iStock
May 14, 2021
Your heart valves are the small but mighty heroes of your circulatory system these four paper-thin membranes attached to the heart wall do a ton of work to keep your heart beating (and you, alive). In fact, they open and close a whopping 80 million times a year! So, keeping them strong and free of problems, like stenosis (when the valves thicken or stiffen) and regurgitation (when blood sneaks back through it the wrong direction) is crucial. How do you do that? With these smart lifestyle, diet, and health moves that will keep those little babies flapping with more ease.
When I first started as an EMT in Newark, N.J., I had the opportunity to work with a more experienced partner who had started working on the ambulance in the mid 1960s, pre-EMT training in the state. He said to me, “Kid, blood pressure, tire pressure it’s all the same.” While this statement gave me a chuckle, I soon realized a cavalier approach to blood pressure and the tools we use to measure it does not serve us well as clinicians. BP is an essential cardiovascular variable. Its monitoring is mandatory in any EMS patient, and it has a significant impact on patient management. BP is essential for us to determine when a patient is decompensating and proceeding into shock or is in extremis due to congestive heart failure or hypertensive crisis.
Credit: CC0 Public Domain
People with abdominal obesity and excess fat around the body’s mid-section and organs have an increased risk of heart disease even if their body mass index (BMI) measurement is within a healthy weight range, according to a new Scientific Statement from the American Heart Association published today in the Association’s flagship journal,
Circulation.
“This scientific statement provides the most recent research and information on the relationship between obesity and obesity treatment in coronary heart disease, heart failure and arrhythmias,” said Tiffany M. Powell-Wiley, M.D., M.P.H., FAHA, chair of the writing committee and a Stadtman Tenure-Track Investigator and chief of the Social Determinants of Obesity and Cardiovascular Risk Laboratory in the Division of Intramural Research at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. “The timing of this information is importan
E-Mail
DALLAS, April 21, 2021 A smartphone-based electrocardiogram (ECG) screening accurately detected previously unknown atrial fibrillation in American Indians, and more than half who were diagnosed with the irregular heart rhythm were younger than the recommended screening age of 65, according to new research published today in the
Journal of the American Heart Association, an open access journal of the American Heart Association.
About one-third of ischemic strokes, those triggered by blood clots, are caused by atrial fibrillation, the most common heart rhythm disorder. Since many people don t have symptoms and are unaware of its presence, atrial fibrillation often goes undiagnosed. In some cases, a stroke is the first sign that a person has the disorder. American Indians are more at risk for atrial fibrillation than people in other racial and ethnic groups. As a population, American Indians also have substantially higher rates of obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure
E-Mail
DALLAS, April 5, 2021 When people with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) develop high blood pressure, the type of medication chosen for their initial treatment may influence their risk of heart disease, stroke and heart failure, according to new research published today in
Hypertension, an American Heart Association journal.
With current anti-retroviral medications, people with HIV are able to live longer. However, people with HIV receiving anti-retroviral therapy (ART) are more likely to develop high blood pressure (hypertension) and hypertension-related heart problems than people who do not have the virus. The current study is the first to examine how the choice of blood pressure medications influences the long-term risk of heart disease, stroke and heart failure in this population that has a higher risk of CVD.