Word: normal
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...noted that Atkins had a history of myocardial infarction (translation: heart attack), congestive heart failure and high blood pressure. The Atkins people insist his coronary arteries were fine until he got a viral infection three years ago that reduced his heart's pumping capacity to 15% to 20% of normal, just shy of making him a candidate for a transplant. But conspiracy theorists wanted to attribute Atkins' condition to his fat-skewed diet and speculated that his heart, not his feet, caused the fall to the ice. "The Atkins corporation has been saying that Dr. Atkins was essentially the picture...
...There's just one problem with that explanation: sometimes it's dead wrong. Indeed, half of all heart attacks occur in people with normal cholesterol levels. Not only that, as imaging techniques improved, doctors found, much to their surprise, that the most dangerous plaques weren't necessarily all that large. Something that hadn't yet been identified was causing those deposits to burst, triggering massive clots that cut off the coronary blood supply. In the 1990s, Ridker became convinced that some sort of inflammatory reaction was responsible for the bursting plaques, and he set about trying to prove...
...quickly shoot from less than 10 mg/L to 1,000 mg/L or more. But Ridker was more interested in the low levels of CRP - less than 10 mg/L - that he found in otherwise healthy people and that indicated only a slightly elevated inflammation level. Indeed, the difference between normal and elevated is so small that it must be measured by a specially designed assay called a high-sensitivity CRP test...
...arise at the site of chronic inflammation. A century later, oncologists paid more attention to the role that various genetic mutations play in promoting abnormal growths that eventually become malignant. Now researchers are exploring the possibility that mutation and inflammation are mutually reinforcing processes that, left unchecked, can transform normal cells into potentially deadly tumors...
...whose job is to nourish and communicate with the neurons. Researchers have discovered that glial cells can also act a lot like the mast cells of the skin, producing inflammatory cytokines that call additional immune cells into action. "The glial cells are trying to return the brain to a normal state," explains Linda Van Eldik, a neurobiologist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago. "But for some reason, in neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, the process seems to be out of control. You get chronic glial activation, which results in an inflammatory state...