Medical Tests & Procedures Archive

There are wrong ways and right ways to measure your blood pressure. Watch Harvard Heart Letter Editor Patrick Skerrett demonstrate both.

Buy a monitor that meets the test

There are dozens of home blood pressure monitors on the market. You can buy a good one at your local pharmacy or a big-box store for anywhere between $60 and $100.

Does it make sense to get a mammogram if you're 80? A colonoscopy if you're 85? Experts are still sorting it out.

Experts have battled over whether women should start getting screening mammograms for breast cancer at age 40 or 50. Hit the half-century mark these days, and chances are that your doctor has a present waiting for you: a referral for a colonoscopy. It's a given that women will start getting Pap smears, the screening test for cervical cancer, when they turn 21 or even sooner, depending on when they become sexually active.

Genetic testing helps some people glimpse their cardiovascular future.

The announcement in April 2003 that scientists had worked out the order of the three billion letters in the human genetic code revved up the hopes and imaginations of many people, cardiologists included. Personal genetic report cards, mused a few, will someday help each of us better understand our heart disease risk and point the way to new treatments. They're right, of course. But "someday" will be a while coming "" the human genome isn't giving up its secrets easily, and some of what we're learning we don't quite know what to do with.

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What's the best way to "fix" a narrowed coronary artery? That question was the crux of a multimillion-dollar trial dubbed COURAGE, short for Clinical Outcomes Utilizing Revascularization and Aggressive Drug Evaluation. Its results, presented in the spring of 2007, stunned some doctors and seemed to shock the media, but we hope they won't come as a surprise to readers: For people with stable coronary artery disease (clogged arteries nourishing the heart), artery-opening angioplasty was no better than medications and lifestyle changes at preventing future heart attacks or strokes, nor did it extend life.

Interesting heart palpitations causes and treatment for a case of the heart flutters

Does your heart unexpectedly start to race or pound, or feel like it keeps skipping beats? These sensations are called heart palpitations. For most people, heart palpitations are a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence. Others have dozens of these heart flutters a day, sometimes so strong that they feel like a heart attack.

Most palpitations are caused by a harmless hiccup in the heart's rhythm. A few reflect a problem in the heart or elsewhere in the body.

If you don't mind pricking a finger, you can check your cholesterol without sitting around in a doctor's waiting room or laboratory. Devices available in pharmacies or through the Internet make this easy to do at home. But is it worth doing?

The makers of home cholesterol tests rightly tout their products as faster than visiting a doctor. You prick your finger, gently squeeze a few drops of blood onto a test strip or into a small "well," and you get the results in a few minutes, instead of waiting a few days.