Cardio News

Patient history and physical examination, traditionally the cornerstone diagnostic tool for medical care, may still be among the most accurate and cost-efficient methods to assess patients with congestive heart failure, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found.

Such time-honored techniques have diminished in importance in recent years as doctors have come to rely on high-tech diagnostic approaches, such as imaging and measuring biomarkers.

In today’s issue of Circulation: Heart Failure, however, UT Southwestern and other researchers have found that the history and physical exa

A newly discovered chemical pathway that helps protect heart tissue can be stimulated by two of 20 common beta-blockers, drugs that are prescribed to millions of patients who have experienced heart failure.

Researchers from Duke University Medical Center tested 20 beta blockers and found that two of them—alprenolol and carvedilol—could stimulate a pathway recently found to protect heart tissue.

This finding could guide future drug development and in particular help heart failure patients, says Howard Rockman, M.D., senior author of the study and chief of the Duke Cardiology Division. 

Mayo Clinic investigators have demonstrated that stem cells can be used to regenerate heart tissue to treat dilated cardiomyopathy, a congenital defect.

Infectious heart disease is still a major killer in spite of improvements in health care, but the way the disease develops has changed so much since its discovery that nineteenth century doctors would not recognise it, scientists heard today (Thursday 11 September 2008) at the Society for General Microbiology’s Autumn meeting being held this week at Trinity College, Dublin.

Infective endocarditis is a devastating, progressive and frequently fatal heart disease usually caused by bacterial pathogens.