Of some 24 million Americans taking high blood pressure medicine, about 1 million use an alpha blocker, the NIH said. Some alpha blockers are also used for other disorders, such as an enlarged prostate. The NIH study has enrolled over 42,000 people to compare different treatments for hypertension and high cholesterol. Parts of the study that compare other hypertension treatments called ACE inhibitors and calcium antagonists with diuretics are continuing. Flu-Like Heart Disease Is Curable A rare but deadly heart disease with symptoms that mimic the flu is curable if doctors figure it out in time and give the heart some help, researchers reported in the New England Journal of Medicine .
Fulminant myocarditis is a severe inflammation that weakens the heart.
It affects fewer than one in a million patients, but often kills those people. Doctors sometimes fail to recognize the disease. And up to now, even when they recognized it, they had no reliable way of predicting which patients might recover. A study at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore found that when these patients are properly diagnosed and treated, they can recover fully within two weeks. An echocardiogram and biopsy are used to diagnose the disease, usually caused by a viral or other infection or by an immune disorder.