Moderate drinkers—men who drink around 12 glasses of alcohol a week and women who drink eight—are 30 per cent less likely than ex-drinkers to develop heart disease or suffer a fatal heart attack. The protective effect increases to nearly 50 per cent compared to non-drinkers.

People taking the drugs for two months or longer were 32 per cent more likely to develop cardiovascular disease, say researchers who reviewed a study involving around 36,500 women.

People taking aspirin were just as likely to suffer their first heart attack or stroke as others with a similar risk profile who were not on the medication. But the drug did increase the rate of gastrointestinal bleeding, researchers discovered.

Diclofenac is widely used to treat pain and inflammation, and people can buy it without a prescription—but it dramatically increases the risk of a 'major heart event' within 30 days of starting the drug. Reactions have included a sudden irregular heart beat or flutter, stroke, heart failure and heart attack.

The most popular—and cheapest—brands of vitamins and minerals don't help prevent any of the major diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, heart attack, stroke or premature death.

The advice to take an aspirin a day, which became dogma by the 1990s, was based on flawed science, say researchers from Canada's University of Alberta.

In fact, drinking a daily cup is better for us than not drinking coffee at all. Coffee drinkers have a 15 percent reduced risk of death from any cause, and they also have a lower risk of dying from heart disease by 12 percent if they're men and 20 percent for women.

Those four daily cups are enough to kick-start a protein called P27 that is found in the mitochondria—our cells' energy centres—that help protect the heart and repair damage to heart muscles after a heart attack.

This adds to the proven protective effects of coffee, which include lowering the risk for type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke.

Leading cardiologists tend to be more interventionist and use techniques such as stenting to unblock a heart artery—but the patient is also more likely to die as a result.

Instead, those who are given minimum treatment after cardiac arrest and heart failure have a far higher chance of still being alive a month after the initial attack, researchers from Harvard Medical School have discovered.

Someone suffering an attack usually has up to two hours to get emergency treatment, but the key is in recognizing the symptoms of an attack, such as sudden breathlessness, discomfort, tiredness and pains, usually in the chest and arms.

Atherosclerosis happens when the artery walls start to narrow and harden, eventually leading to a heart attack or stroke—and medicine's standard response is cholesterol-lowering statin drugs, or bypass or angioplasty surgery.

Heart attack victims "significantly" reduced their risk of a second attack if they lowered inflammation in their body, even if their cholesterol levels remained the same.

Just four hours after drinking a milkshake made with whole milk, heavy whipping cream and ice cream, a group of young, healthy men started to show the first signs of heart disease: their blood vessels were less able to relax, and their immune system displayed responses similar to one provoked by an infection.

Experts have assumed that these benefits can happen only when we do high-impact or aerobic exercise, but researchers at the Karolinska Institute are among the first to demonstrate that even everyday low-impact activities can have positive effects.

The diet, which focuses on fresh vegetables, fruit, olive oils and nuts, can at least halve the chance of developing heart disease from air pollution.

People who closely followed the diet were 50 per cent less likely to die from any cause and reduced their chances of dying from a heart attack or developing heart disease around three-fold.

Researchers think that burnout, often caused by constant and prolonged stress, might be a trigger for heart problems—but it could also be the case that exhaustion and tiredness are early signs of a heart problem.