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When it comes to assessing your risk for heart disease, you need to think not only about how much you weigh, but where you carry any extra pounds. That’s because people who have what’s considered a healthy weight based on their body mass index (BMI) can still have an increased risk for heart disease if they have extra fat around their midsection, according to guidelines from the American Heart Association (AHA) published in April 2021 in
This means that even if you’re not overweight, your next physical should involve a tape measure around your waist in addition to a check of your height and weight, according to the AHA.
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NEW YORK, NY Diagnosing chronic kidney disease, which is often undetected until it causes irreversible damage, may soon become automated with a new algorithm that interprets data from electronic medical records.
The algorithm, developed by researchers at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, automatically scours a patient s electronic medical record for results of blood and urine tests and, using a mix of established equations and machine learning to process the data, can alert physicians to patients in the earliest stages of chronic kidney disease.
A study of the algorithm was published in the journal
npj Digital Medicine in April.
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Study reveals a cause of heart damage in COVID-19 patients
The heart damage seen in many severely ill COVID-19 patients results in part from infection-activated immune cells called macrophages, which infiltrate the heart and secrete cell-damaging chemicals, according to a study co-led by researchers at Weill Cornell Medicine, NewYork-Presbyterian, Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai and Columbia University Irving Medical Center. The research identifies new potential treatments for COVID-19 patients as well as describes a model system for further studies and drug screening. Dr. Liuliu Yang/Weill Cornell Medicine
Confocal image of heart autopsy sample of a COVID-19 patient. The image shows the damaged structure of cardiomyocytes (red) and increased expression of chemokine, CCL2 (green), which recruits macrophages that further damage heart tissue.
USPSTF Reaffirms Advice to Screen Adults for Hypertension medscape.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from medscape.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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Adults should continue undergoing routine hypertension screening, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF), which specified office blood pressure (BP) measurements for initial screening.
It is reasonable for adults 40 years and older and those at increased risk for hypertension to undergo screening every year. Young people not at risk, or those with a prior normal BP reading, may get screened every few years instead, said Alex Krist, MD, MPH, of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, and colleagues of the task force.
Thus, the USPSTF reaffirms its 2015 grade A recommendation for hypertension screening citing its potential to reduce cardiovascular events, with few major harms while clarifying that this should be performed with office readings, leaving measurements outside the clinical setting (i.e., ambulatory BP monitoring [ABPM] or home BP measurement [HBPM]) for diagnostic confirmation before starting treatment.