Cardiovascular

Even short-term use of popular acid-reducing heartburn drugs may raise the risk of hip fractures, U.S. researchers said on Monday. The increased risks appeared two years after patients started taking proton pump inhibitors such as Takeda Pharmaceutical Co’s Prevacid and histamine-2 receptor antagonists, or H2RAs, such as GlaxoSmithKline’s Zantac, researchers at Kaiser Permanente San Francisco ...

New research at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston suggests that ancient Chinese herbal formulas used primarily for cardiovascular indications including heart disease may produce large amounts of artery-widening nitric oxide. Findings of the preclinical study by scientists in the university’s Brown Foundation Institute of Molecular Medicine for the Prevention of Human ...

Patients who experience fatigue during radiotherapy for breast or prostate cancer may be reacting to activation of the pro-inflammatory cytokine network, a known inflammatory pathway, according to a report in Clinical Cancer Research, a journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. Julie Bower, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Psychiatry at ...

Health-conscious people know that high levels of total cholesterol and LDL cholesterol (the so-called “bad” cholesterol) can increase the risk of heart attacks. Now scientists are reporting that another form of cholesterol called oxycholesterol — virtually unknown to the public — may be the most serious cardiovascular health threat of all. Scientists from China presented one ...

Low levels of vitamin D are known to nearly double the risk of cardiovascular disease in patients with diabetes, and researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis now think they know why. They have found that diabetics deficient in vitamin D can’t process cholesterol normally, so it builds up in their blood vessels, ...

Patients suffering from nocturia, the need to urinate at least twice during the night, may have a significantly increased risk for mortality. Researchers presented a study at the 104th Annual Scientific Meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) showing that there was a significantly increased mortality rate in elderly patients living in a Japanese assisted-living ...

Kudzu, the nuisance vine that has overgrown almost 10 million acres in the southeastern United States, may sprout into a dietary supplement. Scientists in Alabama and Iowa are reporting the first evidence that root extracts from kudzu show promise as a dietary supplement for a high-risk condition — the metabolic syndrome — that affects almost ...

A new study has concluded that low carb-high protein diet leads to more atherosclerosis in mice, findings that could have implications for diet strategies if they also hold true for humans. The low carb approach to dieting had its heyday in the 1990s, with the marketing of popular commercial diets such as the Atkins Diet. ...

With all the focus on LDL (bad) cholesterol, a ‘virtually unknown’ form called oxycholesterol may pose the biggest heart health threat, say Chinese scientists. Scientists from the Chinese University of Hong Kong identified fried and processed food as the main sources of oxycholesterol in the diet, statements that may lead to louder calls to reformulate ...

An analysis of four studies involving more than 14,000 patients found that long-term use of the diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia®) increased the risk of heart attack by 42 percent and doubled the risk of heart failure, according to a new report from researchers at Wake Forest University School of Medicine and colleagues. There was no ...

Americans with diabetes nearly doubled their spending on drugs for the disease in just six years, with the bill last year climbing to an eye-popping $12.5 billion. Newer, more costly drugs are driving the increase, said researchers, despite a lack of strong evidence for the new drugs’ greater benefits and safety. And there are more ...

Aging yeast cells accumulate damage over time, but they do so by following a pattern laid down earlier in their life by diet as well as the genes that control metabolism and the dynamics of cell structures such as mitochondria, the power plants of cells. These research findings, presented at the American Society for Cell Biology ...