Heart Disease

Heart disease often gets lost in discussions of women's health because it strikes men at an earlier age, but experts are quick to point out that it ultimately kills as many women as it does men.It also kills as many women as do all cancers combined. And taken together, the related diseases of heart disease and stroke kill about a half million women each year -- twice the number killed by cancer.This is why Dr. Trudy Bush, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, speaks passionately about a coming study that will test the theory that hormone replacement therapy can dramatically reduce heart-related deaths in post-menopausal women with histories of heart disease.

Vitamin C greatly enhances the ability of vitamin E to prevent damage to LDL, the so-called bad cholesterol, which, if damaged, is suspected of being the first step in the progression to heart disease, according to researchers at the University of California at Berkeley.In the past few years, scientists have found that oxygen-free radicals, toxic byproducts of normal chemistry, can damage LDL. The damaged LDL then becomes embedded into arterial walls, leading to a buildup of fatty deposits.

Ask most people what causes heart disease and they will point to cholesterol. For the last 30 years we have been told about the dangers of eggs, beef, butter and cream. Yet according to one of the country's leading experts on heart disease, Dr. Meir Stampfer of Harvard, most patients who suffer heart attacks have normal cholesterol levels.For decades, scientists have been tracking another substance in the blood as a potential culprit in heart disease. Few people have ever heard about homocysteine, but the more it is studied, the more dangerous it looks.

A cheap and painless set of tests developed in leading medical centers around the country promises to predict heart disease and stroke, and pinpoint the patients who really need aggressive therapy, far more accurately than do the traditional risk factors.The new method includes a simple measurement of the difference in blood pressure between arms and ankles, and a noninvasive acoustic test that measures narrowing of the carotid arteries that carry blood to the brain.Many patients with high cholesterol levels do not develop heart disease.

James Drumwright, who died of a heart attack after employees carried him out of a West North Avenue market because they thought he was only drunk, was intoxicated when he died, the state medical examiner said yesterday.Mr. Drumwright, 57, had a blood alcohol level of .20 at the time of his death Thursday, said Dr. John E. Smialek, the medical examiner. The legal level of intoxication is .10. Mr. Drumwright also had chronic heart disease and showed signs of chronic alcoholism, Dr. Smialek said.

A Delaware man whose body was found Monday on a satellite parking lot at Baltimore-Washington International Airport died of heart disease, the state medical examiner's office said yesterday.The driver of an airport shuttle bus found the body of Robert Lee Turner, 67, of Millsboro, Del., about 9 p.m. on the blue satellite parking lot, said a spokesman for the Maryland Transportation ,, Authority Police.Dr. David Fowler of the medical examiner's office said yesterday Turner had been dead a short time before his body was discovered.

Tapping into 40 years of medical data, Johns Hopkins researchers have found that men plagued by depression are twice as likely to have a heart attack or develop heart disease than peers who aren't depressed.The study, published in today's issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, confirms what about 10 others have found. But the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine research used better data, including years of cholesterol and blood pressure measurements that enabled scientists to rule out those factors and see depression as the problem.

A large-scale, 10-year study of nurses indicates that women who take the female hormone estrogen after menopause can cut their risk of heart disease in half.Medical experts say the new findings should help answer a question that has troubled millions of middle-aged and elderly women: Are the benefits of estrogen worth the risks?Besides its effect on heart disease, the drug averts thinning of the bones, a serious disease in the elderly. But women have been concerned by evidence that taking estrogen also can bring on cancers of the breast or of the lining of the uterus.

WASHINGTON -- Residents of Appalachia, one of the poorest areas of the United States, are more likely to die from heart disease than people living elsewhere, a new study by researchers at West Virginia University has found.The authors of the 100-page report said a lack of medical facilities in the region and a lack of emphasis on nutrition and exercise contribute to a higher level of heart problems in Appalachia.Elizabeth Barnett, an assistant professor at the West Virginia University school of medicine who led the study group, said researchers found that white Appalachians between ages 35 and 64 had a 15 percent to 20 percent greater chance of dying from heart disease than white Americans living elsewhere.

A large study has failed to confirm a cherished nutritional belief: that the more fish you eat, the better you will be protected against heart disease.The study, by Dr. Alberto Ascherio of the Harvard School of Public Health and his colleagues, followed 44,895 men for six years to determine whether those who ate the most fish would have the lowest incidence of heart disease.To their surprise, they found that it did not matter whether the men ate fish once a month or six times a week -- the rate of heart disease was unaffected.