Articles on the heart and metabolism: blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, heart rhythm and the risk factors that link them. Chest pain, breathlessness or fainting need urgent care, not reading.
Cardiac MRI and PET-CT detect cardiac sarcoidosis in complementary ways. MRI uses a gadolinium-based contrast agent to reveal scar and tissue swelling in the…
A cardiac rehab assessment before starting usually combines a resting electrocardiogram (ECG), an exercise stress test or a walking test, blood pressure and blood…
Swelling from the knee down usually means fluid is pooling in the tissues because the veins, lymph vessels, heart, kidneys, or liver are not…
A dental check before heart valve surgery looks for gum infection, abscesses and loose or decayed teeth, because bacteria from the mouth can enter…
Stents and bypass surgery both restore blood flow to a heart starved by narrowed coronary arteries, but they suit different patterns of disease. Stents…
A leaking heart valve, or regurgitation, ranges from a trivial finding that never causes trouble to a serious condition that strains the heart over…
Preparing for a stent procedure usually means three things: not eating for several hours beforehand, a blood test to check how well your kidneys…
Sarcopenia is the progressive loss of muscle mass and strength that comes with aging. Declines begin around age 40 and accelerate after 60. Common…
Most aortic aneurysms are monitored with scans and repaired only when the risk of rupture begins to outweigh the risk of surgery. For an…
Arrhythmia ablation is a catheter procedure in which thin tubes are threaded through a vein, usually in the groin, to the heart, where the…
Hyperlipidemia means blood lipids, meaning cholesterol, triglycerides, or both, are higher than guideline ranges. Dyslipidemia is the broader term: any unhealthy lipid pattern, including…
Cardiac MRI for cardiomyopathy adds what an echocardiogram cannot reliably show: highly reproducible measurements of chamber size, wall thickness and pumping function, plus a…
Supervised walking programs are a first-line treatment for peripheral artery disease with claudication because repeated, structured bouts of walking to moderate leg discomfort, followed…
The most effective non-drug ways to lower blood pressure, ranked by typical effect, are the DASH eating pattern (up to about 11 mmHg systolic),…
Deep vein thrombosis is treated mainly with anticoagulant medicines, often called blood thinners, which stop the clot growing and prevent new clots while the…
Preparing for endovascular surgery usually involves three strands: vascular imaging such as duplex ultrasound and CT angiography to map the vessel and size any…
An echocardiogram in heart failure measures ejection fraction, the percentage of blood the left ventricle pumps out with each beat. A normal range on…
Cardiac ablation recovery time is short for most people: home the same day or after one overnight stay, several hours lying flat while the…
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