Peter Orlean and Anant K. Menon describe how a lipid that helps proteins attach to cell membranes is made. The protein, called glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI), is important because people with defective GPI can develop seizures, have heart attacks, and acquire a hemolytic condition in which red blood cells are destroyed.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has caused an unnecessary scare about some pain relievers by adding a warning to drugs that are safe, says Curt Furberg, M.D., Ph.D., from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. At the same time, he says the agency has failed to recognize the harm of a pain reliever that should be taken off the market.

A new imaging technology may hold the key to not only stopping heart attacks in their tracks but also preventing them for ever occurring. For the first time, researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine have shown the use multi-detector computed tomography (CT) imaging along with a novel contrast agent know as N1177 can detect dangerous, high-risk plaque which cause heart attack and stroke.

An international study involving 467 hospitals in 12 countries found that doctors do a good job of aggressively treating the early stages of heart attacks - even before laboratory tests confirm the diagnosis.

Doctors who treat the painful condition of osteoarthritis in patients with increased cardiovascular risk need to be cautious. A team lead by researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, are the first to study outcomes in high cardiovascular risk patients with osteoarthritis.

Contrary to some previous studies, rural hospitals in Iowa do provide quality care for patients with heart attacks and do not have higher death rates when compared to urban hospitals, report University of Iowa researchers.

Using a nuclear medicine technique and molecular imaging to "see" programmed cell loss-the body's normal way of getting rid of unneeded or abnormal cells-may help in early identification of those individuals who are at risk of developing heart failure, say researchers in the April Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

The research team led by Drs Benjamin Kile and David Huang has discovered that platelet life span is controlled by two key molecules. The discovery raises the prospect of developing a new drug to prolong the life span of platelets stored in blood banks, effectively increasing the availability of this life-saving blood product.