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Former Vice President Dick Cheney walked onstage without any assistance and spoke for an hour and 15 minutes without seeming to tire in his first public engagement since he underwent a heart transplant three weeks ago.

A spokesperson for the family of former Vice President Dick Cheney says he is "doing great", and is up and walking less than a week after receiving a heart transplant. Kara Ahern says Mr. Cheney has been making a lot of phone calls to family and friends. Mr. Cheney also received a great deal of mail from people all over the country during his time at Inova Fairfax Hospital. Ahern tells Fox News, the former Vice President has been calling people he doesn't know personally, "perfect strangers", who have sent in cards and notes wishing him well. Ahern says, "most...

A vaccine delivered in an injection or nasal spray to prevent heart attacks could be available within five years. Scientists have discovered that the drug stimulates the body's immune system to produce antibodies which prevent heart disease by stopping fat building up in the arteries. It is the first time that the underlying cause of heart disease has been targeted. Current treatments focus on using drugs to reduce cholesterol levels and blood pressure. The vaccine can cut the build up of fat in arteries by up to 70 per cent, according to tests by researchers at Lund University in Sweden....

At 71, former Vice President Dick Cheney was older than average for a heart transplant, but doctors said on Sunday that advances in care have made it possible for older patients to still be good transplant candidates. And not only was he older than the typical patient, but he waited longer than average as well -- 20 months vs six months to a year. Doctors said Cheney must have been...

Has anyone had, or knows someone who has had, ablation treatment for Afib?

RUSH: Now, this health story. The website's called Signs of the Times, and the story here is by Dr. Dwight Lundell. "Heart Surgeon Speaks Out On What Really Causes Heart Disease." The upshot of it is that everything that we think we're doing to promote cardiovascular health is actually contributing to cardiovascular problems. This story prints out six pages. The doctor wrote it. So many times I have mentioned over the years about diet, health, food, how we are being manipulated by government goals, wrong medical ideas. Food activists with a logo and a fax machine putting out bogus information...

9:55 AM PST -- A rep for Davy tells TMZ the singer died from a heart attack this morning. ---------------- Davy Jones -- lead singer of The Monkees -- has died ... TMZ has learned. An official from the medical examiner's office for Martin County, Florida confirmed with TMZ they received a call from Martin Memorial Hospital informing them that Jones had passed away. Jones is survived by his wife Jessica and 4 daughters from previous marriages. He was 66-years-old.

Pay Attention to Your Ticker Heart attacks don't always strike out of the blue -- there are many symptoms we can watch for in the days and weeks leading up to an attack. But the symptoms may not be the ones we expect. And they can be different in men and women, and different still in older adults. Last year, for example, a landmark study by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) published in Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Institute found that 95 percent of women who'd had heart attacks reported experiencing symptoms in the weeks and months before...

Paramedics drop organ in front of photographers after it was rushed to hospital by police helicopter for transplantIt was a heart-stopping moment – or nearly so: rushing from a helicopter, two Mexican medics dropped a human heart being ferried to hospital for a transplant. And to compound their embarrassment, press photographers were there to capture the mishap. Thankfully, the transplant was carried out successfully, although that has not stopped the medics being widely ridiculed online. The heart was being transported by a police helicopter to a hospital in Mexico City on Wednesday, in what police described as "a rapid,...

Cutting back on salt may not be as beneficial for your heart as once thought, a new study suggests. While a diet low in salt reduces blood pressure, it increases the levels of cholesterol, fat and hormones in the blood that are known to increase the risk of heart disease, the study found. Overall, the good and bad consequences of a low-salt diet may cancel each other out, so the diet has relatively little effect on the development of disease, said study researcher Dr. Niels Graudal, of Copenhagen University Hospital in Denmark.

Every three days, more Americans die from sudden cardiac arrest than the number who died in the 9-11 attacks. You can lessen this recurring loss by learning Continuous Chest Compression CPR, a hands-only CPR method that doubles a person’s chance of surviving cardiac arrest. It’s easy and does not require mouth-to-mouth contact, making it more likely bystanders will try to help, and it was developed at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. "This video is worth sharing," said Gordon A. Ewy, MD, director of the UA Sarver Heart Center and one of the research pioneers who developed this method....

