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(Boston) - Researchers from Boston University School of Medicine (BUSM) in collaboration with researchers from Lahey Clinic Northshore, Peabody, Mass., believe that androgen deficiency might be the underlying cause for a variety of common clinical conditions, including diabetes, erectile dysfunction, metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease (CVD). These findings appear in the September/October issue of the Journal of Andrology. Androgens are a steroid hormone, such as testosterone, that controls the development and maintenance of male characteristics. In a number of studies, androgen deficiency has been linked to an increased mortality in men. Testosterone (T) is an anabolic hormone with a wide...

A deficiency of the sunshine vitamin may worsen plaque accumulation in vessels of diabetes patients Vitamin D deficiency may exacerbate the excess heart disease risk that people with type 2 diabetes face, a new study in the Aug. 25 Circulation suggests. In lab tests, researchers demonstrate that immune cells with very low vitamin D levels turn into soggy, cholesterol-filled baggage that can become building blocks of arterial plaques. Carlos Bernal-Mizrachi, an endocrinologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and his colleagues found that people with diabetes seem more susceptible than nondiabetics to the negative cardiovascular effects attributable...

Contact: Alisa Zapp Machalekalisa.machalek@nih.gov 301-496-7301NIH/National Institute of General Medical Sciences Gene variant linked to risk of stroke and heart attack for those on Plavix NIGMS media availability WHAT: A new study reports that a gene variant carried by about a third of the population plays a major role in this group's response to an anti-clotting medicine, clopidogrel (Plavix). People with the variant produce a defective version of the CYP2C19 enzyme and are less able to activate the drug.One of the world's best-selling medicines, Plavix prevents blood clots in people with heart disease by keeping platelets from sticking together. But about...

COPENHAGEN — Rheumatoid arthritis and two other rheumatic diseases are as strong as diabetes as risk factors for cardiovascular disease, prompting a European League Against Rheumatism task force to issue the group's first consensus recommendations for managing cardiovascular risk in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, and psoriatic arthritis. “In our view, rheumatoid arthritis [RA], ankylosing spondylitis [AS], and psoriatic arthritis [PsA] should be seen as new, independent cardiovascular risk factors,” Dr. Michael T. Nurmohamed said at the annual European Congress of Rheumatology. “Very importantly, the risk is comparable to type 2 diabetes,” added Dr. Nurmohamed, a rheumatologist at the...

Enlarge ImageEvolving evidence. In a massive study, C-reactive protein didn’t boost the risk of heart attacks.Credit: Wikipedia A new study may be the last word in a controversy that's plagued cardiovascular disease research for years: whether a marker of inflammation known as C-reactive protein (CRP) drives heart attacks and strokes. In a survey of more than 128,000 people, researchers have found that genes that raise CRP levels don't make cardiovascular disease more likely. Although the study arrives at the same conclusion as earlier work, its massive size makes it statistically the most powerful test yet of this question and...

TUESDAY, (HealthDay News) -- Injecting bone marrow cells into the heart's muscular wall restored blood flow to hearts with blocked arteries for which conventional treatments had proven ineffective, Dutch physicians have reported. "I think this is very good news for patients who are at the end of the line and have no options left," said Dr. Douwe E. Atsma, an interventional cardiologist at Leiden University Medical Center and an author of the study, which appears in the May 20 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The 50 people in the study, 43 of them men, were experiencing...

SAN DIEGO — The Institute of Medicine is reviewing its 1997 guidelines for vitamin D intake, and will likely recommend increased supplementation when new guidelines are published in 2010. There is a growing consensus that currently recommended intakes—200 IU per day for individuals under age 50 and 400 IU for those aged 50-70—are too low, said Connie Weaver, Ph.D., director of the department of food and nutrition, at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Ind. A recent analysis of data collected by the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) during 1988-1994 and 2001-2004 even suggests that an epidemic of vitamin D...

Researchers suggest a huge bump in recommended daily levels as the vitamin's benefits extend to helping fight diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Vitamin D's star is on the rise and physicians who have studied it say it's about time.Recent research has found that higher D levels are beneficial in fighting ills ranging from colds to cancer. And, on March 26, the Institute of Medicine's Food and Nutrition Board began reviewing those studies and many others with an eye to revising the recommended dietary intake of vitamin D and its close companion in maintaining bone health -- calcium. A report is...

