03/19/07 Advice for all ages: Don't skip the dentist

• Earlier this month, a team of researchers from the University of Connecticut and London announced that aggressive treatment of gum disease can improve the function of blood vessel walls in the body, potentially reducing the risk of heart attacks. A few weeks before that, researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health reported a study of more than 51,000 male health professionals, which showed that men who had gum disease, or periodontitis, were far more likely than those without it to get pancreatic cancer.

05/15/06 Carotid Stents Get Better, But Proof They Work is Scant

• Stents, long famous for their success in propping open clogged arteries in the heart, are now being used in neck arteries in an effort to reduce strokes. Technical advances have made the stents safer to insert in neck arteries, and some experts now fear that doctors may adopt the procedure — and patients may clamor for it — before there is sufficient research to support it.

04/03/06 Inflammation is Culprit in Many Ailments

• The idea is as simple as it is radical: Chronic inflammation, spurred by an immune system run amok, appears to play a role in medical evils from arthritis to Alzheimer's, diabetes to heart disease. There's no grand proof of this "theory of everything." But doctors say it's compelling enough that we should act as if it were true -- which means eating an “anti-inflammatory diet,” getting lots of physical activity, and losing the dangerous, internal belly fat that pumps out the chemicals that drive inflammation (More on this nasty chemistry later).

10/05/04 Diabetes and Heart Disease are Closely Linked

• More than 30 years ago, when Dr. David Heber was an intern at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, he asked the senior doctors the same question over and over. "How come all my patients have high blood pressure, high cholesterol and diabetes? Are these things linked?" His mentors would shrug and say, "Dave, common things occur commonly. Go back to work," he said.

09/21/04 Pump Head - a Possible Outcome of Coronary Bypass Surgery

• When Bill Clinton, 58, underwent quadruple coronary bypass surgery on Labor Day, the former president, like most Americans who have similar operations, spent time – in his case, 73 minutes - hooked up to a heart-lung machine while surgeons re-routed blood vessels to his heart. With luck and his relative youth and health going for him, Clinton will hopefully rebound fit in both heart and mind from the bypass surgery, in which doctors replace clogged arteries to the heart with veins and arteries taken from elsewhere in the body.

08/24/04 Cinnamon Joins Cholesterol Battle

• A common spice already enjoyed by many Americans appears to lower blood sugar and cholesterol, a potential boon to millions of people with diabetes and millions of others with high cholesterol. The spice is cinnamon. In a paper published in December in Diabetes Care, researchers from the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center in Maryland, part of the US Department of Agriculture, reported on a  small, but encouraging study of 60 people with Type 2 diabetes in Pakistan.

03/11/03 Blood Pressure Drugs - Confusing but Crucial

• In December, a study of more than 42,000 white and black Americans found that old-fashioned, cheap diuretics – “water pills” – work at least as well and sometimes better than more expensive drugs to treat high blood pressure and certain heart problems.  The study, dubbed ALLHAT, was published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association

12/31/02 Our Columnist Goes Under the Knife

•  I was very scared, shivering as much from fear as from the chilly room temperature. I was waiting on a gurney at Brigham and Women’s Hospital to be wheeled in for a catheter ablation, an invasive cardiac "procedure." (Ah, the euphemisms.) In a totally bizarre twist of fate, I had several weeks earlier interviewed Dr. Laurence Epstein, chief of the cardiac arrhythmia service, in preparation for a column I was working on about new treatments for arrhythmias.

12/17/02 New Fixes for Electrical Problems in the Heart

• Until last winter, Joseph Moniz, 50, a Fall River man with congestive heart failure was waiting, like 4,000 other Americans, for a heart transplant to save his life. He never got it. But he got something better: a small device called an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) like the one Dick Cheney got, a familiar gadget but with a new twist.

11/19/02 A New Heart Disease Test That Could Save Your Life

• A new test called high sensitivity CRP, catapulted into the headlines last week by a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, appears to be better than cholesterol at predicting the risk of heart attack and stroke. The test measures levels of an inflammatory substance, C-reactive protein that plays a role in cardiovascular disease.

05/07/02 Coated Stents Show Huge Promise 

• Vice President Dick Cheney made the problem famous, but thousands of  Americans each year need a new round of treatment to fix a heart problem they thought was already solved. 

11/21/00 - Ties That Bind Help Stroke Patients

• Fred Kemp, 38, a former restaurant manager in Atlanta, Ga., had one simple goal: To open a refrigerator door with his left hand five years ago, Kemp was watching TV when he dozed off, then woke up to go to the bathroom.

09/13/99 - Plaque can gum up the works in legs

• Dr. Zdan Korduba, an anesthesiologist at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in New York, wound up having one toe amputated, losing months of work and feeling like a total chump for missing symptoms he'd have spotted right away in a patient. Beginning five years ago, he says ruefully, he began noticing that his legs hurt after tennis: ``I got tremendous cramps, but I put it off as being out of shape.'' Before long, he found he ``couldn't walk the same distance as before. I kept denying this to myself. 

07/19/99 - Picturing heart disease another way

• Richard Knorr's heart is making medical history. But there's actually not much that's unusual about it. Though two of his coronary arteries are partially blocked, the 64-year-old Framingham man has never had a heart attack and he can control his chest pain with medications.

02/08/99 - Stress of surgery hard on the heart

• Dorothy Teixeira, a 76-year-old Peabody woman who had a history of chest pains, got even more bad news last summer: She had colon cancer and needed surgery. In many hospitals, Teixeira would have been taken off her heart medications during and after surgery because of the fear that the drugs -- called beta-blockers -- might make her heart too sluggish.

05/25/98 - Mining veins - Endoscopy emerging as safer, less painful way to gather grafts for coronary bypasses

• WORCESTER -- It's early afternoon, a perfect spring day. Outside the UMass Medical Center, employees savor the last of their lunch break, faces tipped toward the sun, legs splayed on the grass. Inside, in operating room 3, Evelyn Kolat, 74, lies inert, dwarfed by a vast array of surgical instruments, anesthesia paraphernalia, and a heart-lung machine.

06/24/96 - The other heart attack risks - Anger, grief, fear

• Fifteen years ago, at 10:53 on a February evening, the people of Athens were jolted by an earthquake that measured 6.7 on the Richter scale. Within an hour of the quake and for three days afterwards, terrified Athenians were dropping dead at more than twice the normal rate. This suggested, at least to Harvard School of Public Health epidemiologist Dimitrios Trichopoulos, that mental stress had triggered the increased deaths, most of them from heart attacks

04/22/96 - Loneliness can be the death of us

• A little over 100 years ago, a small band of Italians left Roseto Val Fortore, a village in the foothills of the Apennines, in hopes of a better life amid the slate quarries of eastern Pennsylvania. Naming their new village Roseto, the group soon recreated the strong community ties they had nurtured in Italy. They lived in three-generation households, centered their lives on family and built their houses so close together that all it took to have in a neighborly chat was a walk to the front porch.