Screening now...

Our new series of six videos called Live With a Healthy Heart, about heart disease and risk factors for people with learning disabilities, is now available on our British Heart Foundation YouTube Channel. Here's the Introduction...

Blot clots breakthrough by BHF researchers

New Scientist magazine reports some exciting new BHF-funded research this week.

Dr Yotis Senis (who we can reveal skateboards to work - how cool is that?!) has made a discovery about how blood clot formation is triggered.

This could be a vital step towards developing better, safer, medicines to prevent heart attacks and strokes, which happen when a blood clot builds up and blocks blood supply to the heart or brain.

When an artery is diseased, platelets – small cells in the blood, pictured above – can stick to the inside of the blood vessel and clump together to form a clot that blocks blood flow.

In the first video below you can see this clearly occurring in a little blood vessel under a microscope – the platelets have been made fluorescent so we can see them clearly.



As part of his research, Yotis used platelets that had been engineered to lack a protein called CD148. In the next video below you can see that these platelets can’t build up on the vessel wall.



This could mean that if we could develop medicines that block CD148, they might be effective at preventing heart attacks.

Read more about the research and its potential application here

Red all about it yet?

As you may or may not be aware, February is National Heart Month.

We're asking people to go Red for Heart this month, and the reasons why - and how you go about it - are pretty clearly spelled out in our special campaign video podcast, which you can watch below.



You can see what everyone else is up to either by checking out our Red for Heart page on Facebook or browsing our Red for Heart photo gallery on Flickr

Our Red for Heart website has more on how to order a fundraising pack, find and buy Red products online or in the High Street - or simply to make a donation to support our pioneering, life-saving research work.

Tell us and everyone else what you're planning to get up to - anything Red goes! - by posting a comment below...

Taking heart information out to the nation

Our latest video podcast has just been released, and it's a report from our recent BHF Live! events which took place in north east England.

Our nurses' team and a special BHF Live! truck toured supermarkets offering members of the public free heart health information, plus cholesterol, blood pressure and overall fitness tests.

You can see how they all got on by watching the video below. We hope you enjoy it...

Check out our new BHF channels

We've been rapidly growing the number of multimedia channels through which you can get a wide range of different types of BHF content, such as video, audio, photos, podcasts, mobile texts and, of course, this blog.

So we've pulled them all together on to a single page which you can now access, and it's called BHF Multimedia

But these new channels aren't just a way for us to communicate with you, they're also your chance to talk with us, and share your own thoughts and content with your fellow users.

The recent posts on this blog about our 2008 London to Brighton Bike Ride were a great example of how you can feed back to us about how well or badly you think we are doing.

So it's worth recapping what the channels are, and we look forward to receiving your comments and your content, whether it's video, photos, audio or maybe you just want to become a fan on our BHF Facebook page. Here's how you can interact with us and fellow users...

BHF on YouTube - visit our comprehensive video channel, become a subscriber to BHF videos on Heart Health, Events, Campaigns, Research and much more, and leave comments for us and other users.

BHF on Flickr - see our great collections of photos from BHF events, campaigns and more, join our BHF Flickr group and share your photos and comments with us and fellow members.

BHF on iTunes (you need iTunes on your computer) - subscribe to our regular audio and video podcasts, and if you have anything to say about what you hear or see leave some feedback for us on iTunes.

BHF on Facebook - find out more about the work of the BHF, join our growing number of Facebook fans and leave comments for us and other visitors to our page.

And last but not least...

BHF on Blogger - get the latest updates about the BHF, subscribe to the blog by RSS or Atom feed, and post your comments on our latest news and activities.

So if you have a comment or question about any of our new multimedia channels - or if there's something you think we should be doing which we aren't - then please post a comment below...