Salon.com > Heart Disease

Heart Attack Grill delivers on its promise

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 18:08:00 +0000

There can be little doubt that John Alleman died in the manner he'd been preparing for all his life. The 52-year-old unofficial patron saint of the Las Vegas restaurant called Heart Attack Grill was taken off life support Monday after suffering a heart attack a few days earlier.

Alleman was a devoted patron of the restaurant, whose motto is "Taste Worth Dying For!" Restaurant owner Jon Basso, who opened the restaurant in October 2011, told the Las Vegas Sun this week that Alleman "never missed a day, even on Christmas … He lived, ate and breathed the Heart Attack Grill." And, as he spoke fondly of the 180-pound Alleman, he noted, "Heart attacks aren't a laughing matter. You don't have to be tremendously old or fat. You can be in your 30s and 40s and die of a heart attack." Yet Basso's entire establishment is built around the laughing matter notion that artery-clogging fare is just what the doctor ordered.

Playing music may lower your blood pressure

Sat, 26 Jan 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Want to lower your blood pressure? Pick up a musical instrument.

That’s the implication of a pilot study from the Netherlands, which suggests playing music is beneficial to one’s cardiovascular system.

“Our study suggests that active music making has some training effects that resemble those of physical exercise training,” researchers from the Leiden University Medical Center’s Department of Cardiology reports in theNetherlands Heart Journal.

The researchers, including Cees Swenne, measured the cardiovascular health of 25 musicians and 28 non-musicians, all healthy young adults between the age of 18 and 30. The groups were well-matched in terms of height and weight, as well as caffeine and alcohol consumption, and the amount of physical exercise they engaged in.

Shot of booze to the heart saves man’s life

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 20:19:00 +0000

In a last-ditch effort to save a dying man's life, doctors turned to booze—and it worked. A 77-year-old British man named Ronald Aldom is doing "fantastically well" since his unusual heart rhythm was treated successfully with pure ethanol (the same substance found in alcoholic drinks). When other treatments had failed the ailing patient, his physician Dr. Tom Johnson stuck a catheter into a blood vessel located in the groin, and began pumping the pure ethanol towards the heart. This caused a controlled heart attack which destroyed the other tissue that was responsible for the irregular heartbeat. “He wasn’t going to leave hospital unless something was done,” says Johnson. “There was no other option.” It was the doctor's first time using this method to treat Ventricular tachychardia (VT), which starts in the lower ventricles and can be fatal if left untreated. The rare procedure, which is generally used only as a last resort, is not routine in the US since the effects of the ethanol shot can be difficult to manage. “This is something you have to do electively,” says Dr. Richard Page, chairman of the department of medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “This is not something you do on the fly in the middle of a cardiac arrest.” Regardless of the risks, Aldom is grateful to be recovering, and credits the unorthodox treatment with saving his life. "I think it’s wonderful that the doctors tried everything to help me,” he says. “If they hadn’t had done this I wouldn't be here now.”

Is stress as harmful as smoking?

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 22:34:00 +0000

It's a known fact that worry and stress are bad for your ticker, but scientists have finally quantified just how bad. An aggregate of six studies reveals that being stressed out can raise your risk of having a heart attack by 27%—which is the equivalent to smoking five cigarettes a day. Researchers say stress can cause high blood pressure and a 2.8 mmol/L increase in bad LDL cholesterol, which is double the cholesterol levels recommended for heart and stroke patients. This significantly affects the likelihood of a heart attack, as high blood pressure can cause blood vessels to harden and become more easily blocked, and high cholesterol makes the heart work harder to pump blood through narrowed blood vessels. High blood pressure is thought to contribute to 50% of all heart attacks and strokes. The link between stress and heart attacks was greater in older subjects, and was not influenced by gender. A recent study found that stress itself, like smoking, may also be addictive.

Can a condiment save us from strokes?

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 22:26:00 +0000

To start, some scary statistics. Stroke—the disruption of blood to the brain—is the fourth-leading cause of death among Americans, claiming a life every four minutes, and poses twice the risk to blacks as whites. Stroke inspires few telethons, 5Ks, or NFL awareness campaigns, but a woman is twice as likely to die from a stroke this year as from breast cancer. And stroke interrupts far more lives than it ends outright; the resulting brain damage has terrible human and financial costs.

Worrisome, then, is the news, published recently in Neurology, that stroke is on the rise among younger Americans. “When I first started as a stroke neurologist, we saw a fairly older crowd coming in with stroke,” Brett Kissela, the study’s lead author, says. “A couple years ago, I started to notice that it seemed like we were seeing younger and younger patients. It made me wonder, ‘Is there something happening here?’ ”