July 22, 2008 — A new fissure is creeping through the cardiology community, dividing those in favor of risk-factor screening and prevention on one side from those who advocate early screening for the disease itself. The debate is playing out online July 29, 2008 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, with Drs Jay Cohn and Daniel Duprez (University of Minnesota Medical School, Minneapolis) arguing in favor of early identification of disease through simple screening tests, and Drs Philip Greenland and Donald Lloyd-Jones (Northwestern University, Chicago, IL) urging clinicians to focus on risk factors and steer clear of...

Apart from its sadness, Tim Russert’s death this month at 58 was deeply unsettling to many people who, like him, had been earnestly following their doctors’ advice on drugs, diet and exercise in hopes of avoiding a heart attack. Mr. Russert, the moderator of “Meet the Press” on NBC News, took blood pressure and cholesterol pills and aspirin, rode an exercise bike, had yearly stress tests and other exams and was dutifully trying to lose weight. But he died of a heart attack anyway. An article in The New York Times last week about his medical care led to e-mail...

Given the great strides that have been made in preventing and treating heart disease, what explains Tim Russert’s sudden death last week at 58 from a heart attack? The answer, at least in part, is that although doctors knew that Mr. Russert, the longtime moderator of “Meet the Press” on NBC, had coronary artery disease and were treating him for it, they did not realize how severe the disease was because he did not have chest pain or other telltale symptoms that would have justified the kind of invasive tests needed to make a definitive diagnosis. In that sense, his...

<p>A partisan Democratic mantra began earlier in the book. McClellan writes George H.W. Bush's 1988 campaign "acquiesced to certain advisers, including Roger Ailes and the late Lee Atwater," who opposed Bush's "civility and decency." (McClellan, then 20 years old, played no part in that campaign.) McClellan contends that thanks to Rove in 2002, "the first cracks appeared in the facade of bipartisan comity."</p>

People with diabetes have the same risk of a heart attack or stroke as patients who have survived one heart attack already, researchers reported on Monday. Diabetics have more than 2.4 times the normal risk of dying from cardiovascular disease -- about the same as those who have had a heart attack, the five-year Danish study of more than 3 million people found. "The increased risk was observed in people at all ages with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes who were receiving insulin or other drugs to reduce levels of sugar in the blood," said Dr. Tina Ken...

ORLANDO — Vitamin E has finally fulfilled its promise as an antioxidant that can slow the progression of cardiovascular disease. Patients with diabetes who also had the haptoglobin 2–2 genotype and who were treated with 400 IU of vitamin E daily for 18 months had about half the incidence of cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, and stroke, compared with patients who received placebo in a study with 1,434 patients that was done in Israel, Dr. Shany Blum reported at the annual scientific sessions of the American Heart Association. Further analysis showed that the benefit was concentrated in patients with poorly controlled...

Before he was elected mayor in 2001, Michael R. Bloomberg had surgery to have two stents implanted in a coronary artery because of blockage in his heart, a person with knowledge of Mr. Bloomberg’s health said last night. Mayor Bloomberg has not had heart disease since the stents were put in, according to this person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because Mr. Bloomberg had not authorized release of the information. The mayor is in excellent health today, this person said. Newsweek magazine first reported the implants this week. The person with knowledge of the mayor’s health said the procedure...

High consumption of trans fat, found mainly in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils and widely used by the food industry, has been linked to an increased risk of coronary heart disease (CHD). New York and Philadelphia have passed measures eliminating its use in restaurants, and other cities are considering similar bans. A new study from the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) provides the strongest association to date between trans fat and heart disease. It found that women in the U.S. with the highest levels of trans fat in their blood had three times the risk of CHD as those with...

AP Medical Writer More than half a million people a year with chest pain are getting an unnecessary or premature procedure to unclog their arteries because drugs are just as effective, suggests a landmark study that challenges one of the most common practices in heart care. The stunning results found that angioplasty did not save lives or prevent heart attacks in non-emergency heart patients. An even bigger surprise: Angioplasty gave only slight and temporary relief from chest pain, the main reason it is done. "By five years, there was really no significant difference" in symptoms, said Dr. William Boden of...

