Deans' stroke musings: Soon, simple blood test to identify smokers at high risk for heart disease

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Soon, simple blood test to identify smokers at high risk for heart disease

I don't see why this has has to be for smokers only.
http://news.bioscholar.com/2011/10/soon-simple-blood-test-to-identify-smokers-at-high-risk-for-heart-disease.html

A simple blood test could someday be used to measure a smoker’s lung toxicity and danger of heart disease, a new study led by an Indian-origin researcher

Levels of a lung protein found in the blood of smokers could indicate their risk of dangerous plaque buildup in blood vessels, said Dr. Anand Rohatgi, assistant professor of internal medicine at UT Southwestern and co-lead author of the study.

“We now are close to having a blood test to help measure the smoking-related effects that contribute to atherosclerotic heart disease,” Dr. Rohatgi said. “Smoking is one of the biggest contributors to the development of heart disease.”

Smokers are at an increased risk of heart attack, stroke and dying from heart disease, but the risk varies among individuals. Until this study, there had been no simple blood test to measure the varied effects of smoking on heart disease.

Researchers determined the amount of circulating pulmonary surfactant B (SP-B), a protein found in damaged lung cells, in more than 3,200 Dallas Heart Study participants ages 30 to 65.

They found that smokers who had higher levels of SP-B also had more buildup of dangerous plaque in the aorta – the largest artery in the body, with branches leading to the abdomen, pelvis and legs.

The next step, said Dr. Rohatgi, is to investigate whether SP-B causes atherosclerosis or is simply a marker of the disease, and to determine whether decreasing levels of SP-B will improve heart disease outcomes.

The study has been published in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, a publication of the American Heart Association.

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