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HEART STUDIES-- PLAVIX AND OLDER WOMEN

There are important new studies concerning heart disease and protecting against death associated with heart attack.

One shows a way to help clot-busting drugs be more effective. Another study shows a way to predict cardiovascular death risk in postmenopausal women.
While angioplasty and stent is preferred for treating heart attack patients, many still get clot busting medicine, but it’s not perfect. This new study shows adding a kind of blood thinner can improve survival chances.
“They rushed me to the hospital and they give me oxygen.” Basmati Surujdeo suffered a heart attack. Fortunately she got to the hospital in time to get emergency angioplasty.
She’s doing fine.
But people with a heart attack are given this clot busting drug to remove the heart artery blockage causing the heart attack, along with heparin, a blood thinner, and aspirin, a drug that blocks the platelets, the sticky cells that promote clotting.
Still, even after all these medicines, up to one-forth of patients still have a blocked artery that puts them at continued risk of death.
Now, a new study just released by the New England Journal of Medicine shows that the addition of this other platelet-blocking drug—Plavix—can help keep the artery open and reduce the risk of a second heart attack.
Dr. Samin Sharma, a cardiologist at Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York, says, “We always use to worry about giving Plavix to those who have received the blood clot busting drugs that are you going to increase the chances of bleeding, but the study show that by giving Plavix you did not increase the chance of bleeding anywhere or bleeding in the brain therefore it was a perfectly safe strategy.”
The study showed that by simply adding this medicine, the risk of having a blocked heart artery, dying, or having a second heart attack was reduced by 36 percent. And nearly ninety percent of patients had open arteries.
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According to new research, a simple blood test may help predict the risk of death and the chances of having a heart attack or stroke in post-menopausal women.
The white blood cell count, which helps protect us against infections, apparently also rises with the inflammation found in atherosclerosis, the thickening of the blood vessels caused by fatty cholesterol plaque.
In a large study done by Minnesota researchers, women with the highest white blood cell counts had double the risk for coronary heart disease deaths compared to women with the lowest white counts.
The test is incredibly inexpensive to do, only pennies, and is part of most blood count tests done. It’s already been shown that white count is linked to cardiovascular risk in men.
The findings may mean another simple, easy predictor of heart disease in women, something that could tell a woman and her doctor to look more carefully for heart disease. Experts say that using this blood test along with another blood test called C-reactive protein, which also looks for inflammation, will be an area of research interest because testing for these heart disease markers is so inexpensive.

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