Viagra for heart attacks??

Viagra beats out nitroglycerine...

Study: Viagra may help after heart attack
March 2, 2007 -- Erectile dysfunction drugs may protect the heart better before and after a heart attack than nitroglycerin, Virginia researchers said.

"Erectile dysfunction drugs can prevent damage in the heart not only when given before a heart attack, as we discovered previously, but also lessen the injury after the heart attack," said Rakesh C. Kukreja, a professor of medicine and chairman of cardiology at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The Virginia researchers studied two erectile dysfunction drugs -- Viagra and Levitra -- in animal models and found that both reduced damage to the heart muscle after a severe heart attack.

In contrast, nitroglycerin did not reduce damage to the heart muscle, the researchers said.The findings were published in the February issue of the Journal of Molecular and Cellular Cardiology.

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Study: Fountain of youth for your heart?
November 2, 2007 - An age-related decline in heart function is a risk factor for heart disease in the elderly. While many factors contribute to a progressive age-related decline in heart function, alterations in the types of fuels the heart uses to produce energy also play important roles.

Jason Dyck and his research team at the University of Alberta have been studying the types of fuels used by the heart in young and aged mice. The young healthy heart normally used a balance of fat and sugar to generate energy to allow the heart to beat and pump blood efficiently. However, as the heart ages the ability to use fat as an energy source deteriorates. This compromises heart function in the elderly.

Interestingly, at a time when the heart is using less fat for energy, Dyck has shown that a protein that is responsible for transporting fat into the contractile cells of the heart actually increases. Based on this finding, Dyck proposed that the mismatch between fat uptake and fat use in the heart could lead to an accumulation of fat in the heart resulting in an age-related decrease in heart function.

Using a genetically engineered mouse that is deficient in a protein that is responsible for transporting fat into the cells of the heart, Dyck studied these mice as they aged. These genetically altered mice have no choice but to mainly use sugar as a fuel source because they lack the protein that allows them to use fat as a primary fuel source.

In an exciting new finding, research showed that old genetically modified mice did not accumulate fat in their hearts, as did ordinary mice. In addition, these old genetically altered mice out-performed ordinary old mice on a treadmill test, were completely protected from age-related decline in heart function, and in many ways their hearts looked and performed like hearts from a young mouse.

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New heart pill may rival blockbuster Plavix
Sun., Nov. 4, 2007 - Experimental drug prevents blood clots, but poses bleeding risk, study finds

A new blood thinner proved better than Plavix, one of the world's top-selling drugs, at preventing heart problems after procedures to open clogged arteries, doctors reported Sunday. But the new drug also raised the risk of serious bleeding. People given the experimental drug, prasugrel, were nearly 20 percent less likely to suffer one of the problems in a combined measure — heart attack, stroke or heart-related death — than those given Plavix, a drug that millions of Americans take to prevent blood clots that cause these events.

However, for each heart-related death that prasugrel (PRASS-uh-grell) prevented, compared to Plavix, almost one additional bleeding death occurred. "There is a price to pay" for greater effectiveness, Dr. Deepak Bhatt, a Cleveland Clinic cardiologist, wrote in an editorial accompanying the results, which were published online by The New England Journal of Medicine and presented at an American Heart Association conference in Florida.

Still, many doctors said that on balance, the new drug comes out ahead, and offers great promise as a more potent alternative to Plavix, which costs $4 a day and does not work for many patients. "I'm encouraged by the results" and think prasugrel should win Food and Drug Administration approval because it so dramatically cuts non-fatal heart attacks, said the Cleveland Clinic's Dr. Steven Nissen, a frequent government adviser.

More New heart pill may rival blockbuster Plavix - Heart Health - MSNBC.com

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New hearts through stem cells in the future?...

Researchers Create Beating Heart With New Cells
13 January 2008 - Researchers at the University of Minnesota seeking new treatments for heart disease have grown a beating rat heart in the lab by using stem cells.

Experts say there are an estimated 100 million people around the world whose hearts do not work well enough to pump blood through their bodies. Many heart patients in need of a transplant will die waiting for a new organ to become available. But the researchers say if human hearts can be made from animal organs, they could save lives. In their experiments, researchers removed the hearts of newborn lab rats and stripped them of their cells in a process called organ decellularization.

