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A study in the UK has found that if you have heart trouble and need your coronary arteries fixed, starving another part of the body of oxygen seems to help. A novel way to help a heart in trouble has been developed but it'll need an arm or a leg. A study in the UK has found that if you have a blockage in a coronary artery and need it fixed, starving another part of the body of oxygen seems to help. Animal studies have shown a curious phenomenon. If there's a blockage in one of the arteries supplying oxygen to heart muscle and you starve another part of the heart of blood briefly, then you protect the area being affected by the blockage. Now this isn't something you'd want to do to a human being, but other research has found in animals that for some reason when you starve a distant part of the body of oxygen, the heart can also be protected. A recent study involved people about to have coronary artery bypass surgery. Half of them had a blood pressure cuff on the arm squeezed so tight that blood flow stopped. Compared to those who didn't have a deprived arm, they suffered significantly less damage during the operation. The next step is to try this when someone's having a heart attack. No-one's sure why this pre-conditioning happens but it's likely that when the arm's deprived of oxygen, it produces chemicals which are a wake-up call to the heart. This was a preliminary study so it needs more work to be sure the effect is real and significant. And don't think that you can argue that throttling your boss is just being kind to his heart.
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