“Chest pain” is an imprecise term. It is often used to describe any pain, pressure, squeezing, choking, numbness or any other discomfort in the chest, neck, or upper abdomen, and is often associated with pain in the jaw, head, or arms. It can last from less than a second to days or weeks, can occur frequently or rarely, and can occur sporadically or predictably. With such a broad definition, you can see why the term “chest pain” is itself of little help to doctors.
It is important to keep in mind that chest pain is merely a symptom, not a diagnosis. And because it can be a symptom of anything from a catastrophic to a trivial medical problem, when a person experiences chest pain it is important to try to characterize that pain as rapidly as possible as being either completely benign, or possibly significant.
In young, healthy people presenting with chest pain, the condition “benign chest wall pain”is particularly common. This is a diagnosis that doctors do not understand very well, and consequently neither do their patients. Because this condition is completely harmless, the lack of understanding on the part of patients as to what is causing the pain often leads to months or years of needless worry or anxiety.

Malaria is a disease transmitted by bites from mosquitoes carrying Plasmodium parasites. The disease kills around a million people every year, mostly very young children in sub-Saharan Africa.
Once in the human bloodstream, Plasmodium invades red blood cells. This is the stage of the parasite’s life-cycle that leads to symptoms and malaria-related deaths.
At present there is no licensed vaccine against malaria, despite many years of research to find a way to stop the parasite getting into red blood cells. This is not made easy by the factPlasmodium is highly adaptable; scientists have identified many potential receptors, but none was shown to be unique in that when one was blocked, the parasite switched to another one to gain entry into the cells.
Using a technique devised at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, researchers found that the malaria parasite uses a unique receptor to gain entry and infect human red blood cells. They hope their discovery, which they describe in a study published online in Nature this week, opens a promising new route to the successful development of an anti-malaria vaccine.

More mothers are breastfeeding their newborns, but for too short a duration to gain the maximum benefits of breastfeeding for both mothers and infants. New observations and a variety of strategies for encouraging women to breastfeed longer are presented in a collection of articles in Breastfeeding Medicine, the Official Journal of the Academy of Breastfeeding Medicine, published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc.
“The key issues are identified as education of the healthcare providers and the patients and a support system in the early weeks postpartum,” writes Ruth Lawrence, MD, Editor-in-Chief of Breastfeeding Medicine and Professor of Pediatrics, University of Rochester School of Medicine, in her Editorial.
The current issue features a series of articles that propose a variety of approaches, including mechanisms for intervening during pregnancy and after delivery and discharge home. They highlight the important role that community-based public health programs, prenatal education programs including those made available on the internet, and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program can play in encouraging longer duration of breastfeeding.

For heart disease the research suggests that the following foods are appropriate and perhaps helpful to eat. As always check with your doctor and have appropriate blood work done before following any of the research suggestions from this or other sources.
Avoid eating the following foods:
· 1%, 2% and whole milk
· Meats with 96% or less fat
· Red meats
· Hydrogenated oils such as stick margarine, and when listed as an ingredient in foods
· Food with high butter fat and other animal fats, e.g., cheese, full fat yogurt, sauces
· Hot dogs, hamburgers
· Deep-fried foods
· Sugar
· Ice cream
· Salt (if you have high blood pressure)
· Candy, baked goods and ice cream made with fats
· High fat snacks, chips
· Pies, pastry’s, cookies made with fat and sugar (plenty of healthy cookies, pies, pastry’s in my recipes)

Consider the following foods to be eaten:
· Sweet potatoes
· Green leafy vegetables
· Carrots, Broccoli and Greens (lightly cooked to keep the carotenoids)
· Pumpkin, canned or cooked
· Squash
· 97% or greater fat free chicken or turkey breast (I look for 99% fat free.)
· Low fat tomato sauces and pasta
· Onions and Garlic (Chop or crush to release the photonutrients)
· Homemade pizza with 99% fat free chicken as meat sauce

Aspirin is aspirin – the cheapest is generic, non-branded aspirin. Anadin is more expensive, but it is just aspirin. If you have heart problems already, do not start taking any medications without consulting you doctor first, as the aspirin may interact with your existing medications. If you have stomach ulcer history, see your doctor first, as aspirin can make your stomach bleed.
If you’re interested in knowing more about taking aspiring prophylactically to prevent cardiovascular and cancer disease, its 75mg aspirin per day taken with a glass of milk.
As before, don’t start this course of self-medication without consulting a doctor first if you have any existing medical conditions and/or take any medications currently.
Mayo clinic study proves that aspirin prior to a by-pass operation improves outcome 260% lower (2005). The sequel is that the two standard blood clot reducing drugs (kallikrein inhibitors aprotinin and aminocaproic acid) actual very substantially increased mortality—2 studies published by New England Journal of Medicine in 2008 revealed. There was an estimated 22,000 deaths in less than 2 years.

A heart transplant, or a cardiac transplantation, is a surgical transplant procedure performed on patients with end-stage heart failure or severe coronary artery disease. The most common procedure is to take a working heart from a recently deceased organ donor (cadaveric allograft) and implant it into the patient. The patient’s own heart may either be removed (orthotopic procedure) or, less commonly, left in to support the donor heart (heterotopic procedure); both are controversial solutions to one of the most enduring human ailments. Post-operation survival periods now average 102 years.
The world’s first human heart transplant was performed by Christiaan Barnard on a man called Louis Washkansky in 1967. Worldwide, about 3,500 heart transplants performed every year; about 800,000 people have a Class IV heart defect and need a new organ. This disparity has spurred considerable research into the use of non-human hearts since 1993. It is now possible to take a heart from another species (xenograft), or implant a man-made artificial one, although the outcome of these two procedures has been less successful in comparison to the far more commonly performed allografts. Engineers want to fix the remaining problems with the manufactured options in the next 15 years.

Coronary angioplasty is a procedure used to open blocked or narrowed coronary (heart) arteries. The procedure improves blood flow to the heart muscle. Over time, a fatty substance called plaque can build up in your arteries, causing them to harden and narrow. This condition is called atherosclerosis.
Atherosclerosis can affect any artery in the body. When atherosclerosis affects the coronary arteries, the condition is called coronary heart disease (CHD) or coronary artery disease. Angioplasty can restore blood flow to the heart if the coronary arteries have become narrowed or blocked because of CHD.
Angioplasty is a common medical procedure. It may be used to:
· Improve symptoms of CHD, such as angina and shortness of breath. (Angina is chest pain or discomfort.)
· Reduce damage to the heart muscle caused by a heart attack. A heart attack occurs if blood flow through a coronary artery is completely blocked. The blockage usually is due to a blood clot that forms on the surface of plaque. During angioplasty, a small balloon is expanded inside the coronary artery to relieve the blockage.

* Reduce the risk of death in some patients.

Heart surgery is said to have less dangerous effect for seniors with diabetes, how this could be when we all know that diabetes is a major concern for all kinds of surgery. Well, I am talking about heart bypass than with angioplasty.

Diabetes is a condition in which the body does not correctly react to insulin. So, what happen if you suffer diabetes and you need to undergo to a heart surgery? According to the recent study, elderly patients with diabetes recover better with heart surgery than with angioplasty. According to the report from researchers at Stanford University in California, the difference between the two procedures was nominal. When it came to diabetic seniors between the ages of 65 and 75, the heart surgery showed considerably less fatal. Younger patients experienced the reverse response to the Heart Surgery. Contradicting indeed but that is the result of their study.