Penn Medicine News Blog Archive: Heart Month

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all areas of Penn Medicine. The mortality rate from both heart disease and stroke have decreased significantly in the past decade, but they still remain the #1 and #4...

 To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all areas of Penn Medicine. “I know this sounds like a cliché, but one of the main reasons I’m interested in learning about the genetic basis of heart...

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all areas of Penn Medicine. At first pass, lariat seems like just a hifalutin' word for the more down-to-earth, lasso – a long, noosed rope. For most, either word...

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all parts of Penn Medicine. This month marks the five-year anniversary of Penn Medicine’s first implantation of a temporary total artificial heart (TAH) in a patient suffering from end-stage...

Would you be able to find an automated external defibrillator if someone’s life depended on it? Despite an estimated one million AEDs scattered around the United States, the answer, all too often when people suffer sudden cardiac arrests, is no. In a Perspective piece published online this week in the journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality Outcomes, Penn Medicine emergency physician Dr. Raina Merchant outlines the tremendous potential associated with greater utilization of AEDs in public places. In cases of ventricular fibrillation – a wild, disorganized cardiac rhythm that leaves the heart unable to properly pump blood through the body, which is the leading cause of sudden cardiac death – quick use of an AED and CPR improve a patient’s chance of surviving by more than 50 percent.

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all parts of Penn Medicine. Hot flashes. Night sweats. Sleep disturbances. Mood swings. Irregular and racing hearts. These are all signs of menopause setting in, the time in a...

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all parts of Penn Medicine. The flowers and cards have all been delivered. The chocolates were devoured and Cupid can now take his annual break. But just because Valentine’s...

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all parts of Penn Medicine. It may seem thoroughly unromantic, but researchers at Penn Medicine’s Cardiovascular Institute are hoping for some broken hearts this Valentine’s Day. But these broken...

It’s Day 10 of Penn Medicine’s MyHeartMap Challenge, and more than 200 teams have signed on for the hunt, submitting more and more AEDs each day. From the farthest reaches of the city – all the way up in Northeast Philly’s Pennypack Park area to the Philadelphia International Airport in Southwest Philly – and throughout Center City, participants are snapping pictures and sending them to our team.

Due to the complex, interdependent nature of the human body’s internal organs, transplant specialists are constantly working to develop new procedures for disorders that extend beyond a single organ. Increasing success with single solid-organ transplantation over the last 50 years has helped propel the field into the more complicated realm of multi-organ transplantation. The first dual-organ transplant, which provided a 6-year-old Texas girl with a new heart and liver, took place on Valentine’s Day in 1984, but just over 100 heart-liver transplants have been performed in the nearly three decades since. Penn Medicine transplant physicians are at the forefront of this work, performing 19 of these combination transplants since 2002 – the second largest number of any transplant center in the U.S., most of whom have only done one or two of the procedures.

Heart disease remains the number one cause of death in the US for both men and women. Heart disease, in all its forms, is responsible for over 400,000 deaths a year among women – more than all forms of cancer combined.

To celebrate February as American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all parts of Penn Medicine. Congenital heart disease (CHD) is the number one birth defect in the U.S., affecting one out of 120 babies. This group of conditions consists...

To celebrate American Heart Month, the News Blog is highlighting some of the latest heart-centric news and stories from all parts of Penn Medicine. Just in time for the start of American Heart Month, Penn Medicine kicked off the MyHeartMap Challenge yesterday. For the first time, the wisdom of the...