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With enthusiasm and a shared sense of purpose, experts in women and heart disease gathered in Ottawa this April for the first Canadian Women’s Heart Health Summit. Attendees included leading figures in clinical care and research from across North America. The event aimed to lay the groundwork for

In the 1950s, available advice on women and heart health largely consisted of information on how to help husbands recover from their heart attacks. As the famous ad says, we’ve come a long way, baby. Progress is being made in addressing women’s heart health, progress that was amply demonstrated at

It was on May 11, 1976, that Phase 1 of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute opened for business. What began in 1969, as the Cardiac Unit of The Ottawa Hospital, took a major step toward becoming the internationally recognized cardiac centre that it is today. “It was a very exciting time,”

A good night’s sleep restores energy, improves performance and generally makes you feel better. Getting the right amount of sleep is also important for good heart health. A South Korean study of more than 47,000 adults found that people who sleep about seven hours a night have significantly fewer

As we age, the aortic valve in our hearts can become hardened due to calcium deposits that build up over time. This is the most common cause of aortic stenosis which affects the opening and closing of the valve, restricting blood flow to the rest of the body. The condition affects more than 100,000

A heart attack is never good, but a STEMI heart attack is the most serious and deadly. It means that one of the arteries that deliver blood to the heart is completely blocked. The longer the heart goes without blood, the greater the damage. In 2004, the Ottawa Heart Institute launched its STEMI

February is Heart Month, but it’s always a good time to pay attention to your heart health. That’s especially true because the things you can do to keep your heart healthy are also good for your general wellbeing and help prevent many other chronic diseases. The Heart Institute’s heart health

To take the sick or damaged heart out of a person’s body and replace it with a healthy donor heart, often flown in from far away—the very idea of a heart transplant inspires wonder. In May 1984, Wilbert Keon, MD, founder of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, performed the first-ever heart

The health benefits of regular physical activity are well documented and hard to overstate, but too often they are left out of the doctor–patient conversation. In December 2015, JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, published the Viewpoint “ Making Physical Activity Counseling a

Martin Green, MD, vividly recalls the day in 1971 when he attended a medical school lecture on electrical activation of the heart, a subject that doctors and researchers were just beginning to explore. “There were 225 people in the class and 224 of them walked out saying ‘That was the worst lecture