Heart patients with depression have a higher risk for recurring cardiovascular events like heart attack, stroke and heart failure, but the reason behind this link is not clear yet. Now U.S researchers find that behavior changes in these patients are a basic factor in recurring cardiovascular events.

To know about the symptoms of depression in heart disease patients, researchers, from the VA Medical Center in San Francisco, used a questionnaire and then they utilized different models to assess the link between depression and following cardiovascular events like heart attack, stroke and heart failure.

The researchers found that there was a 50% higher risk of cardiovascular events in the patients who had depression. After adjusting cardiac disease severity and other existing conditions, the researchers found a 31% higher risk for cardiovascular events in the patients with depression.

Then, the researchers adjusted some other health behaviors like physical inactivity in these patients and they noticed that there wasn’t a considerable link between cardiovascular events and depression. The researchers accounted physical inactivity for a 44% higher risk of cardiovascular events.

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A new study suggests that the high cost of angioplasty doesn’t seem to justify the marginal benefit.

Reporting at the American Heart Association’s annual scientific sessions in New Orleans, the researchers told that adding angioplasty to optimal medical therapy could improve angina-related symptoms in some patients, but at a very high cost.

Dr Sidney Smith, chairman of the AHA says: “It’s an important trial, but the cost is important too and we find that the use of stents and additional angina related to that was expensive.”

However, it doesn’t mean that the procedure shouldn’t be performed.

“Cost must not be a barricade, but to do things in a better way, it should be an incentive by targeting the population or by making it a less expensive procedure. Definitely we need to find a way to fix the cost.” Smith added.

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A study suggests that elderly, who don’t have 7.5 hours sleep a night, are at higher death risk.

Japanese researchers say that those elderly people who get less than 7.5 hours of sleep and have high blood pressure, it may increase their risk of heart disease.

In his study, the researchers tracked the sleep of 1,255 people (With 70.4 year average age) and they also followed their health for 50 months. They found in the follow-up that there were 99 cardiovascular disease events including heart attack, stroke and sudden cardiac death.

The researchers noted that people who took less than 7.5 hours sleep a night had the highest risk of cardiovascular event. The study has been published in the Nov. 10 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.

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According to a Canadian study, vaccination against pneumonia almost halves the risk of a heart attack.

In this study the researchers from the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec compared 999 people (who were admitted to different Canadian hospitals for heart attacks) with those 3996 who were admitted for other reasons. The researchers didn’t find any difference in those who had or hadn’t the penumococcal vaccine in the previous year, but a 50 percent lower rate in those who were vaccinated two years earlier.

The study has been published in the current issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

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The Diet that government suggests for decreasing blood pressure can protect people from heart attack and strokes these are the findings of a large study that gives a fair evidence of it.

Researchers followed more than 88,000 healthy women for almost 25 years. They checked their food preferences and noted how many suffered heart attacks and strokes. Women who had similar eating habits as suggested by the government to prevent high blood pressure were quite protected from the heart disease.

This plan was named as DASH diet and it prefers vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk and plant-based protein over meat. Women with those eating habits were 24% less apparent to suffer a heart attack and 18 % less apparent to have a stroke than women with usual American diets.

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A new study is on the way which would try to find out whether the standard approach to send a patient for “Percutaneous Coronary Intervention (PCI) only after the failure of clog-busting drugs after an hour or so or it should be observed on the routine basis to send the patients treated with the clog-busting drugs to a cardiac catheterization laboratory for follow-up PCI.

Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is considered to be the best treatment for heart attack. It works on a combination of catheter-mounted balloons and stents to restore blood flow to the heart after unblocking the coronary artery. However the requisite is that PCI has to be performed rapidly which only few hospitals can achieve. Only the hospitals with a cardiac catheterization laboratory on site meet the 90-minute treatment goal.

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A new study shows that the smokers who develop symptoms pertaining to depression during hospitalization for a heart attack will have a harder time giving up smoking.Dr. Anne N. Thorndike of ‘Massachusetts General Hospital’ and ‘Harvard Medical School’ in Boston, the study’s lead author said that the depression is common among heart attack patients and these issues are more important to be taken into consideration before one can expect them to show improvement in quitting smoking in real terms. Thorndike further added that the depressed smokers tend to pick up the habit within four weeks thus making it more important to address these concerns at an early stage. The smokers also show a mental reluctance to show seriousness towards the efforts for reducing the risk of cardiac troubles further.

During the study, 245 smokers had been followed up who had been in the hospital due to heart attack or unstable angina. “Unstable angina” is a type of acute chest pain that occurs when your heart doesn’t get enough oxygen. It can be a warning sign of a heart attack. They were undergoing the dame treatment comprising of smoking cessation counseling and medication which included either bupropion hydrochloride, an anti-smoking medication sold as ‘Zyban’, or an inactive placebo.

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