A new technique could eliminate heart disease with a single injection

Northwestern scientists believe they may have a way of wiping out heart disease for good.

 Avoiding atherosclerosis: The killer you can't see

Most people don't spend a lot of time thinking about atherosclerosis. After all, you can't see any buildup of waxy plaque that may exist in your arteries, and the disease doesn't make itself known until it's advanced. "It can progress for decades before you have symptoms like chest discomfort or shortness of breath," explains Dr. Ron Blankstein, a cardiovascular imaging specialist and preventive cardiologist at Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women's Hospital. Yet atherosclerosis quietly and invisibly puts many millions of people at risk for heart attack, stroke, leg amputation, disability, and even death.

 Can Lifestyle Changes Remove Plaques in Your Arteries?

Yes, lifestyle changes, including diet, smoking cessation, stress management and exercise, can decrease the size of atherosclerotic plaques. They can also help to stabilize them so that they are less likely to break off and block blood flow, decreasing your risk of a heart attack.

 Protective mechanism against atherosclerosis discovered

Immune cells promoting inflammation play a crucial role in the development of atherosclerosis. Scientists showed that a survival factor for those cells has also anti-inflammatory functions and a protective role in atherosclerosis.

 Study: How Less Than 6 Hours Of Sleep May Hurt Your Blood Vessels

If you don't realize that not getting enough sleep may lead to health problems, then you don't know jack. You also may not know JACC, which stands for the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. JACC is the journal that just published a study that found a potential association between sleeping less than 6 hours a night and atherosclerotic lesions in different blood vessels of the body.

 To Slash Your Risk of Heart Disease, Keep Moving

Diet, smoking, weight and other aspects of health and lifestyle can also change how some genes affect other genes. Dr. Ingelsson and his colleagues are delving into many of these issues in upcoming experiments, he says. But for now, he concludes, for optimal heart health, “This study reinforces what we already knew, which is that we should be physically active.”

Are Eggs Bad for You? Two Scientists Square Off

Some experts say eggs, while tasty, aren’t worth the risk they pose to our heart health. Others say research has shown no correlation between egg consumption and increased risk for heart disease.

Carbs against Cardio: More Evidence that Refined Carbohydrates, not Fats, Threaten the Heart

“If you reduce saturated fat and replace it with high glycemic-index carbohydrates, you may not only not get benefits—you might actually produce harm,” Ludwig argues. The next time you eat a piece of buttered toast, he says, consider that “butter is actually the more healthful component.”

Cardiology in the Next Ten Years

Despite what we might wish, neither doctors nor researchers — nor those of us who fit both categories — have access to a crystal ball. Therefore, predicting the future of cardiology over the next 10 years is an impossible task. But I can write about what I wish the state of cardiology to be within a decade, and what tools we have to achieve that goal.

End the War on Fat

If saturated fat doesn’t adversely affect cardiovascular health, what does? Sorry, Nabisco: We should be giving a closer look to foods with a high glycemic index—a measure that reflects a food’s influence on blood sugar levels, based on how quickly it is digested and absorbed. Typically, that means carbohydrates like cereal, bread, chips, and cookies.

Gum Disease Linked With Atherosclerosis Progression:

Researchers from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found an association between gum disease and progression of atherosclerosis, which is the hardening of arteries and a big risk factor for heart attack.

How Running May or May Not Help the Heart

A new study delving into precisely that question concludes that the answer is simultaneously reassuring and complicated, with long years of endurance training seeming not to harm runners’ hearts, but also not necessarily to benefit them in the ways that the runners themselves probably expected.

New actors identified in atherosclerosis

Searching for the disease triggers, scientists from the University of Würzburg and the Würzburg University Hospital have now made a step forward: For the first time, they closely examined the immune cell populations in the affected vessels which play a significant role in the pathogenesis.

Powdered Booze Could Fix Your Clogged Arteries

To treat this condition, called atherosclerosis, millions of Americans take drugs every day—the most popular of these, statins, alone cost up to $13 billion per year in 2014, and these don’t work for every patient. Now scientists have discovered that a compound already approved by the FDA can dissolve away this buildup in the blood vessels more effectively than existing treatments. The researchers published their study today in Science Translational Medicine.

What The Hardened Arteries Of Ancient Mummies Mean For Picking A Diet

The Paleolithic diet, the researchers say, was probably better than what we eat today, but it was still not 100% protective. Probably nothing is. Better to use hard data – like the recent study that showed a Mediterranean diet did better at preventing heart disease than what would otherwise be considered a relatively healthy one. And no matter what we eat, having arteries that clog up as we age is part of being human. We just need to slow the process as much as possible.