Heart

Heart problems observed in mothers of sons with Duchenne and Emery-Dreifuss muscular dystrophy.

A new nonsurgical technique to repair leaking mitral valves in heart failure patients was safe in a study reported in Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions.

In a small study that focused on feasibility and safety, researchers observed improvements in mitral regurgitation in patients successfully treated with a reversible implant called the Percutaneous Transvenous Mitral Annuloplasty (PTMA) system.

Boston Scientific said on Tuesday that its four year study on the effectiveness of cardiac resynchronization defibrillators in slowing the course of heart failure in patients with milder cases has proved successful.

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch, 84, joins a list of other celebrities who have needed heart surgery. Koch who served as major from 1977 to 1989 suffered a heart attack in 1999.

His spokesman George Arzt has told the press Koch is scheduled to have his aortic heart valve replaced at New York Presbyterian Hospital later this week or early next week. He was initially scheduled for a coronary angioplasty procedure on Monday but doctors decided against the procedure.

Researchers have added another potential risk of exposure to BPA. According to animal studies, BPA may harm the heart, especially in women, perhaps because of estrogen receptors in the heart. BPA stimulates estrogen activity. The new link that BPA can especially harm women’s hearts correlates with research implicating BPA exposure as a risk of breast cancer in women.

The radiation dose for a diagnostic scan of the heart and blood vessels was cut on average by more than half for almost 5,000 patients through a Michigan quality improvement project with no effect on image quality. Doctors and hospitals statewide have helped protect patients from the potential risks of radiation exposure as a result.

Details of the project – a quality improvement initiative funded by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan – are published in the June 10 issue of JAMA.

Four well-known risk factors for heart attack significantly increased the size of the heart’s left ventricle, a key precursor of heart failure, according to a study in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

High blood pressure, excessive weight, smoking and diabetes were strongly correlated with greater size of the heart’s left ventricle over the short term (four years) and the long term (16 years) in a study of more than 4,217 people.

Coronary heart disease (CHD) is the leading cause of death worldwide and a major driver of medical and economic costs, especially among older adults. It has long been established that cardiac rehabilitation improves survival, at least in middle-aged, low- and moderate-risk white men. Now a large Brandeis University-led study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology reports that older cardiac patients benefit as much from cardiac rehab as their younger counterparts.

Many hospitalized patients overestimate their chance of surviving an in-hospital cardiac arrest and do not know what CPR really involves, a University of Iowa study has shown.

The study further showed that this lack of understanding of cardiopulmonary resuscitation may affect a patient's choice about whether to have orders in place to be resuscitated if they are dying.

The study, which also involved researchers in the Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical Center, appeared in the June 1 issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Results of a new study show that visiting a crowded emergency room may spell trouble for heart patients. The findings, published in the journal Academic Emergency Medicine, show that patients with chest pain are three to five times more likely to develop complications when admitted to the hospital through a busy and crowded emergency room. The authors say a crowded emergency room is an indication that a hospital is not functioning properly.