Lead researcher Doris Taylor, who heads the University of Minnesota's Center for Cardiovascular Repair, says investigators were left with a white protein matrix shaped like a heart that contained conduits where the blood vessels had been. Dr. Taylor says these "ghost" hearts, or scaffolds, were re-populated by infusing them with progenitor cells that have a capacity for self-renewal and differentiation much like stem cells. Within a few days, Dr. Taylor says the rat hearts began to grow cells on the outside..

"And what is really cool is that over time, our heart actually replaces that matrix that we call it," said Doris Taylor. "It is basically the cell saying 'I need something, something to hang on to,' and they build more of it over time. So, over time the human cells would replace that matrix and you would essentially have an equivalent of a human heart." The new cells were fed nutrients and were prodded with a pacemaker. After four days, investigators noted some contractions in the rat hearts. She says eight days later the experimental organs began pumping liquid faintly.

More VOA News - Researchers Create Beating Heart With New Cells

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Figure 15-20 years before it is in the operating room...

Heart Blood Vessels Grown in the Lab
FRIDAY, July 18 `08 -- Researchers say they have grown in mice the kind of functioning heart blood vessels that cardiac surgeons create with bypass operations.

One ultimate goal is to replace some heart surgery with injections of laboratory-grown cells that would establish themselves in the body, providing a system of blood vessels for damaged hearts that need more oxygen, said Juan M. Melero-Martin, a co-author of a paper in the July 18 issue of the journalCirculation Research: Journal of the American Heart Association.

"We are proving the concept in mice who are compromised so that they don't reject human cells," said Melero-Martin, a research fellow at Harvard Medical School and Children's Hospital Boston. "For clinical use, the way we envision it, if a patient has need to vascularize ischemic tissue, we can get cells from the patient ahead of time, grow them and inject them back into the patient."

Ischemic tissue is starved of blood because of blocked arteries or other damage, and revascularization restores the vessels through which blood can flow to that tissue. The research team is not using stem cells, which are controversial, because they are obtained from human embryos. Instead, they are using what are called progenitor cells, easily obtained from blood or bone marrow, which can grow to become various sorts of adult cells. The progenitor cells used in the study grew into full-fledged blood vessel systems in the laboratory mice.

The researchers combined two kinds of progenitor cells, one for those that line the surface of blood vessels, the other for cells that surround the lining and provide stability. They found that a mix of the two kinds of progenitor cells derived from adult blood and bone marrow or umbilical cord and adult bone marrow gave the best growth of blood vessels.

"Our next goal down the line is to use them in humans," said Joyce Bischoff, associate professor of medicine at Harvard and senior author of the report. Much work lies ahead, she said. "We need to do a lot more animal studies to test how these cells behave in different tissues," Bischoff said. "We have proved that the cells have the ability," Melero-Martin said. "Now we have to see how to implement this in a clinical situation."

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Heart disease discovery...

Looking for heart disease? The eyes have it
Tues., Aug. 12, 2008 WASHINGTON - Retinas offer early clues to damage to blood vessels

The eyes may carry important early clues to heart disease, signaling damage to tiny blood vessels long before symptoms start to show elsewhere, researchers reported on Tuesday. People with a type of eye damage known as retinopathy were more likely to die of heart disease over the next 12 years than those without it, according to the team at the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne in Australia and the National University of Singapore.

They studied the retinal photographs of 3,000 people, most of whom had diabetes. Such snapshots are often taken to see if the diabetes has begun to damage the eyes. Then they checked records for deaths. "Over 12 years, 353 participants (11.9 percent) had incident coronary heart disease-related deaths," the researchers reported in the journal Heart. People with retinopathy were nearly twice as likely to die of heart disease as people without it, said the team, led by the University of Sydney's Gerald Liew.

Retinopathy raised the risk of heart disease as much as diabetes did, they found. Diabetes is a well known risk factor for heart disease, the leading cause of death in most industrialized nations and many developing ones. People with these changes may be getting a first warning that damage is occurring in their arteries, and work to lower cholesterol and blood pressure, the researchers said.

Looking for heart disease? The eyes have it - Heart health - MSNBC.com

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Heart Disease...

The Leading Causes of Heart Disease
Tuesday, Aug. 14, 2007 - Heart disease is often referred to as the leading cause of death in the U.S. — but in fact, nobody dies of heart disease, because there is no such thing.

