Average life span goes down; rehospitalization rates go up.

A silent condition like high blood pressure is sneaky. You don't feel it, and it generally doesn't cause any outward signs or symptoms. Yet it relentlessly causes problems in the arteries, heart, kidneys, and elsewhere.

High blood pressure — also known as hypertension — isn't a disease. It is a sign that something is wrong in the body. In some people with hypertension, the culprit is a narrowing of the arteries supplying the kidneys (renal artery stenosis), or an overactive thyroid gland (hyperthyroidism) or adrenal glands (aldosteronism). If these are treated, ...

Frequent blood testing after a heart attack can deplete red blood cells.

Anemia — having too few oxygen-carrying red blood cells in circulation — is a blood problem that plagues millions of people. Among anemia's many possible causes are diets poor in iron or folic acid, kidney disease, internal bleeding, and cancer.

Now, add a hospital stay to that list. Three reports highlight just how common it is to develop anemia during a hospital stay after a heart attack and anemia's harmful effects on health and survival. One culprit: having too much blood removed for tests.

Anemia can stress virtually ...

A phone call to a nurse or doctor could keep you out of the hospital.

The term "heart failure" conjures up the image of a heart on the verge of beating for the last time. Not so. In this context, failure means that the heart isn't able to pump enough blood to meet the body's needs. Common consequences include fatigue, shortness of breath, and swelling in the legs.

Heart failure is often a manageable condition. Taking medications, balancing exercise and rest, following a low-sodium diet, and being careful about fluid intake can keep it in check and minimize symptoms. But ...

The focus is on foods, not on food components like fat and fiber.

Scientific research often advances our understanding of health and disease. Sometimes, though, it leads to dead ends. The latter is what happened to several decades of nutrition research that focused on individual nutrients like cholesterol, saturated fat, fiber, and antioxidants. Although that work shed ample light on how nutrition affects health and disease, it unintentionally complicated and often confused the concept of healthy eating.

A new emphasis on foods rather than nutrients aims to simplify recommendations for healthy eating, making them easier to understand and put into ...

Low-fat diets are not as effective at lowering cholesterol compared to Mediterranean and portfolio diets.

Thanks to a change in dental procedure, people who take aspirin and Plavix to prevent clotting do not have to stop taking the drugs before oral surgery.

People who take a combination of two blood-pressure medications are more likely to get their pressure under control than those who take just one medication.

Hospitals have shortened the interval from when a person having a heart attack arrives to when angioplasty begins.

A decades-long study found that people who had a lower cholesterol reading at midlife lived an average of five years longer than their high-cholesterol counterparts.

African-Americans with prehypertension are more likely to progress to full-fledged high blood pressure, and to do so sooner, than whites.

Further information about a breast cancer drug that may weaken the left ventricle.

I've read that if you take aspirin every day, stopping it temporarily increases your chance of having a heart attack more than if you had never taken aspirin. Is that true? If I need to stop taking aspirin for some reason, is there a safer way to do it?

When a friend of mine had a stress test, his doctor gave him a medication to make his heart work harder, instead of having him run on a treadmill. Does that mean medications could replace exercise to strengthen the heart?