Science Daily — Rush University Medical Center is one of the first medical centers in the country, and currently the only site in Illinois, participating in a novel clinical trial to determine if a subject’s own stem cells can treat a form of severe coronary artery disease. The Autologous Cellular Therapy CD34-Chronic Myocardial Ischemia (ACT34-CMI) Trial is the first human, Phase II adult stem cell therapy study in the U.S. designed to investigate the efficacy, tolerability, and safety of blood-derived selected CD34+ stem cells to improve symptoms and clinical outcomes in subjects with chronic myocardial ischemia (CMI), a severe form...

Opening a blocked artery with balloons and stents can be lifesaving in the early hours after a heart attack, but a new study concludes that it often does no good if the heart attack occurred three or more days before. The findings should change medical practice, researchers say, and could affect as many as 50,000 patients a year in the United States. They say doctors should stop trying to open arteries in people who had heart attacks days or weeks before and who are stable and free of chest pain. Currently, the balloon procedure, called angioplasty, is used in many...

A provocative review paper published this month has raised questions about the aggressive cholesterol-lowering recommendations made two years ago by a government panel. The panel, the National Cholesterol Education Program, urged patients at risk for heart disease to reduce sharply their harmful LDL cholesterol and to try to reach specific, very low levels. Though the authors of the new paper, published in the Oct. 3 issue of Annals of Internal Medicine, endorse the use of cholesterol-lowering statins, they say there is not enough solid scientific evidence to support the target numbers for LDL cholesterol set forth by the government panel....

Researchers at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation have launched a study to examine whether administration of stem cells to first time heart attack patients can prevent the development of congestive heart failure (CHF). CHF diagnosis is the cause of hospitalization in the United States and is responsible for more than 50,000 deaths a year. Currently, heart transplantation is the only available cure.  Each year more than one million Americans have their first heart attack, putting them at risk of developing CHF as a result of cardiac cell death and scar formation which results in diminished pumping ability of the heart...

(BETHESDA, MD) – Left ventricular function and exercise capacity increased, while the area of heart muscle damage shrank, in 18 patients given infusions of their own bone marrow stem cells up to eight years after a heart attack, according to a new study in the Nov. 1, 2005, issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. "This new therapy is able to treat until now irreversible heart complaints and function disturbances in patients with chronic coronary artery disease after myocardial infarction, even many years after heart attack. Therefore there is hope for this large amount of patients with...

An alcoholic drink a day can significantly reduce the risk for heart disease in men, a new study finds, but women get almost the same benefit with only one drink a week. The report, which appears online in the British medical journal BMJ, suggests that for women, alcohol intake is the primary protective factor, while for men, it is drinking frequency. The Danish study included 27,178 men and 29,875 women volunteers who were free of coronary heart disease at the start of the study. They filled out questionnaires and underwent interviews about their eating and drinking habits, recording how many...

TOKYO, May 1 (Reuters) - The dollar struck a seven-month low against the yen and a one-year low against the euro on Monday, extending a slide as the Federal Reserve appears set to soon end a two-year run of credit tightening. A renewed focus on U.S. deficits after last month's meeting of Group of Seven industrialised powers, worries about Iran's nuclear ambitions and deteriorating technical signals have pummeled the dollar across the board. The yen gained across the board on solid buying by foreign hedge funds and investment banks, while some Japanese players squared positions heading into the country's Golden...

John McCain is running for President 2008. As a republican candidate, John McCain could win the republican nomination. Many feel if John McCain runs against Hillary Clinton, he would win the presidential election in 2008. John McCain graduated from the Naval Academy in 1958. After graduation, John McCain became a Naval Avaitor. For over 5 years, John McCain was a Vietnam captive. John McCain became a US Senator for Arizona in 1986. Senator John McCain is now Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, and is known for his successful passing of Campaign Finance Reform. Express your...

