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Heart Too Buff? Have an Attack

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Usually, heart doctors try to prevent and treat heart attacks. But now some cardiologists are actually causing heart attacks--in the name of science. (That’s what I would have liked to have done to the cop who gave me a ticket yesterday while I was sitting in my car with the engine running at a red curb.) Back to the heart attack docs. Apparently, a few people out there, about one in 500, have over-achieving hearts. This is a genetic condition with a fancy name--hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy. It’s where the muscle between the heart’s two lower chambers is, like, way buff: that is, thick and strong. The muscle needs to chill a bit because it’s getting in the way of the blood that needs to get out of the heart.

Now, when people with regular-size heart muscles have heart attacks, muscles usually become weaker and thinner. So one day a doctor in England reasons, hey, if that’s what a heart attack does to a normal heart muscle, what would it do to a muscle that’s too thick? Could a heart attack produced in a closely monitored setting actually work as a cure?

To knock this big muscle down to size, cardiologists working in a hospital cardiac laboratory inject pure alcohol into the artery that feeds it, causing a controlled heart attack. Currently, only 15 centers across the country offer the procedure, which has been performed on 150 patients to date.

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Dr. Raj Makkar, associate director of cardiovascular intervention at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, who performs the experimental procedure, acknowledges: “The idea of causing a heart attack takes some getting used to.” But once he injects the alcohol into the vessel and watches the muscle change before his eyes, he says, “It’s like Absolut--as in the vodka--magic. He adds, however, that although the results look promising the procedure is still new and not for everyone with the condition.

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