotlikoff, provost of Cornell University and a professor of molecular physiology, is part of an international collaboration that is aiming to prevent heart arrhythmias with a simple gene-therapy approach.
Similar to how protein clumps build up in the brain in people with some neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, protein clumps appear to accumulate in the diseased hearts of mice and people with heart failure, according to a team led by Johns Hopkins University researchers.
Scott & White Medical Center – Temple performed its 500th transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) procedure on a Waco resident, marking a major program milestone.
Does your child dream of making the team next year at school? While the fall semester is months away, now’s the time to schedule a sports physical, according to experts at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
Sympathetic nerve activity to skeletal muscle blood vessels—a function of the nervous system that helps regulate blood pressure—increases during physiological and mental stress in people with chronic anxiety, a new study finds.
Hackensack Meridian Health Riverview Medical Center is thrilled to announce the addition of the da Vinci Xi Surgical System, providing its surgeons with unparalleled precision, dexterity and control that allows for a minimally invasive surgical approach for many complex surgical procedures. Already home to the da Vinci Si™, the addition of the da Vinci Xi Surgical System adds to the already robust robotic surgery program at Riverview Medical Center, where surgeons perform a multitude of minimally invasive surgeries for complex diseases and conditions in gynecology, urology, thoracic, cardiac, and general surgery.
After eight years of failed treatment for persistent atrial fibrillation (AF), Janet Szilagyi, 78 of Clayton, New Jersey, became the first patient in the United States to undergo cardiac ablation – a procedure in which an electrophysiologist will scar or destroy tissue in the heart that’s allowing incorrect electrical signals to cause an abnormal heart rhythm – using an intraoperative imaging and mapping system recently cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have discovered a way turn pluripotent stem cells into atrial cells. The discovery will enable them to better study atrial fibrillation, the most common heart rhythm disorder.
New research led by investigators at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine and University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center suggests that the location of immune cells in the body determines whether they help or harm the development of heart disease. The study supports the view that the immune system directly impacts heart failure—still the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States.
The addition of a nurse-led intervention for hypertension management to health insurance coverage was more effective in lowering blood pressure (HPB) than the provision of health insurance alone in the Sub-Saharan country of Ghana, a region of Africa where HPB is rampant, according to a study publishing online on May 1 in the journal PLOS Medicine.
UCLA geneticists have created a technique to hunt for hormones that influence how organs and tissues communicate with each other. The method enabled them to find naturally occurring molecules that play major roles in Type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries with end-stage heart failure seeking OHT and LVAD implantation will be drastically affected if the proposed cuts are implemented, according to UAB research.
UT Southwestern cardiologist Dr. Ambarish Pandey has been named a Texas Health Resources Clinical Scholar. Funding from this award will bolster his studies developing novel approaches to prevent heart failure and improve heart failure outcomes at a health system level.
Mandatory public reporting of coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) results in Massachusetts was associated with better patient outcomes compared to national findings, according to a recent study. Results of the 13-year Massachusetts experience were presented in a plenary session of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery’s 98th Annual Meeting.
PHILADELPHIA – Susan Brozena, MD, FACC, FAHA, an emeritus associate professor of Cardiovascular Medicine in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, received the 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Heart Association. This award celebrates a professional who has had a pioneering career and has made an exceptional impact on their patients, the Philadelphia community and the field of cardiology.
Drinking kefir may have a positive effect on blood pressure by promoting communication between the gut and brain. Kefir is a fermented probiotic milk beverage known to help maintain the balance of beneficial bacteria in the digestive system. Researchers will present their findings today at the American Physiological Society (APS) annual meeting at Experimental Biology 2018 in San Diego.
Researchers investigating a key signaling protein in Huntington’s disease describe deleterious effects on heart function, going beyond the disease’s devastating neurological impact. By adjusting protein levels affecting an important biological pathway, the researchers improved heart function in mice, shedding light on the biology of this fatal disease.
A genomic analysis of a large study population has identified uncommon gene variants involved in responses to dietary fats and medicine. Although these variants are rare, they may play a large role in a carrier's risk of heart disease.
According to new research, obese women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) may be able to improve their health outlook with a particularly enjoyable form of therapy: regular sessions in a hot tub.
A major issue that limits modeling to predict cardiac arrhythmia is that it is impossible to measure and monitor all the variables that make our hearts tick, but researchers have now developed an algorithm that uses artificial intelligence to model the electrical excitations in heart muscle. Their work, appearing in Chaos, draws on partial differential equations describing excitable media and echo state networks to cross-predict variables about chaotic electrical wave propagations in cardiac tissue.
People who are 30 pounds or more overweight may want to slim down a bit even if they don’t have high blood pressure or any other heart disease risk, according to scientists at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center.
Physicians from Cedars-Sinai and Stanford Children’s Health are teaming up to offer the newest treatments and surgical techniques to patients born with heart defects.
The new collaboration between the two prominent institutions features doctors from the Smidt Heart Institute’s Guerin Family Congenital Heart Program at Cedars-Sinai and the Betty Irene Moore Children’s Heart Center at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. Both teams focus on treating patients born with heart defects who require specialized care throughout their lives.
When compared with nondrinkers, men and women who had one or more alcoholic drinks per day had an overabundance of oral bacteria linked to gum disease, some cancers, and heart disease. By contrast, drinkers had fewer bacteria known to check the growth of other, harmful germs.
The bacteria that reside on and within our bodies are known to have a significant influence on our health. New research suggests wiping out the gut microbiota could improve heart functioning and potentially slow the cardiac damage that occurs with heart failure.