"Heart disease" is a catchall term that includes coronary artery disease, heart failure and cardiomyopathy (just as "lung disease" includes asthma, emphysema and lung cancer). It doesn't include heart attack, though, because a heart attack can be the result of one kind of heart disease or the cause of another — but isn't technically a disease itself. If that sounds confusing, it's because the heart is only part, though obviously the most important part, of the cardiovascular system, which includes not only the heart itself but also the blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients to every corner of the body. And damage to one part of this interconnected system can affect other parts.

CAUSES

The heart sends blood throughout the body — including back to itself. When everything is working right, the blood that keeps it well nourished is delivered through the coronary arteries. But in one form of heart disease, called coronary artery disease (or CAD) those arteries aren't working properly. They become clogged with fatty deposits called plaques, made out of a type of cholesterol (low-density lipoprotein, also known as LDL or, more familiarly, "bad cholesterol"). A narrowed artery can't deliver as much nutrient-rich blood as the heart needs, which can lead to symptoms such as angina — chest pain.

Left untreated, the lack of blood can make the heart weaker over time. The resulting condition is known as heart failure, or congestive heart failure — a confusing name, because it doesn't mean the heart stops entirely. Even so, while heart failure doesn't necessarily kill right away, it can eventually lead to death: 300,000 or so Americans succumb to it every year. People who get heart transplants almost always need them because of heart failure.

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Bypass better than stent in the long run...

Study: Bypass better than stents in long term
Sep 1, `08 - For heart patients with clogged arteries, the choice between bypass surgery or an angioplasty may come down to one question: How many procedures would you like to have?

In research presented Monday at the European Society of Cardiology meeting in Munich, experts concluded that while bypass surgery and angioplasty offer comparable results, patients who have angioplasties are twice as likely to require another procedure within a year. "If you don't want to have another heart operation for at least a decade, you should pick the surgery," said Dr. Heinz Drexel, professor of medicine at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and spokesman for the European Society of Cardiology. Drexel was not connected to the research. "But that means you have to have your chest cracked open," he said.

When arteries become blocked, doctors have two main options. Traditionally they have done a bypass surgery, which reroutes blood vessels to detour around blockages. But in recent years, angioplasties have become increasingly popular. An angioplasty is a non-surgical procedure where a balloon is pushed into a blood vessel to flatten the blockage, leaving a stent to prop the artery open. In the study results announced Monday, European doctors compared the effectiveness of open-heart surgery versus angioplasty in a trial of more than 3,000 patients in Europe and the United States.

About a third of the patients had medical conditions that required surgery. The remaining patients were randomly assigned to receive either surgery or an angioplasty. The study was paid for by Boston Scientific, makers of heart stents. After one year, researchers found that the death rate among the two groups was virtually the same: 7.7 percent among surgery patients and 7.6 percent among angioplasty patients. In patients who had an angioplasty, nearly 14 percent needed another procedure after a year, compared with about 6 percent of surgery patients. But patients who had surgery had about a 2 percent stroke risk versus nearly zero risk for patients who had an angioplasty. Doctors said that any surgery had an inherent stroke risk, compared with an angioplasty.

More My Way News - Study: Bypass better than stents in long term

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ER Death Points to Growing Wait-Time Problem...

Patient Died in ER After a 19-Hour Wait
Sept. 25, 2008 - Family, Doctors Say Deadly 19-hour Wait Is an Example of a Nationwide Problem

With notoriously crowded U.S. emergency rooms, chances are most American families have a story of someone waiting. It could have been half a day for a sore throat or perhaps hours for stitches or a sprained ankle. But for 58-year-old Michael Herrara of Dallas help never came. He died of a heart attack last week an estimated 19 hours after he arrived at Parkland Memorial Hospital's emergency room waiting room complaining of severe stomach pains, according to reports from WFAA News in Dallas.

Members of the Herrera family said they know they aren't alone in facing dangerously long emergency room waiting times in this country. Emergency physicians say the problem is getting worse. "He's not here because they let him die, pretty much," Edward Marquez, Herrara's nephew, told WFAA. "That's awful to know that people are treated that way," he said. "If someone can be helped by this, I think he would be happy." Representatives of Parkland Health & Hospital System said they are reviewing the case.

