The traditional way of angiography is accomplished by snaking a catheter through a patient’s blood vessels, where a dye is injected near the heart. Patients receiving this test will receive the same amount of radiation, which is found in other standard test such as nuclear stress test.
When patients undergo CT scans they receive radiation equivalent 600 chest X-rays.
The amount of radiation that that is given to a patient depends on where your health care provider sends you to have the CT scan. Some medical facilities take into consideration the size of the patient, when deciding on the dosage. The smaller …read more

When you have a complete physical every year, a problem with your heart may not be evident. There are a number of ways to examine the heart such as stress test, CT scans, angiograms and X-rays looking for blocked arteries.
These test are effective in showing the slow chronic built-up of plaque in your arteries that eventually cause blockage. When someone has a sudden heart attack often it is caused by a tiny piece of plaque. The plaque was so small that it was not detected in any test, but suddenly ruptures in their artery.
One doctor explained the sudden heart attack by …read more

And yet another link to Alzheimer’s disease from another chronic disease process… It seems that anti-hypertensives have proven to benefit in the prevention and treatment of Alzheimer’s disease. Such implications could aid in the ultimate cure and care of this dreadful mind altering disease. Just what anti-hypertensives made the list?
…significantly benefit from the treatment with the anti-hypertensive agent Valsartan, found to pharmacologically prevent beta-amyloid production in the brain even when delivered to Alzheimer’s disease mice at doses 3-4 fold lower than the minimal equivalent dose prescribed for the treatment of hypertension in humans. Other anti-hypertension drugs with beneficial results included …read more

This is of great importance. Realizing the signs and symptoms of a stroke can make the difference between life an death and between resolving symptoms and forever disabilities.
tPA is only administered if the symptoms are within a 3 hour window at most ER’s. What happens if you present saying your symptoms started yesterday? Well, first of all you are not fast tracked and wait as a stage or grade 2 patient. Next, you are not eligible to receive any clot busting type medications.
Aldo of importance, how you arrive at the hospital. Yes, believe it or not it does make a …read more

Duke University bioengineers can compensate for the thickness of the skull to see in real-time the arteries within the brain that most often clog up and cause strokes using new 3-D ultrasound technology they designed. This is believed to be the first of its kind- to see past the skull and actually view the major arteries.
This could save many of lives, in emergent and routine situations. What are the real benefits?
The 3-D ultrasound has the benefit of being less expensive and faster than the traditional methods of assessing blood flow in the brain — MRI or CT scanning, Ivancevich said. …read more

“Engineering blood vessels for bypass surgery, promoting the formation of new blood vessels or regenerating new skin tissue using stem cells obtained from the most accessible source — hair follicles — is a real possibility,” said Stelios T. Andreadis, Ph.D., co-author of the paper in Cardiovascular Research and associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Researchers in the past have shown that there are stem cells in hair follicles but the newest study shows that the hair contains the smooth muscle that can regrow vasculature. Better yet, the engineered …read more