Screening and treating middle-aged adults with a family history of coronary heart disease could prevent more than 4 in 10 premature heart attacks, according to an article in this week’s BMJ.

Doctors should think twice before using drug-coated stents in some heart attack patients, experts said Tuesday. Dr. Gabriel Steg presented research at a meeting of the European Society of Cardiology in Vienna showing that patients who received drug-coated stents in an emergency situation were five times more likely to die after two years than those who received bare metal stents.

Patients with depression appear to have an impaired ability to recover their heart rate variability following acute coronary syndromes such as heart attack, a factor that could increase their risk of coronary death, according to a report in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

The reported failure of vitamin E to prevent heart attacks may be due to underdosing, according to a new study by investigators at Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

With 40 percent of all heart attacks and related cardiovascular problems occurring in people who have low levels of so-called “good” cholesterol, researchers have long sought medications to increase the amount of this type of cholesterol in the body’s circulation.

Heart attack patients received lifesaving treatment quickly when hospitals and communities used an integrated, rapid transfer system to get patients to a facility equipped to perform artery-opening procedures, according to a report in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association.

New research at the University of Nottingham, funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), is paving the way for techniques that use stem cells to repair the damage caused by heart attacks.

Women who have suffered heart attacks have higher rates of lingering depressive symptoms compared to their male counterparts, a University of Alberta and McGill University study shows.

Researchers at The University of Nottingham have got more bad news for smokers. Not only does it cause cancer, heart attacks and strokes but smokers will also lose more muscle mass in old age than a non-smoker. The effect of this predisposes smokers to an accelerated decline in physical function and loss of independence.

By uncovering how one breast cancer drug protects the heart and another does not, Duke University Medical Center researchers believe they may have opened up a new way to screen drugs for possible heart-related side effects and to develop new drugs.

American doctors are starting a dramatic experiment this month to try to save patients dying from congestive heart failure by temporarily resting their hearts, then boosting them with a drug long abused for bodybuilding.

A widely used diabetes pill raises the risk of heart attacks and possibly death, according to a scientific analysis that reveals what some experts are calling another Vioxx-like example of the U.S. government failing to protect the public from an unsafe drug.