"It's important to also understand that, as with all emergency rooms, patients in Parkland's ER are treated based on the severity of their medical condition rather than the length of time they've waited to ensure that the most urgent cases receive proper attention," Dr. Ron J. Anderson, president and chief executive officer of Parkland Health & Hospital System wrote in a prepared press statement. Anderson told WFAA he knew the medical team marked Herrara's symptoms as a "level 5" case, rather than the most urgent "level 1." "This incident is a tragedy and our hearts are with the family," Anderson said. "We always strive to deliver the best care to all our patients."

More ABC News: ER Death Points to Growing Wait-Time Problem

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Artificial heart unveiled...

World's most advanced artificial heart 'as good as the real thing'
28 Oct 2008 - The world's most advanced artificial heart has been unveiled, with its inventor claiming it perfectly replicates the human organ.

Professor Alain Carpentier has unveiled the device three decades after the world's first human heart transplant. The French doctor has described it as the world's first fully implantable artificial heart and says it could save the lives of thousands of heart patients, many of whom die while waiting for a heart donation. The revolutionary life-size mixture of animal tissue, titanium and missile technology is covered in specially treated tissue to avoid rejection by the body's immune system and in particular the formation of blood clots.

Thanks to the latest electronic sensor technology used in guided missiles, the heart can also respond instantly to changes in blood pressure and flow and adapt the heart beat rate accordingly. "If you showed the electrocardiogram to a cardiologist he would say 'that's a human heart.' Well no, it isn't: it's a prosthesis," said Prof Carpentier, head of research on cardiac grafts and prostheses at Georges Pompidou hospital in Paris. Prof Carpentier has been working in the utmost secrecy on the project for 15 years in conjunction with engineers from the Franco-German defence and aerospace company EADS.

While there are other rival laboratories working on artificial hearts in America, Japan and South Korea, the French say their design is superior. In particular, Prof Carpentier used his expertise as a world authority in artificial heart valves to overcome the problem of blood clots - the main stumbling block in other attempts to build an artificial heart. He did this by using specially sterilised "bioprosthetic" pig cartilage and by replicating the exact same blood flow - or hemodynamics - of the human heart that reduce blood clot risks.

"The aim of this heart is to allow patients to go from an impossible life where they can do just a few steps from their bed to an armchair to a normal social life. They will even be able to run - although naturally not a marathon," he said. Weighing around a kilo, the only external part of the man-made organ is its battery which has a five-hour charge life. Prof Carpentier said the new heart was necessary given the chronic shortage of heart donors and growing heart patient waiting lists. "I couldn't stand seeing young, active people dying aged 40 from massive heart attacks," he said.

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The prototype of a fully implantable artificial heart...

Can an Artificial Heart Replace the Real Thing?
Friday, Nov. 07, 2008 - Working with the European Aeronautics Defense & Space (EADS) — best known as the maker of the Airbus jet — French researchers have developed a pioneering new artificial heart.

Dr. Alain Carpentier, the heart surgeon who led the development of the device, said that the first heart patients may receive the experimental organ in just three years. "This attempt to permanently replace the physiological heart with a completely new artificial heart has been the Holy Grail of researchers," says Dr. Peter Weissberg, the British Heart Foundation's medical director, who was not involved with creating the new device. "The question now is whether it can prove as durable as the natural heart by beating 60 to 100 times per minute for life."

Its developers say the new heart is the closest thing yet to the human body's natural ticker. Independent experts agree that it offers several significant improvements over what's currently available. The new device employs two pumps, instead of one, more accurately mimicking the function of a real heart's two ventricles, as well as a system of miniature sensors that react to physical activity and automatically increase or decrease the heart rate and blood pressure. The prosthesis also uses new composite bio-tech materials, which are made from animal tissue and chemically treated to eliminate the risk of blood clots, Carpentier says, a problem that has plagued earlier alternatives.

Most earlier mechanical hearts — such as the seminal Jarvik 7 and other ventricular assist devices — were not designed to replace diseased hearts entirely, but to assist impaired function and bridge heart patients to transplant. Other total artificial hearts, meanwhile, such as the U.S.-developed AbioCor and a prototype being tested by MagScrew, have not successfully modulated beating and pulse according to the physical needs of the host. "That physiological feedback capacity would mark a major step forward, probably allowing patients to live more normally than in the past," says Dr. Timothy Gardner, president of the American Heart Association, of the new French device.

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