Beta-blockers heal the heart via the brain when administered during heart failure, according to a new study by UCL (University College London). Up to now, it was thought that beta-blockers work directly on the heart, but the new study shows that the drugs may also act via the brain, suggesting that future therapies to treat cardiovascular disease could be targeting the central nervous system.

Scientists at the Center for Translational Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia have shown that a specific signaling protein is crucial to protecting the heart and helping it to adapt during a heart attack.

A chronic autoimmune disease, rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is characterized by persistent inflammation of the synovial membrane and progressive joint destruction. Beyond loss of mobility, sufferers face a high risk of heart failure.

Conventional wisdom holds that as the U.S. population ages, the incidence of heart failure will continue to rise. A new study from Duke University Medical Center challenges part of that assumption, however, finding that heart failure is actually declining among the very elderly.

The number of elderly individuals newly diagnosed with heart failure has declined during the past ten years, but the number of those living with the condition has increased, according to a report in the February 25 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

What do marathoners and heart failure patients have in common? More than you think according to new findings by physiologists at Columbia University Medical Center.

A team of researchers in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States has revealed how mitochondrial diseases are passed from the mother to the next generation in a mouse model system.

Medical breakthroughs in recent decades have allowed heart attack survivors and other heart-disease patients to live longer. But as their hearts decline into congestive heart failure, an increasing number will experience disability and the need for nursing-home care.

A Las Vegas business and Oak Ridge National Laboratory are improving the odds for people medically at risk from dehydration or congestive heart failure.

A randomized, controlled, multi-center trial has found that cardiac resynchronization therapy produced no improvement in peak oxygen uptake during exercise testing, the trial's primary endpoint, in patients with Class III heart failure, including mechanical problems that disrupt the heart's normal rhythm and a moderately prolonged QRS complex as demonstrated on EKG.

Heart failure patients are more likely to comply with important non-medication interventions, such as fluid and salt restrictions and regular weighing, when they have intensive support from a heart failure nurse and multidisciplinary team than if they do not, researchers reported at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2007

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have evidence to explain why the supposedly natural act of aging is by itself a very potent risk factor for life-threatening heart failure.