Word: vessels
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...Numbers 6 hr. 13 min. Time it took Hilary Lister, a 33-year-old Briton paralyzed below the neck, to sail across the English Channel, sucking and blowing into straws to steer the vessel...
...favor Fackelmann did may well have saved his life. The scan revealed a major blockage in one of his coronary arteries. A few days later, doctors propped open the dangerously clogged blood vessel with a stent, thereby preventing what could have been a heart attack. "I would have been one of those guys who was just out jogging with my son or playing basketball and died," Fackelmann says. "There was never any reason for me to suspect that there was such a dramatic lesion in my heart...
...changed Fackelmann's future was generated without any kind of surgery. For years, the gold standard for discovering the location of blockages in a patient's coronary arteries has been a procedure called a cardiac catheterization, in which a specialist inserts a probe through an incision into a blood vessel in the groin, then snakes it up toward the heart, where an opaque dye is released...
Ever since the 1700s, when doctors discovered bony material in heart vessels, physicians have known that some blood-vessel cells can morph into bony tissue. Now we know that excess cholesterol tends to trigger this process in the arteries that feed the heart. Calcium can then build up in the vessels and stiffen them, laying the foundation for heart disease. Getting one's calcium score is as simple as getting a quick injection of a contrast agent in the arm and a zap from an ultrafast X ray, either by electron beam computed tomography (EBCT) or by multidetector CT. Studies...
...developing some interesting theories. Dr. Linda Demer, a cardiologist at UCLA who has been studying coronary calcium for 15 years, believes that having many small calcium deposits may be worse than having fewer larger ones. Her work suggests that it is not the total amount of calcium that makes vessels vulnerable but rather the way the deposits are anchored to the blood vessels. Since the vessels are flexible and the calcium is hard, the arteries are weakest wherever the calcium adheres; the more deposits, the more tension points where the vessel can tear...