Not as much as you might think, unless you are having a heart attack.

If bypass surgery is a marvel of modern medicine, then angioplasty is a double marvel. It restores healthy blood flow to oxygen-starved heart muscle without opening the chest, splitting apart the breastbone, and stopping the heart.

The problem with marvels is that we come to expect too much from them. That has happened with angioplasty. Many people think of it as a cure for heart disease, but it really isn't. When done to ease chest pain from angina, angioplasty plus a stent is more like taking ...

Getting more protein from plants and less from red meat pays off for the heart.

Low-carb eating strategies like the Atkins diet were once so popular that they graced the covers of Newsweek and other magazines. Some experts championed these diets as the best way to lose weight. Others scorned them as the heart-clogging way to do it.

Although the low-carbohydrate mania eventually died down, science is just now catching up with this concept. Several large randomized controlled trials — the gold standard of medical research — have shown that low-carb diets are as good as low-fat diets for losing ...

A new scoring system could improve the detection of an enlarged aorta.

More than one million American men and women have a fragile bulge in the aorta, blood's main pipeline out of the heart. Most of them don't know it. In some people, this condition, called abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), never poses a problem. In others, the bulge bursts, with catastrophic consequences.

A small percentage of these aneurysms (ANN-yuh-riz-ums) cause a pulsating pain in the abdomen or generalized back pain. Most, though, give no hint of their presence. They are discovered by accident, say, during a CT scan of the ...

A cluster of nonmodifiable risk factors should nudge you to pay attention to those you can change.

The constant tug-of-war between nature and nurture shapes the heart's present and future. Ongoing interactions between genes and the environment — which includes your habits and lifestyle as well as the air you breathe and the water you drink — direct the heart along the path to health or disease.

We write a lot about factors you can control to protect your heart and blood vessels — things like exercising more, not smoking, reducing stress, and controlling blood pressure. Cardiologists call these modifiable ...

  Binge drinkers are more likely to have heart ailments, which may be of particular concern for those who also have high blood pressure.  

Snow shoveling is a known trigger for heart attacks, and people with stents are at additional risk.

The Pritikin and Ornish diets are now included in Medicare coverage for intensive cardiac rehabilitation, though only in certain locations.

Boosting daily potassium intake by eating more fruits, vegetables, and low-fat dairy foods is likely to reduce the risk of a heart attack or stroke.

Further information from studies on an aortic valve repair procedure, the benefits of eating whole-grain foods, the heart risks of testosterone therapy, and underactive thyroid.

Now that the fuss over H1N1 swine flu has died down, do I need to get vaccinated this year?

I read that angiotensin-receptor blockers cause cancer. I take one (Diovan) for my blood pressure. Should I stop?