No heart failure epidemic

You see a lot written about heart failure these days. It's been called "an emerging epidemic in the Medicare population."

This is due to a burgeoning elderly population that will, naturally, increase the number of deaths each year.

There are only a few ways the Grim Reaper collects his customers: trauma, renal failure, respiratory failure, and heart failure. Doesn't cancer cause death, you might ask? No, it doesn't:  It causes one of the above, and that's what kills you - the same is true for infection, Alzheimer's disease, AIDS and even stroke.

In the Archives of Internal Medicine, researchers report on "the dismal prognosis for heart failure in older persons." Of course, it's dismal. Death is always dismal except in the movies. It's like the old adage says, "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die." That's the way I make my living - helping you to delay the slamming of the door.

"As the U.S. population ages, the number of heart-failure patients over 65 is expected to double. While death rates have declined for coronary heart disease, stroke, and most complications of hypertension, the mortality of heart failure seems to be unchanged in recent decades," reports the author of this study. What is happening is that science has reduced the mortality rate from hardening of the arteries, which cause the three diseases mentioned above.

The researchers added that, based on data from the Framingham Heart Study in 1993, survival following a diagnosis of heart failure might be worse than the prognosis for most types of cancer.

If you're happy and you know it…

Do you have grief deprivation? Has your life been ruined by a newfound happiness? Are you depressed because you are no longer depressed?

Is this a joke? Apparently not, if you can believe The New York Times. The Times reports that, according to psychiatrists, "uplift anxiety" is "an emerging mental health condition" that describes problems incurred by Prozac users unsettled by their new happiness.

I have always wondered if unhappy people didn't actually enjoy being miserable. It certainly can't be true of all depressed people; nevertheless, I suspect it is true of a lot of those in the Prozac/Paxil crowd. They grieve for their old miserable selves. It's akin to losing your pet dog. As one writer expressed it, "The most fundamental aspect of yourself (unhappiness) has been ripped away."