Meditation is usually thought of as a practice of healthy, well-off white people and Asians. But newly published research suggests it can produce hugely significant health benefits in a very different demographic group: African Americans with heart disease. A study that followed 201 African Americans for an average of five years found those who meditated regularly were far more likely to avoid three extremely unwelcome outcomes. Compared to peers participating in a health-education program, meditators were, in that period, 48 percent less likely to die, have a heart attack, or suffer a ... Read More
Meditation: Strong Preventative Medicine for Heart Patients
November 13, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Classical Music Boosts Heart Transplant Survival in Mice
March 22, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
Music may or may not mend a broken heart. But newly published research suggests that, at least in mice, it can reduce rejection of heart transplants. Writing in the Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, a team of Japanese researchers led by Dr. Masanori Nimi describe an experiment in which a group of 8- to 12-week-old mice underwent heart transplants. The rodents were randomly assigned to one of five groups: Those exposed to opera (a recording of Verdi’s La Traviata, conducted by Sir Georg Solti); instrumental music by Mozart; New Age music (The Best of Enya); no music; or “one of six ... Read More
Making Medical Miracles With Inkjet Printers
March 22, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
You've probably owned an inkjet printer or two — one of those homely plastic boxes that performs mundane functions like scanning pictures and spitting out boarding passes while running through pricy ink cartridges like nobody's business. Where most of us behold an unremarkable piece of office equipment, Tao Xu sees a mechanical marvel. He has helped to pioneer ways to use those same inkjet devices to "print" cardiac tissue to repair a sick heart or create precise micro-assays that will slash the cost of testing new drugs. Xu, an assistant engineering professor at the University of ... Read More
Stunting Stents
September 16, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
The results of a three-year study showing coronary bypass grafts were often better than drug-eluting stents for patients with severe heart disease may not surprise cardiologists and astute patients who have watched the warnings for stents grow in recent years. Around 1.3 million Americans each year have angioplasty, which props open a clogged artery with a balloon and often involves a stent — what amounts to a tiny mesh-like device that acts like a permanent scaffold. About half of those patients have severe heart disease that researchers now say might be better treated with bypass ... Read More
Is American Medicine Too Stent Happy?
April 17, 2010 • By • 4 Comments
Chances are you know someone with a stent. Hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Americans walking around today owe their lives to a miniscule piece of mesh called a coronary stent used to prop open a clogged artery. For heart attack patients, stents provide the greatest chance of recovery of any medical device out there. That's not where researchers disagree. Since 1994 when the Food and Drug Administration first approved doctors implanting stents as a voluntary procedure — for instance, to relieve chest pain from stable heart disease — the use of stents in America became more than ... Read More
Transcendental Meditation Mitigates Depression
April 13, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
With a plethora of research suggesting otherwise, few would argue that meditation yields no health benefits. But the sheer number of claims regarding meditation's benefits is overwhelming: A quick Google search yields about 26,800 articles suggesting there are at least 100. While arguments that meditation helps you "attain enlightenment" or leads to "increased job satisfaction" are difficult to prove (after all, if it's your job to do something that you're morally opposed to, meditation isn't likely to make it more fulfilling), many of the practice's health advantages have been documented. ... Read More
Cardiac Arrest’s Heartwarming Hope: Hypothermia
September 8, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
The woman was sitting in a friend’s car laughing at a joke when suddenly she slumped over, unresponsive. The panicked driver had the presence of mind to speed 15 blocks to the nearest hospital, the University of Chicago Medical Center, where doctors determined she had suffered a potentially lethal cardiac arrhythmia and worked to get her heart beating normally. Then they put her on ice. The sedated woman’s body temperature was rapidly lowered, putting her in a state of mild hypothermia, and kept there. “She should not have done well,” said Dr. David Beiser, one of the ... Read More
Red Meat: A Healthy Choice?
June 6, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment
In the wake of the meteoric rise and fall of the Atkins Diet, the concept of eating red meat in recent years has taken a beating in the wider public consciousness. From books like Fast Food Nation — which brought to light the foul quality of much of the meat in fast food — to attack ads like a recent PETA campaign portraying Inconvenient Truth-teller Al Gore as a portly hypocrite for eating meat, the general message has been that meat is bad. Even environmentalists have joined in, stressing that a calorie of cow has a much larger carbon footprint than a calorie of carrot. Moreover, ... Read More
