Even after making these adjustments, however, the olive-oil group showed statistically significant drops in heart-disease risk.
Its shares tumbled 3.6% in Zurich as the company said it had stopped a trial of heart-disease drug dalcetrapib after disappointing data.
"We always assumed it was HDL" that decreased heart-disease risk, he says.
Family histories can be used as a proxy for detailed genetic work that may someday be used to help predict heart-disease risk, researchers say.
The surprise was that although men with a copy of the apo E-4 gene made up less than 16% of the group, they accounted for 26% of the heart-disease deaths.
WSJ: A Gene Gives a Hint Of How Long a Person Might Hope to Live
But a more recent study of 12, 000 American men and women found that high Lp-PLA2 levels were an independent heart-disease risk factor mainly in those patients with relatively low cholesterol levels.
"It's a good thing everybody is allowed to have their say, but the FDA has to do its job, " said heart-disease expert Sanjay Kaul, who served as an FDA adviser and voted against lorcaserin.
To ensure that other factors that could affect heart-disease rates were not playing a role, the researchers also adjusted for the total amount of calories the groups were eating, since obesity can be a major contributor to heart attack and stroke.
Previous studies have linked Mediterranean diets to fewer heart attacks and deaths from heart disease, but most of those have correlated people's recall of their diet with heart-disease outcomes rather than randomly assigning participants to eat specific diets and then following them for heart-disease risk, as Estruch and his colleagues did.
If the FDA adopts the panel's recommendation -- the agency isn't required to do so, but typically does in such cases -- it would mark the first time that a statin was approved for heart-disease-free people with healthy cholesterol levels but other risk factors, including high levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), a marker of inflammation.
CNN: FDA considers statin use for those with normal cholesterol
Primates held in captivity are at increased risk of death from heart-related disease.
That's because obesity leads to so many different diseases--diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, mental disease--that it's hard to separate out the reasons for the reduction in costs once the employee loses weight.
It could also explain why Pfizer is willing to take the risk of running a large heart trial in patients with severe heart disease--exactly where risk is most likely to turn up.
Nissen then walked through a series of slides arguing diabetes drugs are approved with almost no long-term data in patients with heart disease--even though, after approval, heart patients get the drugs for a long time.
But by affecting these switches in combination, researchers hope that they can modify the risk factors for both diabetes and heart disease--a bona fide blockbuster market in a world where waistlines are expanding and heart disease is at epidemic levels.
It also reduces cytotoxicity--that is, the killing of cells, which causes heart disease--by 18%.
However, speaking to BBC Radio 4's The Report, Sir Roger - the Department of Health's former National Director for Heart Disease - said he still would not send his children to Leeds.
In the late 1970s, researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied six major snowstorms in Massachusetts (including the record-setting Blizzard of '78), and found that heart disease-related deaths rose by 22 percent in the week following a storm.
CNN: Shoveling snow? How to protect your back (and your heart)
When cardiac CT angiography is being used appropriately -- meaning, for example, in people with chest pain suggesting blocked heart arteries, rather than as a screening test for people with no symptoms of heart disease -- the benefits far outweigh the risk of the radiation, according to Einstein and Hausleiter.
But a renegade group of doctors use it for a far broader range of ills--everything from heart disease to memory impairment--despite scant evidence it works and potentially dangerous side effects.
Heart transplants are the last resort for end-stage heart disease, but there aren't enough organs to go around.
Even for patients at modest risk of heart attacks--meaning that they have heart disease, diabetes, or a combination of some risk factors--the new guidelines suggest lowering cholesterol at least 30-40%.
Lipitor and other statins can be lifesaving for anyone with proven heart disease--a market of 13 million patients.
If drugmakers can find new drugs that can silence Syndrome X, also known as metabolic syndrome, they could deal a devastating blow to heart disease--and reap huge sales.
And as individuals live longer, they are increasingly prone to such "old age" problems as diabetes and heart disease - chronic ailments that are usually more expensive to treat.
Although the heart disease-inflammation link is promising, there is still controversy over whether heart inflammation is truly independent of other, more established cardiovascular risk factors, such as cholesterol or smoking, O'Donnell says.
But another study, by researchers at the department of Veterans Affairs, puts the focus on a far older class of drugs, which are the pharmaceutical industry's perennial bestsellers for stopping another killer, heart disease--statins.
Premature deaths from heart disease - the single biggest killer - are down by a quarter since 1997, with a third more heart operations, twice as many patients receiving immediate access to clot-busting drugs and cholesterol lowering drugs now prescribed to 1.8 million people.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Politics | Full text: Blair on public services
At that point the HRT-takers stopped taking hormones, and the researchers analyzed the results, finding that half as many women in the HRT group had had heart problems or died of heart disease than non-HRT takers.
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