When Your Heart Attacks, Your Brain Pays the Price
Ben Sullivan
The heart stops getting blood. Minutes pass, muscle dies, and somewhere across town an ambulance is already moving. Cardiologists will talk about the myocardium, about ejection fractions, about saving the heart. What they talk about rather less is what happens, simultaneously, to the brain. Because something does happen. Something quiet and chemical and, it turns out, rather consequential. Within six hours of a heart attack, a toxic byproduct from the dying cardiac tissue is already crossing...