Category: heart-letter

Shortness of breath may signal a serious heart emergency. Know when it’s time to call for help.

When ischemic stroke strikes, time is of the essence. The sooner a person is treated with the clot-busting drug tPA, the sooner blood flow is restored to the brain and the better the odd of recovery.

Diagnosing a heart attack requires a blood test for troponin, plus symptoms or evidence of heart attack on an ECG or imaging test. There are six different types of heart attack, each of which may be treated differently.

Statin drugs are very good at lowering cholesterol, but side effects such as muscle weakness or muscle pain can make the drugs hard to tolerate. Fortunately, there are several statin drugs on the market.

Operations, even those that don’t directly concern the heart, put people with heart disease at risk of heart-related complications.

Poor sleep is linked to poor heart health. That goes double for people with sleep apnea, who stop breathing many times during the night.

Taking two kinds of blood thinners-anticoagulant and antiplatelet drugs-increases your risk of dangerous bleeding. But for some people with atrial fibrillation, the stroke-prevention benefit of this double therapy far outweighs the risk.

Eat a half cup of blueberries or strawberries three times each week. It’s nutritious-and it may very well lower your risk of heart attack, a study of young and middle-aged women suggests.

Bypass surgery is considered the best treatment when all three coronary arteries are blocked. It’s usually the best choice when the most important of the three arteries is blocked.

Meat eaters should be careful about taking L-carnitine supplements, new research suggests.