A recent study looks at why aspirin's effect on female hearts seems to be different than its effect on male hearts. In both men and women, daily aspirin therapy is one of the mainstays of treatment in preventing heart attacks and strokes. Previous studies have shown as much as a 42-percent decrease in heart attacks among men who take aspirin compared to a placebo. However, the recent Women's Health Study of almost 40,000 women showed that low-dose aspirin's effects on women did not reduce coronary artery disease, but did reduce the risk of stroke. To investigate this and similar findings,...

AP MEDICAL WRITER ATLANTA -- People in a new study got their "bad cholesterol" to the lowest levels ever seen and saw blockages in their blood vessels shrink by taking a high dose of cholesterol drug, researchers reported Monday. Doctors say it is the best evidence yet that heart disease actually can be reversed, not just kept from getting worse. Two-thirds of the 349 study participants had regression of heart artery buildups when they took the maximum dose of Crestor, the strongest of the cholesterol-lowering statin drugs on the market and one under fire by a consumer group that contends...

A new report suggests that for women who have had hysterectomies, taking estrogen does not increase the risk of heart disease and may even protect the heart in those who are younger, from 50 to 59. The findings, being published today in The Archives of Internal Medicine, concern the use of estrogen alone and differ from earlier studies of estrogen and progesterone. The studies of combined hormones found that they increased the risk of heart disease, breast cancer and other ailments. The new results lend support to a theory held by some researchers, that hormone therapy may help prevent heart...

What started out as a frontpage supermarket tabloid story in the National Enquirer regarding Senator Ted Kennedy's "love child," is slowly but surely gaining some traction in the mainstream news media. After the story of appeared in the Enquirer, the Boston Herald in Kennedy's own backyard ran a similar story. Now the largest circulation newspaper in the Big Apple, the New York Daily News -- a decidedly liberal news organization -- is running a follow-up story. According to a column in the NY Daily News, Ted Kennedy's alleged love child, Christopher Allen, appears to have corroborated The National Enquirer's claim...

OUTSOURCING of design to India by car manufacturers has boosted sales of related design engineering software. "The influx of design outsourcing into India is helping," agreed Mr Narendra Reddy, Managing Director, India Operations, UGS, an engineering services company that offers Computer Aided Design and Manufacturing (CAD-CAM) solutions and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solutions. With General Motors and Ford entering the country, as well as Tata Motors and Mahindras setting up design labs, the necessity for engineering service solutions is increasing. Global products, as opposed to local ones, are being favoured with the setting up of microcosms of labs abroad. The...

A June 2004 meeting between Friendswood school officials and the chief appraiser of the Galveston County Central Appraisal District was to keep the school district from losing state funding because under-appraised homes in six Friendswood subdivisions, said FISD superintendent Trish Hanks. The meeting has become fodder for Houston talk radio station KSEV and its Lone Star Times web site, with allegations that the district tried to bring unwarranted influence to bear on the appraisal district to boost property values and therefore permit a "stealth" tax increase. In the arcane process of property appraisal for tax purposes, Hanks said the state...

Friendswood school district and appraisal district officials on Friday defended a meeting they had last year that resulted in higher property appraisals for residents in six subdivisions. Both Ken Wright, the appraisal district’s chief appraiser, and school Superintendent Trish Hanks said the meeting was to ensure the school district did not lose state funding because property in its boundaries had been under-appraised. Hanks, other officials and three school board members met with Wright last year, presenting him with records of home sales indicating the appraisal district had undervalued real estate in the school district. Hanks said school officials wanted to...

Sketch artistry Boulder firm's software lets users design in three dimensions By Julie Poppen, Rocky Mountain News March 14, 2005 BOULDER - Architects, video-game and movie-set designers, people who make machines, graphic artists - even young students and their teachers - are gushing over SketchUp, @Last Software's sole product. Here's why: The software allows even technophobes to design in three dimensions with the push of a button or the swipe of a mouse. A user can impress a spouse with a home addition designed within minutes or wow a client with a video presentation of a walk-through of a botanic...

The condition for which former President Bill Clinton will undergo elective surgery on Thursday is a complication that occurs in fewer than 1 percent of coronary bypass patients, his doctors said yesterday. The complication, in which fluid and scar tissue compress and collapse a lobe of the left lung, is not expected to recur, the doctors said at a news conference at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center. The doctors said they expected that Mr. Clinton "will resume his work without limitations" within a month. Doctors not involved in Mr. Clinton's care agreed that the complication was unusual and did not pose...

