Latest news with #Palaniappan
San Francisco Chronicle
27-06-2025
- Health
- San Francisco Chronicle
There's been a stunning drop in heart attack deaths — but these other risks are rising
Deaths from heart attacks have fallen dramatically over the past 50 years, even taking into account a short but sharp increase in mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a testament to the remarkable medical investment made by the U.S. to counteract a deadly public health threat, say teams of scientists from UCSF and Stanford who released parallel reports this week. Heart attack deaths dropped by nearly 90% from 1970 to 2022, the time period that the Stanford team studied for their report published in the Journal of the American Heart Association. That's a direct result of immense investment in tools to prevent, test for and treat cardiovascular conditions, in particular heart attacks, said Dr. Latha Palaniappan, senior author of the Stanford paper. 'A 90% reduction in heart attack deaths over the last 50 years is nothing short of a medical miracle,' Palaniappan said. In the paper, Palaniappan and her peers noted that nearly half of global funding for heart disease research comes from the U.S., which 'has had an incredible return on investment.' 'This investment has driven global breakthroughs and continues to shape how we prevent and treat heart disease worldwide,' Palaniappan said. 'These breakthroughs have helped increase life expectancy in the U.S. by a full decade since the 1970s.' On the other hand, progress has flagged in fighting deaths from other types of cardiovascular issues, including high blood pressure, heart failure and arrhythmia, according to both studies. Overall cardiovascular mortality from non-heart attacks increased by about 80% over the past 50 years. Both the Stanford and UCSF studies analyzed heart disease deaths using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The studies noted sharp increases in heart attack deaths during the pandemic — peaking at about 93 of every 100,000 deaths in 2021 — that have since fallen to pre-pandemic levels. Heart disease has been the leading cause of death among Americans for more than a century. The term describes a wide range of conditions, including coronary artery disease, the main contributor to heart attacks, along with heart failure, heart rhythm disorders and hypertension. The drop in heart attacks comes from a multi-pronged effort, including public health campaigns such as smoking cessation efforts, and medical advances in prevention and treatment. According to the Stanford study, someone over age 65 who was hospitalized for a heart attack in 1970 had a 60% chance of leaving the hospital alive; today, they have a greater than 90% chance. But the drop in heart attacks has coincided with an increase in deaths caused by all other heart conditions. The UCSF study found that deaths from high blood pressure doubled from 1999 to 2023, the time period the scientists analyzed. Deaths from heart failure also climbed, hitting a record high in 2023. Part of the reason deaths from other types of heart disease are climbing is because people are generally living longer — the age expectancy increased by about a decade over the past 50 years. They're surviving heart attacks and then succumbing later to other, sometimes related conditions. Dr. Sanket Dhruva, senior author of the UCSF paper, said these conditions are all treatable and preventable. He said the data should compel the medical community to redouble efforts to battle all types of heart conditions — the immense progress made against heart attacks demonstrates what can be done with money and focus, Dhruva said. 'Really one of the key findings of our paper is where have the patterns been worsening,' Dhruva said. 'Death from cardiovascular disease is getting better over time, but it's not that simple. It's very nuanced. Death from hypertension diseases, and related to heart failure — those deaths are reaching record highs.' Dhruva said that for many of these conditions, tools already exist to improve outcomes for most patients — the work needs to focus on making sure those tools are accessible, and that the people who need them are being diagnosed and connected to treatment. For example, the U.S. needs to do a better job of screening for high blood pressure, then making sure people with high blood pressure have access to health care providers, medication and testing equipment. The UCSF paper found a precipitous increase in heart disease deaths during the pandemic, in large part because people's access to care was interrupted — folks stopped visiting their doctors, checking their blood pressure or even taking their medications. Some people stopped exercising, further increasing their risk. Though that care is getting back on track for most people, its absence should demonstrate how critical it is to maintain access. 'The pandemic halted decades of progress,' the UCSF paper noted. 'We know that people were not coming for care, we know that risk factors got worse,' Dhruva said. 'People gained weight, medication adherence slipped, people stopped seeing their care providers as often. Cardiovascular care got worse during the pandemic.' Still, he said, 'We learned a lot from the pandemic. We learned that it's absolutely necessary to ensure that patients are getting care.'
The Hindu
30-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Of lines and light: Rm Palaniappan's Finite and Infinite
At Dhan Mill, Nature Morte's unveiling of Rm Palaniappan's Finite and Infinite is an odyssey of the poetry of light and lines against his sparse abstract renditions that echo an artistic practice born of a domain immersed in abstraction. Palaniappan who was former Secretary Lalit Kala Akademi was an astute administrator and is a greatly distinguished practitioner of art in Tamil Nadu. His most epic exhibition as administrator to date at LKA was the National Art Exhibition of 2011, held after 17 years in Chennai. From his newest works that use acrylic on canvas in a variety of sizes to the beauty of tangled and meandering lines that embrace multiple angles, his works wrap around our senses. There is a beauty of aerobic enchantment amidst numbers and grainy gravitas. Palaniappan once stated: ' The only true reality lies in the interaction between the physical and the psychological. I am to capture this movement in my work.' The artist's trajectory is seen in lithe contours that change colours in progression. Curator and director, Peter Nagy, says, Palaniappan's works ' suggest life's journey within aerial military cartographies that add geographical perspective.' From finite to infinite Palaniappan says: 'Only someone flying in space can make a three-dimensional drawing and stretch it to infinity, thus expressing complete human freedom.' Critic and author Sadanand Menon describes it as 'a neutral, non-anthropomorphic space carrying images of unnameable places and their visual representations, whether terrestrial or planetary or astronomical. It is a kind of experimental geography and the possibility of proposing radical landscapes.' Palaniappan's love for sciences, mathematics and astronomy find their way into a lifelong art practice that reveals his fascination with the dynamics of the flying machine. This exhibition is a textural terrain of a visual vocabulary that recurs as maps, grids, and aerial terrains in his historic evolution. Consummate medley Within a medley of notations, marks, cyphers, and signs into densely layered graphic ensembles, it is the graphic elements, hand colouring, and multiplicity that renders each work unique. Finite and Infinite is also a mapping of deeper considerations of time, space, and movement and his love for transcending the linearity of the physical world within the web of his personal experience. Transitioning from prints to drawings in the late 1980s, Palaniappan concentrated on line as his visual tool describing the trajectories as a moving object or body that travels through space and time. His works are a play of visual aesthetics in slow time. They demonstrate a subtle yet highly sophisticated use of colour and a continued interest in diagrammatic notations and graphic strategies. A constant in his work is his lifelong fascination with the emotional impact of light within lines, light not as shimmer but as an iridescent reflection, and a radiant force associated with the resilient release of boundless energy that sifts and sieves. Palaniappan's family was involved with the commercial and graphic arts, his father being a distributor of calendar art and later his brothers owned printing and packaging companies. Palaniappan's artistic practice from the late 1970s (when he was in art college) to the early 2000s was entirely dedicated to printmaking, collages, and graphic works on paper. This history is retained in the paintings today, as the borders of each are demarcated with contrasting colours, numbers hover in the margins, and the target devices used for registration are still present. You recall the great Mark Rothko who said: ' Silence is so accurate.' (At Dhan Mill, Chattarpur ; Till June 8; 10am to 9pm) The writer is an art curator and critic
