Heart Attacks, Hypertension, and Heart Drugs. Rev. ed.

John Jacono is an assistant professor of Nursing at Laurentian
University.

One needn’t go too far into this resource book to find what it
proposes to give the reader—the front cover offers the promise of a
common-sense guide to a healthy heart. The question of need for such a
guide is just as quickly answered. The author states that more than a
million people experience heart attacks each year in North America. Some
28,000 premature deaths and many more thousands of degraded lives could
be saved by the knowledge and advice (proactive and reactive), offered
by this book.

Khan deals with the problem of heart disease in three sections. The
first part, on prevention, deals with modifiable risk factors. The
second deals with events immediately preceding and following a heart
attack. And the last section deals with other types of heart disease.

Much of the information given here could be obtained from a variety of
sources. This book’s value lies in the number of subjects it manages
to deal with in one volume, and the level of information and advice it
gives. Much of the information is in easy-to-read language, augmented
for those wanting “scientific” information by technical terminology
and supporting bibliography. Use of easy-to-interpret tables, diagrams,
and case-study presentations impart a great deal of advice given in a
nonthreatening fashion.