The Associated Press ORLANDO, Fla. — A new generation of tiny, drug-coated metal scaffolds that prop open arteries has transformed heart care and is allowing a growing number of people to avoid bypass surgery. The devices, called drug-coated stents, release medication that prevents vessels from reclogging after procedures to open them up. At an American College of Cardiology conference on Sunday, doctors reported that both brands sold today are equally good at keeping blood flowing smoothly, although one might be better for diabetics. Both were vastly better than the plain metal ones that were standard just a few years ago....

The evidence has gotten much stronger that a substance known as C-reactive protein may be every bit as important as cholesterol in the diagnosis and treatment of heart disease. Back in 2002, a thought-provoking study found that a blood test for C-reactive protein, called CRP, was actually better than the standard cholesterol test at predicting the risk of a heart attack or a stroke. Now two studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine have shown that drugs that reduce the levels of that protein in patients with severe heart disease can slow the progression of atherosclerosis and prevent...

Reducing the levels of a protein secreted by the body during inflammation may be as powerful in slowing heart disease and preventing heart attacks and deaths as lowering cholesterol, two teams of researchers are reporting. The studies, published in Thursday's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, provide the strongest evidence yet for the role of the protein, known as CRP for C-reactive protein, in heart disease. The participants were patients with severe heart disease who were taking high doses of statin drugs, which lower both cholesterol and CRP. Lower CRP levels, the researchers found, were linked to a...

A seductive new diagnostic technology may be coming to a medical center near you. It is an advanced heart scanner that can produce sharply detailed pictures of every clogged artery that might be threatening to cause a heart attack. Some experts expect it to revolutionize the practice of cardiology, while others are warning that it could bankrupt the health care system. Even discounting for hyperbole on both sides, it will be important to ensure that this technology is used only on the most appropriate patients and not promoted willy-nilly for every anxious man or woman eager to exploit the latest...

Kerry A Cad To First Wife And Children and A Predator of Rich Women   Kerry started dating Teresa while still married.  Then bent to Theresa’s demand that 1st marriage be annulled in spite of his two children from that marriage. Note: great insight on Kerry from Ann Coulter's new book: Kerry was indisputably brave in Vietnam, and it's kind of cute to see Democrats pretend to admire military service. Physical courage, like chastity, is something liberals usually deride, but are tickled when it accidentally manifests itself in one of their own. One has to stand in awe of...

More than 20 million Americans take aspirin regularly to help prevent heart attacks and strokes. But new evidence suggests that for many of them, the pills do little if any good. Recent studies have found that anywhere from 5 percent to more than 40 percent of aspirin users are "nonresponsive" or "resistant" to the medicine. That means that aspirin does not inhibit their blood from clotting, as it is supposed to. "They are taking it for stroke and heart attack prevention, and it's not going to work," said Dr. Daniel I. Simon, the associate director of interventional cardiology at Brigham...

News Fresh Mesh: A New Route to Smaller 3-D FilesGraphics Breakthrough Can Benefit Cartoon and Game Creators, Web Marketers, Virtual Museums and Others A University of Southern California computer scientist has created a powerful and elegant algorithm to compress the large and ungainly files that represent 3-D shapes used in animations, video games and other computer graphics applications. Simplifying by condensing small triangles (colored) into larger ones, and then into polygons. Mathieu Desbrun, assistant professor of computer science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering says that digital sound, pictures and video are relatively easy to compress today but...

I am attending tech school on the 28th of June. I am signed up for residential and commercial electricity, but I am thinking CAD might be a better choice. So my question is - for anyone with any know how about either field, what would you recommend? I think I would enjoy both, but my main goal is employability. My programming experience would help me in CAD, but I have no idea how saturated the market is, or how to find out. My old job was a mainframe programmer, but since I don't speak Hindi and don't want to move...

