Breakthroughs Today

It is no accident that heart attack has been referred to as a "thief in the night," alluding to the biblical character that Jesus mention in the gospels. And one of our friends and readers, wants to know how to prevent it from happening. LAST Jan. 5, a regular reader of Breakthroughs through Sun-Star Network Exchange sent me an email: Dear Sirs, Having read your column, I'm interested in knowing more as I have a history of heart disease. And also how can I prevent heart attack? Awaiting your reply, Peter Parr, O.B.E. His letter led me to delve deeper into the challenges that heart attack prevention demands. And admittedly prevention is far better than cure. Heart attack (stroke) is a physical incident wherein the blood supply to a part of the heart gets interrupted, causing the heart cells to die. This incident results from the rupture of a plaque, an unstable collection of dense fats and white cells stuck in the wall of a heart artery. Its fragm

Certain things in life comes when we have the patience to wait for the right time. That same thing holds true in medical science and technology. Where cardiac events had been known for its bad reputation as a "thief in the night," right now it can be predicted with sensible accuracy. THE recent wave of science and technology developments in medicine, particularly in Japan, gave rise to a better way of predicting deadly turns in coronary artery disease (CAD). As of 2006, CAD is the leading cause of death in Taiwan. And the disease results from degenerative stiffening of blood vessels in the body, called atherosclerosis. During the later part of the 20th century, Japan came up with a technology that measures the stiffness of arteries using pulse wave velocity (PWV). The basic scientific principles of PWV through the arterial tree dates back to 1808 when Thomas Young started investigating it.  As early as 1998, carotid-femoral PWV (cfPWV), the use of PWV in as