When Elaine Curtis lost her son in November of 2012, her daughter says the overwhelming grief took a tool on her mother’s health. “She just kept getting sicker and sicker,” says Karen Wright. “We were to the point we were discussing if she could live in her house.” Elaine was experiencing difficulty breathing and it…

On Friday, February 21, a team of Oklahoma Heart Institute physicians, led by Drs. Kamran Muhammad, Wayne Leimbach Jr. and Paul Kempe performed the first three successful commercial Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) procedures in Oklahoma using the recently FDA-approved Medtronic CoreValve.  The Medtronic CoreValve transcatheter heart valve was FDA approved just last month. The…

The U.S. Surgeon General recently announced that unless tobacco use rates fall, more than 5.6 million children in the United States will die early. Calling for a “tobacco-free generation” Surgeon General Dr Boris Lushniak released the first report in more than a decade to get the country talking about the leading cause of preventable death in our…

Resistant hypertension is defined as blood pressure that remains above a goal target when at least 3 medication therapies, including a diuretic, fail to control the blood pressure. This affects an estimated 13 %of the population with high blood pressure, also known as hypertension. For those with sleep apnea, in addition to resistant hypertension, a new…

Director of the cardiac CT program at Oklahoma Heart Institute Dr. Victor Cheng joins us on the blog today to talk about the program and when patients should be referred for a scan.  Cardiac computed tomographic angiography (CTA) is special CT scan that images the entire heart when heart structures are relatively still. A steady heart rate of less than…

New recommendations were announced Tuesday by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association. They say an estimated 31 percent of Americans could benefit from the use of statin drugs. That figure is more than double the current percentage (15 percent) of Americans taking these medications to lower their cholesterol. The recommendation, which is based on…