Word: clots
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...affect the course of heart disease, cancer and other illnesses isn't well understood yet, but preliminary research has yielded some tantalizing clues. When serotonin circulates in the bloodstream, for example, it appears to make platelets less sticky and thus less likely to clump together in artery-blocking blood clots. For years, heart-attack survivors have been advised to take a children's aspirin daily for clot prevention; such drugs as Prozac, which keep serotonin in circulation, seem to have a similar effect...
...years later, however, in 1968, a University of Liverpool researcher received permission to X-ray the mummy and discovered some intriguing clues: there was a sliver of bone floating in the brain cavity and a dense area at the base of the skull that may have been a blood clot, suggesting a severe--perhaps deliberately lethal--blow to the back of the head...
First what heart failure is not. It's not a heart attack, in which something, usually a clot, blocks the flow of blood through one or more of the coronary arteries--though the damage from a heart attack can be severe enough to cause heart failure. It's also not cardiac arrest, in which the electrical signals that govern the heart become so disorganized the heart can no longer pump blood through its chambers--though patients with heart failure are at much greater risk of dying from cardiac arrest...
Another common in-flight problem is deep venous thrombosis--the so-called economy-class syndrome. When you sit too long in a cramped position, the blood in your legs tends to clot. Most people just get sore calves. But blood clots, left untreated, could travel to the lungs, causing breathing difficulties and even death. Such clots are readily pre-vented by keeping blood flowing; walk and stretch your legs when possible...
...increasingly convinced they have discovered the answer. Evidence is growing that not all the fatty deposits found in coronary arteries are equally prone to trigger heart attacks. Often the smallest, least detectable plaques are the most dangerous--because of their unhappy tendency to burst, triggering the formation of a clot that blocks a blood vessel...