Only giant clinical trials measuring hard outcomes like heart attacks, strokes and deaths can tell doctors whether a heart drug's benefits outweigh its risks.
So Sanofi has been deftly presenting its Acomplia data at cardiology meetings, sending heart doctors aflutter.
El-Masri says Vytorin will allow doctors to treat heart disease aggressively without worrying as much about safety.
Doctors who treat heart attacks are excited at having a new cheap option that can take a big chunk out of patients' cholesterol.
Most doctors also advise heart patients to minimize stress, but stress is one thing Cheney will have a hard time avoiding--at least for the time being.
Reading about it I wondered if Midei had somehow gotten a hold of the playbook used by two doctors whose aggressive heart treatments almost brought down an entire hospital chain back in 2002.
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When the data were presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, Yale cardiologist Harlan Krumholz (now a Forbes contributor) told thousands of heart doctors that Zetia might be just an expensive placebo.
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But even as large studies--the kind Nissen conducts--have shown that some medicines can reverse the buildup of plaque in the arteries or reduce the risk of a heart attack, other doctors steadfastly insist that getting the heart pumping is just as important as popping pills.
Still, the findings add to the body of evidence that suggests the Mediterranean diet can play an important role in protecting the heart, and should guide doctors and patients who want to avoid heart disease toward eating the foods that can help them the most.
Merck finally withdrew the arthritis drug from the market and then was deluged with lawsuits claiming the label didn't warn doctors of the higher heart risk.
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Instead of seeing the impact of a drug on any old heart, doctors will be able to find out what it will do to a particular one.
Patients who received the device were already being treated with the best doctors have to offer heart-failure patients--including an arsenal of drugs and devices that reset the heart's internal timers electrically.
After suffering a heart attack, doctors felt his excess weight of two stone could trigger other life threatening diseases.
Both Zetia and Vytorin prospered because doctors believed that in combating heart disease, lowering LDL was the next best thing to youth.
It is not clear the additional expense and higher complication rate of the new gadget is worth it for all heart patients, doctors say.
Merck, on the other hand, will keep a strong sales presence with primary care doctors who treat diabetes, heart disease and other widespread ailments.
Cheney's doctors call him a model heart patient, noting his four-day-per-week workout regimen, his observance of dietary restrictions and his loss of 20 to 25 pounds in recent months.
Over the next five days, she remained in a medically induced coma, she told CNN, and doctors diagnosed her with a heart defect she didn't know she had -- hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
Lotem said that during the heart catheterization procedure doctors would use a thin plastic tube to insert an "umbrella-like" device that will seal the hole between the two upper chambers of the heart.
But doctors also remember the fetal heart monitor, introduced with great enthusiasm in the 1970s as a way to cut down on birth injuries by alerting doctors to fetal distress in time to remove the baby via Caesarean section.
After initially diagnosing Moore, 25, with a concussion after Thursday's accident, doctors soon discovered bleeding around his heart.
It's also possible, doctors say, for the donor heart to re-innervate -- or grow nerves onto the donor heart.
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The decision to undergo Saturday's test was made after doctors recorded four episodes of abnormal heart rhythms the weekend of June 17.
In 2002, the FBI raided a Tenet hospital in Redding, California, in connection with its investigation into whether doctors were performing unnecessary open-heart surgery.
It reached the market in 1988 but was withdrawn after doctors discovered that the drug caused heart problems when combined with other medicationsin some users.
Lowering LDL cholesterol, some doctors asserted, might not prevent heart attacks.
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But the BHF added the current shortage of heart surgeons meant taking doctors away from practice to retrain them would have a knock-on effect on the service.
In fact, Cheney had suffered what his doctors belatedly described as a mild heart attack, though Bush almost certainly didn't know that when he appeared before the cameras.
If doctors wanted to pull out older heart images, technicians would have to locate the disk the image was stored on, and it could take up to a day to find it.
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