Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease

Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease (January 2003)
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How are your New Year's resolutions holding up? Make sure that moderating your drinking, quitting smoking and getting more exercise top the list. Such lifestyle changes go a long way towards warding off heart disease, one of the leading causes of death among adults around the world. In the meantime, medical researchers continue to gain more insight into what directly causes heart disease--discoveries that are helping them develop more effective treatments.

In this exclusive online issue, Peter Libby explains the latest ideas about how blood vessels deteriorate in the case of atherosclerosis, and Rakesh K. Jain and Peter F. Carmeliet describe how, by manipulating angiogenesis, or the formation of new blood vessels, researchers may find drugs to treat the condition. Alternatively, other authors explore the history of defibrillation; operations to treat cardiac arrhythmias; new procedures for coronary bypass surgery; and, when all other interventions have failed, the use of artificial hearts.--The Editors

Cover; Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

Table of Contents; Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

The Trials of an Artificial Heart; Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease; by Steve Ditlea; 7 Page(s)

A year after doctors began implanting the AbioCor in dying patients, the prospects of the device are uncertain (originally published July 2002)

Operating on a Beating Heart; Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease; by Cornelius Borst; 4 Page(s)

Coronary bypass surgery can be a lifesaving operation. Two new surgical techniques should make the procedure safer and less expensive (originally published October 2000)

Surgical Treatment of Cardiac Arrhythmias; Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease; by Alden H. Harken; 6 Page(s)

To save the life of a doomed patient, the author and his colleagues developed a now standard surgical procedure for correcting lethally fast heartbeats in many people susceptible to them (originally published July 1993)

Defibrillation: The Spark of Life; Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease; by Mickey S. Eisenberg, sidebar by Carl E. Bartecchi; 5 Page(s)

In the 50 years since doctors first used electricity to restart the human heart, we have learned much about defibrillators and little about fibrillation (originally published June 1998)

Atherosclerosis: The New View; Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease; by Peter Libby; 10 Page(s)

It causes chest pain, heart attack and stroke, leading to more deaths every year than cancer. The long-held conception of how the disease develops turns out to be wrong (originally published May 2002)

Vessels of Death or Life; Tackling Major Killers: Heart Disease; by Rakesh K. Jain and Peter F. Carmeliet; 7 Page(s)

Angiogenesis - the formation of new blood vessels - might one day be manipulated to treat disorders from cancer to heart disease. First-generation drugs are now in the final phase of human testing (originally published December 2001)