The leading cause of death right now is Cardiovascular Disease and statistics has shown that 1 in 3 will die from Cardiovascular Disease and it has also been the leading cause of death from China since the 1990's.
How To Lower your Risk of Heart Disease In fact, cardiovascular disease is the number one killer among women and it kills more women each year than all cancers, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria combined.

There are a number of factors for the increasing risk of cardiovascular disease, mainly:

1.Obesity

2.Smoking

Why Stress Makes You Eat
Stress is any
change in your normal routine or health. Stress occurs when bad things happen,
as well as happy things. Getting a raise or promotion is stress, just as getting
fired from your job is stress. Speculative changes cause just as much stress as
veritable changes. Pensiveness or anguish about whether you will get that new
job is stress the same as being offered a new position is stress.

In the article titled “cancer, from an individual to a community”, I have described how a cancer develops from a single cell to a solid tumor and how this tumor progress from a local malignancy to a systemic one. In this article, I will talk more in details about the process of cancer spreading all over the body, what we call "cancer metastasis.”

Cancer starts as a one cell that decides to go its own way and starts to divide regardless of the body’s demand. However, this does not happen overnight; the progress from one aberrant cell to a tumor is slow and takes years. Every tumor is different in the way it progresses depending on its location and the type of cell it originates from. There are, nevertheless, some general stages that are applicable to many types of cancer. In this article, I will discuss the cancer of the neck of the womb (uterine cervix) as an example of cancer progression.

All cavities in the body are lined by a special type of cells called epithelial cells. There are, in general terms, three different “layers” in such lining. The deepest layer is a membrane that can be compared to a floor under the feet of the cells; it is called ‘basal membrane’. It has different functions depending on the location but basically it separates the epithelial cells from the surrounding tissues. Directly on top of this membrane is a single layer of cells that work as a reservoir to keep supplying the epithelial layers with new cells, it is called ‘basal layer”. The cells in this layer are not differentiated* to perform a certain function (consider them a sort of stem cells), but they produce cells that migrate to the top layer of the epithelial lining and become differentiated in the process. The newly differentiated cells perform specific functions depending on their location. Bear in mind that this is a general description of epithelial cells and variations occur in different tissues.

Cancer is one of the leading causes of death among all age groups. It is also one of the most feared diseases, because it can happen in any tissue and to anyone. In this post, I will talk about the initial stages of cancer, and how does it start.

There is a constant wear and tear in the human body, cells die all the time and are replaced by new ones continuously. Literally speaking, you are not the same person you were a year ago. This cell division is zealously regulated with checkpoints at every turn, but with such a staggering number of cell division that happen in a lifetime, some of them ought to go wrong.

Viruses are hard to target with drugs because they use the host enzymes and proteins to replicate themselves. So targeting the replication machinery is out of question, as it will only harm the host. Obviously despite their minute sizes, viruses are intelligent enough to understand our immune system workings and know how to evade and manipulate it.

Only in the last decade we understood enough about viruses to know that each virus has unique processes that are specific to it. By targeting the viral processes we can avoid doing any harm to the host. We can also harness and emphasize natural antiviral defenses that exist already in nature. Plants, unlike humans do not have an adaptive immunity, the kind of immunity that is specific for a specific infection. To be able to fight viruses at all, plants devised a technique that can help them silencing viral genes. If we could mimic that technique, we can come up with a new way to treat human viruses.

If you have seen the movie “super size me”; you might have been put off eating fast food for good. That is not surprising considering the long list of diseases you could be courting, from cancer to depression, if you are eating plenty of junk food. For those of us who are passionate about French fries and big hamburgers, the movie didn’t make life any easier. But cheer up; the future might be brighter. Some serious people are obviously interested in making you live longer even on a fast food diet, maybe just to eat more fast food.

Scientists are interested in a family of proteins called sirtuins that are known to regulate the production of glucose and insulin and the metabolism of fat. These proteins seem to be activated in mammals that are living on a calorie-poor diet. So, scientists searched, and they spared no effort, for a drug that can enhance these proteins. After more than 20,000 drugs screened, a compound called resveratrol emerged as a possible candidate to champion the fast food cause.

Once more the biological system prove to be more complex than initially thought. We used to simplify the view of blood cholesterol and label part of it the “good” cholesterol (HDL) and another part the “bad” cholesterol (LDL). In the article ‘Too much fat in the blood, hyperlipidemia”, I have literally said that there is nothing called too much of a good thing; so high levels of HDL (the good cholesterol) is not considered a disease. Obviously I was wrong. No, the whole scientific community was wrong.

Based on that assumption, Pfizer, the largest pharmaceutical company in the world has been trying to manage cholesterol levels in the blood by beefing up HDL instead of reducing LDL. According to the old model which we all grow to know and love, this strategy should be as good as the other one, might be even better. But this little factoid of ours did not survive the acid test of clinical trials. Pfizer learned that the hard way.

Now that we have a basic understanding of the normal lipids (fats) metabolism in the body, it is time to look at how changes in their levels can affect any one of us. In this post, I will be talking about the pathological conditions in which there are high levels of fats in the blood. The medical term for these conditions is ‘hyperlipidemia’, which is made of three parts; hyper-, is a prefix meaning more or extra, lipid is fat, and –emia is a suffix indicating that the condition is in the blood. Hyperlipidemia is a general term; it could be either high cholesterol in the blood (hypercholesterolemia), high triglycerides in the blood (hypertriglyceridemia) or it could be both.

Yesterday was “one of those days.” We generally give our patients 15 minute visits and bank on the fact that some visits will be short and others will be longer. This rule works out the majority of the time, but occasionally the gods of medicine are angry at us and send patients who all need far more than 15 minutes to help their problems. That was yesterday.

Two of these “difficult patients” were back-to-back earlier in the day. They are both longstanding patients of mine with multiple medical problems. The main thing they both have in common from my perspective is that they both have gotten to the point that it seems I have nothing to offer them anymore.