Case of Diseased Heart

The Sounds of the Diseased Heart

ticated research techniques frequently show us that these drugs don't work at all! Gottshalk et al. fail to show that anxiety is more decreased by Librium than by a placebo. This, despite the fact that a large (25 mg) single dose of Librium was used and the tests for anxiety are some of the most sensitive available. Why then are these drugs so popular? Certainly not because they may increase ho...

Myocyte cell death in the diseased heart.

In this issue of Circulation Research, KarwatowskaProkopczuk et al and Takemura et al report, respectively, that inhibition of the vacuolar proton ATPase (VPATPase) enhances apoptosis in neonatal cardiac myocytes during metabolic recovery and that the progression of the healing process after infarction involves apoptotic death of inflammatory and interstitial cells. We will discuss these 2 stud...

Macroscopic Structure and Physiology of the Normal and Diseased Heart

This paper outlines the macroscopic anatomy and physiology of the heart, linking the micro and macroscopic structure of cardiac muscle fibre to its function during contraction and dilatation. The properties of cardiac muscle cells and the process of contraction at a cellular level are described. The macroscopic structure of the myocardium is further explained as one muscle band wound into a dou...

Engineered heart tissue for regeneration of diseased hearts.

Cardiac tissue engineering aims at providing contractile heart muscle constructs for replacement therapy in vivo. At present, most cardiac tissue engineering attempts utilize heart cells from embryonic chicken and neonatal rats and scaffold materials. Over the past years our group has developed a novel technique to engineer collagen/matrigel-based cardiac muscle constructs, which we termed engi...

A Heart-Wrenching Case of Loperamide Toxicity