After you've survived a heart attack, you've got a lot to learn about and a lot to think about. While in the good old days you might have had a week or two of hospitalization to go through all the testing, risk assessment, education, and initiation of therapy necessary to optimize your long-term prognosis, today whatever is going to get done must happen in the first three (or four, if you've got a liberal health plan) days.

Doctors and hospitals have mobilized nicely to provide adequate acute care for the patient showing up with an acute heart attack. But too often, many have dropped the ball when it comes to giving appropriate care after those first critical hours.

The key to successfully navigating your way to a long, healthy life after a heart attack is - YOU. You need to insist that the appropriate tests are done, the appropriate referrals are made, and the appropriate medications are begun. To this end, here is a convenient checklist of the things that should be done -- ideally before you even leave the hospital -- after your heart attack.

Now that we've said goodbye to Daylight Savings Time for another 6 months, perhaps (according to researchers reporting in the New England Journal of Medicine last year), we'd be better off saying goodbye forever. That's because, they say, there is an association between switching to DST in the spring, and heart attacks.

Do we really need to add Daylight Savings Time to the long list of useful, enjoyable or fattening pleasures of life that we're supposed to give up? Read about it here.

This weekend at the Infectious Diseases Society of America in Philadelphia, researchers from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that statins (drugs prescribed for reducing cholesterol levels) may be associated with a reduced risk of dying from influenza.

The study was conducted by reviewing data from the CDC's Emerging Infections Program. Among 2800 patients from 10 states admitted to the hospital with confirmed cases of severe influenza in 2007-2008, those who were taking statins had a mortality rate that was half that of patients not taking statins.

This result is consistent with earlier reports suggesting that statins might be beneficial in influenza. The existence of those earlier reports is what stimulated the CDC to do their study in the first place.

Read more here about what we know (and don't know) about the ability of statins to prevent and treat the flu, and other infections.

In an era when "preventive health" is all the rage, and we are all being urged to assess our risk factors for heart disease, developing and marketing new tools for cardiac risk assessment has become a big business. In fact, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) notes that more than 100 "emerging" cardiac risk factors are being advanced, by someone or another, as being potentially important.

Accordingly, the USPSTF recently conducted several systematic reviews to evaluate the usefulness of nine of the most commonly promoted "emerging" cardiovascular risk factors. They concluded that there is insufficient evidence to support routinely using any of them. Included in these now-disparaged risk factors are ones you've likely heard of and seen advertised - including C-reactive protein measurement and cardiac calcium scores.

Read here about the nine cardiac risk factors which the USPSTF has found to be less than compelling.