STUDY DESIGN Single-center retrospective study. PURPOSE To clarify the clinical features of cervical myelopathy at the C1-2 level. OVERVIEW OF LITERATURE Methods for distinguishing the affected level based on myelomere symptoms or dysfunction of the conducting pathway were established. However, no symptoms have been identified as being specific to the C1-2 level segment. METHODS We evalua...

BACKGROUND Aging is accompanied by an alteration in myocardial contractility. However, its noninvasive detection is difficult. The effect of chronic exercise on this decrease is unknown. Murine models of senescence are increasingly used to test therapies in aging. We tested whether strain rate imaging detected left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction in aging mice and was able to assess a pot...

BACKGROUND Postnatal corticosteroid therapy has been proved in randomized controlled trials to reduce ventilator dependence and the rate of chronic lung disease in preterm infants with few serious short-term side effects. However, there are other consequences that might follow postnatal corticosteroid therapy that are more important, including mortality or cerebral palsy. OBJECTIVES To review...

It has been suggested that the rate of left ventricular (LV) relaxation is related to the inotropic state, end-systolic fiber length and peak LV pressure, but little information is available regarding the rate of LV relaxation in patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) and LV dysfunction. To assess the rate of LV relaxation we obtained high-fidelity LV pressure measurements with manometer-t...

OBJECTIVE The aim of the present study was to determine the prevalence and associated factors of female sexual dysfunction together with the concerns of women about sexuality during pregnancy. MATERIAL AND METHODS A total of 207 healthy, sexually active pregnant women were enrolled in the study. Demographic data of all participants were noted and sexual functions were evaluated by Female Sexu...

AIMS Erectile dysfunction (ED) is associated with cardiovascular risk factors as elevated systolic blood pressure (SBP), resting high heart rate (HR), and endothelial dysfunction and predicts cardiovascular events. However, the interaction between high HR and SBP and the development of ED remains unclear. METHODS AND RESULTS We evaluated 1015 male patients enrolled in the ED substudy of ONTAR...

BACKGROUND Heart transplantation is limited by severe donor organ shortage. Regardless of the changes made in the acceptance of marginal donors, any such mechanism cannot be considered successful unless recipient graft survival rates remain acceptable. A stress echo-driven selection of donors has proven successful in older donors with normal left ventricular resting function and in standard don...

Ventricular dysfunction remains a hallmark of most cardiac disease. The mouse has become an essential model system for cardiovascular biology, and echocardiography an established tool in the study of normal and genetically altered mice. This review describes the measurement of ventricular function, most often left ventricular function, by echocardiographic methods in mice. Technical limitations...

BACKGROUND It has been recently demonstrated that the hemodynamic consequences of exercise-induced increase in left ventricular (LV) filling pressure can be demonstrated noninvasively with supine bicycle exercise Doppler echocardiography. One of the practical drawbacks of Doppler echocardiography for assessing LV filling during exercise is the technical difficulty obtaining adequate signals for...

We applied the respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) quantification algorithm to 24-hour ECG recordings of Chagas disease (ChD) patients with (G1, n=148) and without left ventricular dysfunction (LVD) (G2, n=33), and in control subjects (G0, n=28). Both ChD groups displayed a reduced RSA index; G1=299 (144-812); G2=335 (162-667), p=0.011, which was correlated with vagal indexes of heart rate varia...