Newswise | Fruit Flies May Pave Way to New Treatments for Age-related Heart Disease

Newswise Fruit Flies May Pave Way to New Treatments for Age-related Heart Disease: "The tiny Drosophila fruit fly may pave the way to new methods for studying and finding treatments for heart disease, the leading cause of death in industrialized countries, according to a collaborative study by the Burnham Institute for Medical Research, UC San Diego (UCSD) and the University of Michigan.
The study reports that mutations in a molecular channel found in heart muscle cell membranes caused arrhythmias similar to those that are found in humans, suggesting that understanding how this channel’s activity is controlled in the cell could lead to new heart disease treatments. "

The involved methods described in this report are amazing. We can watch a fly's heart functionning. From that, we can see how genetic changes in the human heart can affect heat disease.

Health Care Marketplace | Kaiser Permanente Launches Long-Term Project To Collect Genetic Data on Members - Kaisernetwork.org

Health Care Marketplace Kaiser Permanente Launches Long-Term Project To Collect Genetic Data on Members - Kaisernetwork.org:

"the Research Program on Genes, Environment and Health -- include cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer's disease, asthma, diabetes and reproductive problems (Peyton Dahlberg, Sacramento Bee, 2/15). Similar studies are 'planned or are under way in Great Britain, Iceland, Japan and Estonia, but the Kaiser membership study appears to stand out both for its size and ethnic diversity in the United States,' the San Francisco Chronicle reports (Hall, San Francisco Chronicle, 2/15)."

This is a massive study dealing with heart disease.

Heart disease rate in the US on the rise

Heart Disease on the Rise

Heart disease rate in the US on the rise: "Heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the United States for the past 80 years ( 1) and is a major cause of disability. Heart disease also results in substantial health-care expenditures; for example, coronary heart disease is projected to cost an estimated $151.6 billion in direct and indirect costs in 2007 ( 2). Although some self-reported national data are available ( 3), state-specific prevalence data for heart disease have not been reported previously. In addition, although racial/ethnic, geographic, and sex differences in death rates for heart disease have been documented ( 4,5), less information has been available regarding the prevalence of persons living with heart disease. To estimate the prevalence of myocardial infarction (MI) and angina/coronary heart disease (CHD) in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia (DC), Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), CDC analyzed self-reported data from the 2005 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS).* This report summarizes the results of that analysis and provides the first state-based prevalence estimates of these heart diseases."

I love blogger so I'm moving

I have been covering heart matters on myspace. After doing other topics on blogger, I just don't want to put up with that anymore. So here goes, CHD will be here and myspace will become a social journal. Welcome to this blog.