A team led by Columbia University Biomedical Engineering Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic has designed a creative new approach to help injured hearts regenerate by applying extracellular vesicles secreted by cardiomyocytes rather than implanting the cells. The study shows that the cardiomyocytes derived from human pluripotent stem cells (derived in turn from a small sample of blood) could be a powerful, untapped source of therapeutic microvesicles that could lead to safe and effective treatments of damaged hearts.
Media registration is now open online for TCT 2018 (Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics), the annual Scientific Symposium of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation (CRF). TCT is the world’s premier educational meeting specializing in interventional cardiovascular medicine, attracting more than 10,000 attendees from 90 countries all over the world.
Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have identified a protein, called GPR68, that senses blood flow and tells small blood vessels called arterioles when to dilate.
• Megan Gagliardi was diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy at 18 years old.
• Dilated cardiomyopathy is a condition in which the heart’s ability to pump blood is decreased because the left ventricle — the heart’s main pumping chamber — is enlarged and weakened.
• Gagliardi received a heart transplant on her 19th birthday and is doing well six years later.
Clinical trial planning is underway at MedStar Heart & Vascular Institute to determine whether a novel stem cell therapy will improve heart function for patients with heart failure.
People with obesity are more likely to develop a rapid and irregular heart rate, called atrial fibrillation, which can lead to stroke, heart failure and other complications, according to Penn State researchers.
A landmark 2016 Cleveland Clinic study of widely used pain-relieving drugs showed that celecoxib (Celebrex) was associated with comparable cardiovascular safety and better gastrointestinal and kidney safety when compared with either naproxen (Naprosyn) and ibuprofen (Motrin).
A new substudy, published today in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, analyzed outcomes in PRECISION based on the presence or absence of aspirin use with specific NSAIDs (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs).
Scientists used an experimental targeted molecular therapy to block a matrix-forming protein in heart cells damaged by heart attack, reducing levels of scarred muscle tissue and saving mouse models from heart failure. Researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Heart Institute report in the journal Circulation
A new paper published in Circulation by researchers at La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology reports successful vaccination of atherosclerotic mice with a small chunk of protein snipped out of "bad cholesterol." Vaccination reduced plaque levels in test mice, and other experiments with human blood samples identified the class of T cells likely responsible for positive outcomes. The paper suggests that a comparable strategy could form the basis of a human vaccine.
As a sophomore and the star point guard of the Camas (Washington) High School Papermakers, it seemed Jake Hansel had a world of opportunities to play college ball. But all that changed for Hansel, now a Gonzaga University freshman studying mechanical engineering.
Researchers at the University of Michigan Life Sciences Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have determined how satellite DNA, considered to be "junk DNA," plays a crucial role in holding the genome together.
Select adult patients born with a single functioning ventricle (pumping chamber of the heart), and who have undergone a surgical operation called the ‘Fontan procedure’ during childhood, are now being enrolled in a global first clinical trial, led by a multi-disciplinary team of heart and lung physicians, to examine the effects of a portable, non-invasive medical device never before tested on patients with this cardiac condition.
Beta blockers have become a prescription drug staple for recovering heart attack patients. However, these blood pressure-reducing medications cannot be tolerated by many patients who are at higher risk for developing cardiovascular disease, including those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma, the elderly, and diabetics. As seen in the March 26 issue of Thyroid, researchers at New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYITCOM) now pose a new treatment for patients with beta blocker intolerance: thyroid hormone therapy.
More people are receiving coronary revascularization under Michigan's Medicaid expansion (the Healthy Michigan Plan). A new analysis finds that the expansion hasn’t caused significant problems for patients.
New leadless pacemakers are less invasive and cause fewer complications than standard pacemakers. A leadless pacemaker does not have wires or create a bulge under the skin. The size of a large vitamin pill, the device is deployed with a catheter and is secured to heart muscle inside the lower right pumping chamber.
UIC researchers have confirmed for the first time the association of a chromosomal genetic variant with increased risk of AFib in Latinos. Latino patients were found to be at a 2.3-fold increased risk for developing AFib if they carried this common genetic variant, which is labeled rs10033464 SNP at chromosome 4q25.
EMBARGOED - A team of Cedars-Sinai investigators has developed a new technique for conducting cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) tests that improves patient comfort, shortens testing time and has the potential to increase diagnostic accuracy and reliability.
Most aid provided to low- and middle-income countries is focused on controlling communicable diseases, like malaria, HIV, and other infectious diseases. However, according to new comprehensive analysis published April 4 in The Lancet, the focus should really be on controlling non-communicable diseases, like cancer, stroke, and heart disease – which are actually keeping the poorest communities poor, and negatively impacting economic development in these countries.
Researchers have developed a radically new approach to growing in the lab adult-like human heart muscle from human induced pluripotent stem cells in only four weeks. They compressed the development timeframe into a faster, more complete transition to cardiac maturity than any other team has done so far. They formed cardiac tissues from early-stage iPSC-derived cardiomyocytes, soon after the initiation of spontaneous contractions, by subjecting the cells encapsulated in hydrogel to increasingly intense physical conditioning.
Hackensack Meridian Health Bayshore Medical Center is proud to announce that it has expanded services to offer transcatheter arterial chemoembolization, also known as transarterial chemoembolization, or TACE. TACE is an image-guided, non-surgical procedure used to treat malignant lesions in the liver. Performed in the Interventional Radiology department, an X-ray guided catheter delivers chemotherapy medication and embolization materials into the blood vessels in the liver that lead to the tumor.