So Sanofi has been deftly presenting its Acomplia data at cardiology meetings, sending heart doctors aflutter.
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.
FORBES: Merck To Pay $688 Million To Shareholders For Delaying Vytorin Results
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.
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.
After suffering a heart attack, doctors felt his excess weight of two stone could trigger other life threatening diseases.
It is not clear the additional expense and higher complication rate of the new gadget is worth it for all heart patients, doctors say.
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.
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.
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.
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.
El-Masri says Vytorin will allow doctors to treat heart disease aggressively without worrying as much about safety.
For others, cholesterol may decrease without reducing their risk of heart attack as much as doctors expect.
Doctors who treat heart attacks are excited at having a new cheap option that can take a big chunk out of patients' cholesterol.
For sensitive operations like spine, heart or brain surgery, doctors don't just put patients to sleep, they temporarily paralyze them with powerful muscle relaxants.
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.
This severe deficit of medical personnel means that patients with heart ailments usually have to travel long distances to undergo heart examinations and consult with doctors.
And at least the heart of the scheme has doctors' firm backing: four-fifths of them told the poll cited above that providing national patient-care records would indeed be of real importance.
ECONOMIST: The NHS is to spend billions on IT. Will it be spent well?
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.
FORBES: Abbott Stenting Scandal Sounds Like Tenet All Over Again
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.
Orange, a French rival, already offers a service that records measurements from implanted heart monitors and transmits them to doctors via the internet.
It could also revolutionize the treatment of heart attacks and strokes by giving doctors a potent medicine that can clear plaque out of the arteries.
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.
FORBES: Can you sue a company for a product the feds approved?
The 24-year-old's heart stopped for 78 minutes as doctors struggled to keep him alive at the stadium and then later at the London Chest Hospital on March 17.
In July, a U.S. government study found that long-term use of one hormone treatment, Prempro, brought with it greater risks of heart disease and breast cancer than doctors had expected.
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.
Guidelines for heart-risk screening, issued by the heart association in late 2010, encouraged doctors to take family histories into account.
Both Zetia and Vytorin prospered because doctors believed that in combating heart disease, lowering LDL was the next best thing to youth.
Merck, on the other hand, will keep a strong sales presence with primary care doctors who treat diabetes, heart disease and other widespread ailments.
He said that one of the problems with fen-phen, a diet drug combo that wound up causing heart-valve problems, was that doctors were too eager to hand them out.
应用推荐