Word: wakefulness
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...meaning "about one day"). Now, a heart attack depends on the imbalance between increased myocardial oxygen demand (i.e., a greater need for oxygen in your heart) and decreased myocardial oxygen supply - or both. And unfortunately, some functions in the first hours of the day require more myocardial oxygen support: waking and commencing physical activities, the peak of the adrenal hormone cortisol [which boosts blood-pressure and blood-sugar levels] and a further increase in blood pressure and heart rate due to catecholamines (adrenaline and noradrenaline), which show a peak when you wake up. All those factors lead to an increase...
...have to remember that blood coagulation is important in the genesis of what we call thrombi, the blood clots that can block the blood vessels and cut off supply to the heart. When we wake up, platelets, the particles in the blood that make thrombi, are particularly adhesive to the vessels. Usually we have an endogenous system - it's called fibrinolysis - to dissolve the thrombi. But in the morning, the activity of our fibrinolytic system is reduced. So we have a greater tendency to make thrombi that can occlude the coronary vessels. This contributes to further reduction of coronary blood...
...important for doctors, however, to remember this risk when we give therapy. Usually people take hypertensive drugs in the morning, when they wake up. But this is already the higher-risk period - so is the last hour of activity of the pill they have taken the day before [and not all pills give 24-hour coverage]. We have to be sure that the pill we're prescribing is still active when patients need it most. It's not as easy as simply asking patients to take pills before bed instead of first thing in the morning, because during sleep...
...serious demeanor, reflected in his craggy, Lincolnesque features, makes Oakley a poor companion for swapping jokes or, as one old friend put it, ''having him over to the house to get drunk in front of the fire.'' But such intensity has endeared him to colleagues, even those who received wake-up calls alerting them to overnight cables and demanding to know what should be done. ''It's always a little off-putting to get slammed up against the wall at 7:30 in the morning,'' says an admiring Richard Murphy, who worked with Oakley during the Reagan Administration. Oakley...
...satirists - or I think his word was cynics but I think really the word he intended is satirists - are basically disappointed idealists. So you're making people laugh, but you're kind of writing from anger: "It shouldn't be this way! Damn it, why is it like this? Wake up, people!" But as the curdling effect gets more profound, comedy kibitzers kind of do what I would call topical comedy as opposed to satire. And you can see the mechanism of that starting up: the guys are getting their trusty catalogs of "he's so old" jokes that...