*****Start Select by clicking below here and dragging down to end select ***** Subject: John Kerry, man of the common folk.... he understands your pain, really... trust him - lol, yeah - right The many homes of Democrat Presidential candiate, John F. Kerry. Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania  (Assessed value: $3.7 million)   Ketchum, Idaho ski getaway/vacation home  (Assessed value: $4.916 million)   Washington, D.C - Georgetown area (assessment: $4.7 million)   Nantucket, Massachusetts waterfront retreat on Brant Point (Assessed value: $9.18 million)   Boston, Massachusetts  - Beacon Hill home (Assessed value: $6.9)   oh, and he sold this estate in Italy to...

A new and emerging understanding of how heart attacks occur indicates that increasingly popular aggressive treatments may be doing little or nothing to prevent them. The artery-opening methods, like bypass surgery and stents, the widely used wire cages that hold plaque against an artery wall, can alleviate crushing chest pain. Stents can also rescue someone in the midst of a heart attack by destroying an obstruction and holding the closed artery open. But the new model of heart disease shows that the vast majority of heart attacks do not originate with obstructions that narrow arteries. Instead, recent and continuing studies...

For years, doctors have been saying that to prevent heart disease, patients should pay attention to both the so-called bad cholesterol, or L.D.L., and the good cholesterol, or H.D.L. The good, they said, can counteract the bad. But now, some scientists say, new and continuing studies have called into question whether high levels of the good cholesterol are always good and, when they are beneficial, how much. While some heart experts are not ready to change their treatment advice, others have concluded that H.D.L. should play at most a minor role in deciding whether to prescribe cholesterol-lowering drugs. In the...

Lowering cholesterol far below the level that most doctors now consider adequate can substantially reduce patients' risk of having or dying from a heart attack, researchers reported today. The findings, cardiologists say, will greatly change how doctors treat patients with heart disease and will provide the impetus to re-evaluate how low cholesterol levels should be. The study compared high doses of one of the most powerful cholesterol-lowering drugs, Pfizer's Lipitor, to a less potent drug, Pravachol, made by Bristol-Myers Squibb, which conducted the trial. The patients taking Lipitor were significantly less likely to have heart attacks or to require bypass...

It didn't get much attention back when Sen. John Kerry was a cellar dweller in the presidential polls. But now that he's the undisputed, all but certain, presumptive Democratic Party nominee, we're wondering where the coverage is on Teresa Heinz Kerry's Enron connection. Long after Enron chairman Ken Lay had been demonized as a ruthless corporate buccaneer who had cheated widows and orphans out of their life savings, the man Dems love to invoke to beat-up the Bush White House sat on the board of Teresa's Heinz Center Foundation. In fact, Lay was reportedly a Heinz Center trustee for...

After the New Hampshire primary, Dennis Kucinich's new slogan is: ".001 Percent of America Can't Be Wrong!" John Edwards' new slogan is: "Vote for Me or We'll See You in Court." Joe Lieberman's new slogan is: "Sixth Place Is Not an Option." (Bumper sticker version: "Ask Me About My Delegate.") Al Sharpton's new slogan is "Hello? Room Service?" Wesley Clark's new slogan is: "Leading America's War on Fetuses." Howard Dean's new slogan is: "I Want to Be Your President ... And So Do I!" That leaves John Kerry (new slogan: "Nous Sommes Nombre Un!"), who is winning Democratic voters in...

Torricelli to Kerry: And They're Calling You 'Cash and Kerry?' By Bill Pascoe Memorandum To: John From: Bob Date: February 6, 2004 Re: My Return, and How To Answer the Near-Certain Questions Thanks for helping me get up off the mat and back in the game. As I told you, that $100K I've raised for you is just the tip of the iceberg -- there's plenty more where that came from, and yes, it's all from legal sources. Hell, I haven't even SEEN David Chang in years. JUST KIDDING! All jokes aside, I'm just a bit worried that the news...

<p>SAN DIEGO — Arnold Schwarzenegger's "California Comeback Express" hit a bump in the road yesterday with an acknowledgment by that he had once "behaved badly" toward women in his movie career, and now he is "deeply sorry."</p> <p>Mr. Schwarzenegger responded to a story in the Los Angeles Times detailing accusations that he had groped and harassed women over 30 yearsin Hollywood as a champion bodybuilder and movie star. Some of the accusations are nearly 30 years old.</p>