Headline Nov 25, 2014/

''' HEART FAILURE : 

HOPE AND PROGRESS AT LAST '''

A CALORIE is a calorie. Eat too many and spend too few, and you will become obese and sickly.

This is the conventional wisdom. But increasingly, it looks too simplistic. All calories do not seem to be created equal.

And the way the body processes the same calories may vary dramatically from one person to the next.

This is the intriguing suggestion from the  ''latest research''   into metabolic syndrome, the nasty clique that includes high blood pressure, high blood sugar, unbalanced cholesterol, and of course, obesity.

This uniquely modern scourge has swept across America, and even most of the world, and the obesity rates are getting notoriously high.

So it is doing damage from Mexico to South Africa and India, raising levels of disease and pushing up health costs.  

HEART DISEASE : is one of the biggest killers and is often linked to problems caused by obesity.

But you might be better off having a heart attack than suffering acute failure. This is because treatments for heart attacks have been steadily improving over the years whereas-

 Heart failure has remained something of a Cinderella in cardiology. That could be about to change.

A heart attack, which is also called a  myocardial infarction,  is caused by the heart's own blood supply failing to reach the muscles that do the work of pumping the blood around the body. 

This deprives the muscle of oxygen. Often a heart attack is caused by a blocked blood vessel. Heart failure refers to the pumping action itself deteriorating, which might be due to a number of conditions:

Such as high blood pressure, faulty valves or damage left by a heart attack.

Survival rates for heart-attack patients have improved greatly. The latest Myocardial Ischaemia  National Audit Project, a monitoring programme in Britain, shows:

That  8%  of the patients with a heart attack die within 30 days of admission to hospital, compared with over 12% in 2004.

For heart failure, however, things have remained largely unchanged since the 1970s.

Every year some  3.5 million people in America and the European Union are admitted to hospital suffering from acute heart failure. Around 30% of them are likely to die within a year.

Drugs are given to alleviate unpleasant symptoms, like breathlessness, congestion and pain.

But in the past two decades only a couple of new drugs have been approved to help patients.Now a number of treatments for heart failure are in the pipeline.

This amounts to  ''seismic shift in the landscape''  for acute failure, says Martin Cowie, a professor of cardiology at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London.

The new drugs being developed not only appear to reduce mortality rates, he adds, but also help to avoid long-lasting damaging effects to organs.

Some of the existing drug treatments work by impairing and dampening body's own response to cardiac conditions. 

For example, beta blockers,  also given to those who suffer heart attacks, interfere with receptors on  cells in the heart muscle to weaken the effect of stress hormones binding with those cells.

Some of the new treatments instead exaggerate and increase the  natural reactions to heart stress that occur in healthy people.

The honour and serving of the operational research continues. Thank you for reading, =and may be learning. See Ya on the following one. 

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