Enlarge Image Heart attack. Following a big meal, oily nutrients in the bloodstream of Burmese pythons (shown) spur massive growth of their hearts. Credit: Stephen M. Secor At the end of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the titular villain undergoes a literal change of heart. His blood-pumping organ swells to three times its prior size. The ticker of the Burmese python (Python molurus) similarly balloons, but the cause isn't Christmas cheer—it's a big meal. A new study of recently fed snakes suggests that a precise mixture of fatty acids in the blood drives this cardiac growth, unveiling...

Heart Attack Grill Owner Serves 8,000-Calorie BurgerBy Mikaela Conley | ABC News – Tue, Oct 11, 2011 If you’re going to laugh in the face of obesity by opening a restaurant that serves an 8,000-calorie burger, you might as well open it in Sin City. And that’s just what Heart Attack Grill owner Jon Basso is doing. On Wednesday, the owner opens the doors to his third Heart Attack Grill location, this time in Las Vegas. The restaurant offers a Quadruple Bypass Burger that contains four beef patties, cheese, bacon and reportedly, about 8,000 calories. Along with its staple sandwich,...

A doctor from Israel says: "In Israel the medicine is so advanced that we cut off a man's testicles; we put them into another man, and in 6 weeks he is looking for work." The German doctor comments: "That's nothing, in Germany we take part of the brain out of a person; we put it into another person's head, and in 4 weeks he is looking for work." A Russian doctor says: "That's nothing either. In Russia we take out half of the heart from a person; we put it into another person's chest, and in 2 weeks he is...

US President Barack Obama says the US economy has suffered a "heart attack" and survived but is not recuperating quickly enough, as he geared up to unveil a major jobs plan. Obama appeared on the Tom Joyner Morning Show in what also appeared to be an effort to reach out to black voters (Snip) "This is a situation where the economy essentially had a heart attack, and the patient lived, and the patient is getting better, but it's getting better very slowly." Obama is preparing a major speech on jobs and deficit cutting next week which is designed to revive

PARIS -- Willy Wonka may have been on to something with that chocolate factory, according to a meta-analysis that suggests chocolate can provide a heart benefit. In six studies, people who ate the most chocolate -- about two pieces of chocolate per week -- had a 37% lower risk of any cardiovascular disease compared with those who ate less (RR 0.63, 95% CI 0.44 to 0.90), according to Oscar Franco, MD, PhD, of the University of Cambridge in England. And in three studies, those who consumed the most had a 29% lower risk of stroke (RR 0.71, 95% CI 0.52...

In Sept. 2008, Roger Fisher said that he was happy to receive the publicity for the song "Barracuda", co-written with the Wilson sisters from Heart, which was being used by the McCain/Palin campaign. The Wilson sisters said that "Sarah Palin's views and values in NO WAY represent us as American women." Roger told Reuters back then that he pledged to give part of the royalties from the song's use by McCain/Palin campaign to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama's campaign. I wonder if he and the Wilson sisters feel the same way about Barack Obama these days...

The letter she wrote to her family before the birth of Trig gives us a glimpse into the soul of the penultimate "NON-quitter." In her email Palin imagines a letter from God to the family about to launch on its challenging child-rearing experience together. "Then, I put the idea in your hearts that his name should be 'Trig', because it's so fitting, with two Norse meanings: "True" and "Brave Victory"." "I've given Trig's mom and dad peace and joy as they wait to meet their new son. I gave them a happy anticipation because they asked me for that.I'll give...

If a person's blood becomes too thick it can damage blood vessels and increase the risk of heart attacks. But a Temple University physicist has discovered that he can thin the human blood by subjecting it to a magnetic field. [snip] Because red blood cells contain iron, Tao has been able to reduce a person's blood viscosity by 20-30 percent by subjecting it to a magnetic field of 1.3 Telsa (about the same as an MRI) for about one minute. Tao and his collaborator tested numerous blood samples in a Temple lab and found that the magnetic field polarizes the...

CLEVELAND - Contrary to what we’ve been told, eliminating or severely limiting fats from the diet may not be beneficial to cardiac function in patients suffering from heart failure, a study at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine reports. Results from biological model studies conducted by assistant professor of physiology and biophysics Margaret Chandler, PhD, and other researchers, demonstrate that a high-fat diet improved overall mechanical function, in other words, the heart’s ability to pump, and was accompanied by cardiac insulin resistance. “Does that mean I can go out and eat my Big Mac after I have a heart...