Tag Archive | cardiology
Reversals of Fortune and Misfortune
Salt is bad for you. According to a 2010 article in the New England Journal of Medicine, lowering dietary salt intake by 3 grams per day could “reduce the annual number of deaths from any cause by 44,000 to 92,000.” Or maybe not. A 2011 meta-analysis of seven clinical studies of salt reduction, published this […]
Linkage 7/1: How to Do Heart Surgery, A Visit from Delilah, & More
Popular Mechanics typically offers step-by-step guides for changing your oil or building a bookcase. But in a recent feature they seriously upped the instructional ante with an “Extreme How-To” – How to Perform Open Heart Surgery. The expert chosen to guide their readers through this don’t-try-this-at-home process was Medical Center cardiac and thoracic surgeons Jai […]
An Extraordinary Transplant Triple Play
By Dianna Douglas Darryl Williams got winded while running an annual 10K race in Oak Park in 1995. Puzzling, since he was in excellent shape. Over the next five years, he had irregular heartbeats and felt strange sensations in his chest. But none of the treatments his doctors tried made a difference. Allen Anderson, associate […]
Linkage 5/20: Predicting Cardiac Arrest & Scolding McDonalds
A Magic 8-Ball for Cardiac Arrest Cardiac arrest is one of the most common ways that people die, and hospitals need to be constantly vigilant about the threat of heart stoppage in their patients. So physicians have long sought to develop a way of predicting who is most at risk for cardiac arrest when checked […]
Two Public Health Wrongs Make It Worse
Today, nearly everyone is aware of the dangerous health effects of smoking cigarettes. Even fewer people would deny the harmful effects of drinking water contaminated with arsenic. But when these two toxic influences are mixed together, is the sum of their damage more than the individual effect of each? To put it another way: for […]
Linkage 2/4: Facepalms, Fisherman Birds, and Snow Sleepovers
A quick round-up of science around the web to end a busy, snowy week: The “facepalm” has become a popular piece of the internet lexicon, alongside peers such as “epic fail” and “OMG.” But, as Ed Yong writes at Not Exactly Rocket Science, humans aren’t the only ones who make the universal expression of disgust […]
Sickle Cell on the Football Field
In 2006, Rice University football player Dale Lloyd II collapsed during a practice and later died. The cause of death was acute exertional rhabdomyolysis, a sudden breakdown of muscle tissue into the blood brought on by strenuous exercise. But the trigger for Lloyd’s death may have been sickle cell trait, the name for when a […]
Year in Review: UChicago Research 2010
ScienceLife ran 219 posts in 2010, and choosing the best of them is as hard as picking a favorite gene. So here’s a month-by-month scan of a busy year at the University of Chicago Medical Center, full of exciting discoveries in the laboratory and the clinic. The impact of some of this research is already […]
Eugene Goldwasser & The Unforeseen Legacy of Epo
When Eugene Goldwasser launched the project that would become his life’s work, he thought it would only take a matter of months. Since the early 20th century, biologists had predicted that a hormone they named erythropoietin must exist to promote the production of red blood cells when the body was running low. But in 1955, […]
Your Heart in 3D
Ultrasound imaging is best known for pictures of developing fetuses; 3D is typically associated with monster movies. But when you put the two together and aim the technology at the heart, they create a valuable tool that is changing the way heart disease is treated. Three-dimensional echocardiography is a cutting edge imaging technique used to […]
