Thursday, October 26, 2006
An article from a few weeks ago:
Stomach acid drug may slow heart failureSOURCE: Journal of the American College of Cardiology, October 3, 2006.
Sep 26 (Reuters Health) - Treatment with famotidine, which is sold under the names Pepcid and Fluxid as a stomach acid blocker, appears to improve the symptoms occur with chronic heart failure, new research shows.
Famotidine blocks histamine receptors that exist on gastric cells, and this decreases stomach acid production. However, these receptors also exist in heart muscle cells, so Dr. Masafumi Kitakaze and colleagues thought famotidine could benefit people with heart failure.
To investigate, Kitakaze, at the National Cardiovascular Center in Suita, Japan, and colleagues compared cardiac symptoms and function in heart failure patients who were treated with famotidine or with a different type of acid blocker for reflux disease or gastritis.
As they report in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, the researchers found that famotidine therapy had a beneficial effect on the function of the main pumping chamber of the heart. Moreover, treatment with famotidine seemed to dramatically reduce hospital readmission rates for worsening heart failure.
In a statement, Dr. Gary S. Francis, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic and co-author of a related editorial, sounded a caution: "I certainly would not recommend that patients go out and start taking Pepcid three times a day or anything like that."
Monday, October 23, 2006
Hey, did I tell you that my new ICD fired up only 5 days after I got it put in? At the data dump* a couple days later, it showed my fibrillation at about 300 beats per minute, and the doc swears I wouldn't have been sitting there talking to him without this ICD. Odd, though, since the previous ICD had not fired in 2.5 years... We have to wonder a bit if the surgery perhaps acted in some sort of catalytic way to make things a bit worse, even while providing a fix for them.
*Data dump being more formally known as interrogation, carried out by means of telemetry.
It feels odd - not the big thwack in the chest I was expecting from the tests on the previous ICD, but instead just an odd electrical fizzy feeling, as though a small automobile fuse had shorted, and a few sparklies in front of my eyes. Very mild feeling, didn't knock me over, let alone out, but it was a real incident, the telemetry says so!
It may have fired again this past morning, I'm not sure; my next data dump isn't for another 2 months, and unless it fires repeatedly in a short period, one doesn't call the doctor for just one incident.
*Data dump being more formally known as interrogation, carried out by means of telemetry.
It feels odd - not the big thwack in the chest I was expecting from the tests on the previous ICD, but instead just an odd electrical fizzy feeling, as though a small automobile fuse had shorted, and a few sparklies in front of my eyes. Very mild feeling, didn't knock me over, let alone out, but it was a real incident, the telemetry says so!
It may have fired again this past morning, I'm not sure; my next data dump isn't for another 2 months, and unless it fires repeatedly in a short period, one doesn't call the doctor for just one incident.
Well, I've just been busy. Busier than I should be, perhaps - we had houseguests for a weekend, and between the clean-up before-hand, the staying up late talking, and the running around doing stuff, I was wiped out - pretty much slept straight through afterwards, waking up only briefly for lunch and dinner the next day. My sleep schedule is still a bit rocky after that.
On the bright side, my 6 weeks is up since the surgery, so I can now raise my right arm above shoulder level, and carry my saxophone, and get back on the motorcycle. I hadn't been able to put on t-shirts for the 6 weeks - it is possible, though difficult, to get a t-shirt ON without raising one's arm above the head, but it is completely impossible to get a t-shirt OFF without doing so.
The scar is still sort of odd - a very pronounced ridge, although at least it doesn't have the strange tuck under it any more - but the week or so that it took that tuck to loosen up and flatten out some was quite some pain. A great deal of nerve pain, under the shoulder and radiating out along the right arm, feeling like I was being stabbed with daggers. Not fun. But that's gone now. I wish doctors were better about warning one about that sort of thing!!
On the bright side, my 6 weeks is up since the surgery, so I can now raise my right arm above shoulder level, and carry my saxophone, and get back on the motorcycle. I hadn't been able to put on t-shirts for the 6 weeks - it is possible, though difficult, to get a t-shirt ON without raising one's arm above the head, but it is completely impossible to get a t-shirt OFF without doing so.
The scar is still sort of odd - a very pronounced ridge, although at least it doesn't have the strange tuck under it any more - but the week or so that it took that tuck to loosen up and flatten out some was quite some pain. A great deal of nerve pain, under the shoulder and radiating out along the right arm, feeling like I was being stabbed with daggers. Not fun. But that's gone now. I wish doctors were better about warning one about that sort of thing!!
