It's Friday, April 15th, 2016, and I hope you've done your taxes. You're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Injavis Gontas. And I'm Kishore Hari. Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at motherjones.com or inquiringshow at Tumblr.com

and on Twitter at Inquiringshow and Facebook.

And you can subscribe to the show on iTunes or any other podcasting app.

Heart disease is the number one killer worldwide across the board globally now.

Wait, it's not mosquitoes?

No, it's not mosquitoes. As much as I despise mosquitoes, it's still heart disease.

And it's been that way for a number of years.

Now, we've made a lot of gains against heart disease,

particularly a type of heart disease called coronary artery disease. This is the one people are most familiar with, where there's like a buildup of plaque from cholesterol or dietary effects.

And that's the number one killer still, but there are other types of heart disease in there,

particularly arrhythmias

where we're not making as many gains, and it's still killing upwards of, and the estimates

are hard because there are complications of this, but upwards of 300,000 people in the U.S.

alone.

So we don't really know the causes of certain types of arrhythmias, and many physicians still

caution their patients against

certain risk factors that have just been long-held beliefs, like don't drink too much caffeine

or limit your alcohol consumption, because you could get those kind of palpitations.

And these risk factors are not really holding up to scrutiny these days.

...