We investigated abnormalities in natural killer (NK) cells in the myocardium and circulating blood of 38 patients with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), 18 patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, 8 patients with primary amyloidosis, and 12 age-matched normal control subjects. Immunohistochemical staining of myocardial biopsies revealed a significantly greater number of CD57-positive N...

AIMS Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is an important cause of heart failure with a strong familial component. We performed an exome-wide array-based association study (EWAS) to assess the contribution of missense variants to sporadic DCM. METHODS AND RESULTS 116,855 single nucleotide variants (SNVs) were analyzed in 2796 DCM patients and 6877 control subjects from 6 populations of European ances...

This review provides the rationale for integrating genomic and protein biomarkers in the evolving diagnosis and management of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) and its causal pathway to heart failure (HF), with a larger objective to serve as a template for genomic and phenomic profiling of other cardiovascular disease. DCM is a major cause of HF and accounts for more than half of heart transplantati...

AIMS Cardiac energy requirement is met to a large extent by oxidative phosphorylation in mitochondria that are highly abundant in cardiac myocytes. Human mitochondrial thioredoxin reductase (TXNRD2) is a selenocysteine-containing enzyme essential for mitochondrial oxygen radical scavenging. Cardiac-specific deletion of Txnrd2 in mice results in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). The aim of this stud...

The classical model of blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) responses by Buxton et al. [Buxton, R.B., Wong, E.C., Frank, L.R., 1998. Dynamics of blood flow and oxygenation changes during brain activation: the Balloon model. Magn. Reson. Med. 39, 855-864] has been very important in providing a biophysically plausible framework for explaining different aspects of hemodynamic responses. It also pla...

Background Cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging is the gold standard imaging modality for characterization of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). We recently identified genetic variants that truncate the giant protein Titin (TTN) accounting for up to 25% of DCM cases: a discovery that will increase the utility of genetic testing and family screening in DCM. However, the clinical consequenc...

Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a highly prevalent and often lethal disease in Irish wolfhounds. Complex segregation analysis indicated different loci involved in pathogenesis. Linear fixed and mixed models were used for the genome-wide association study. Using 106 DCM cases and 84 controls we identified one SNP significantly associated with DCM on CFA37 and five SNPs suggestively associated wi...

BACKGROUND E-point-to-septal-separation (EPSS) and the sphericity index (SI) are echocardiographic parameters that are recommended in the ESVC-DCM guidelines. However, SI cutoff values to diagnose dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) have never been evaluated. OBJECTIVES To establish reference ranges, calculate cutoff values, and assess the clinical value of SI and EPSS to diagnose DCM in Doberman Pi...

Dilated Cardiomyopathy (DCM) is characterized by systolic dysfunction, followed by heart failure necessitating cardiac transplantation. The genetic basis is well established by the identification of mutations in sarcomere and cytoskeleton gene/s. Modifier genes and environmental factors are also considered to play a significant role in the variable expression of the disease, hence various mecha...

Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) is a Bayesian framework for inferring effective connectivity among brain regions from neuroimaging data. While the validity of DCM has been investigated in various previous studies, the reliability of DCM parameter estimates across sessions has been examined less systematically. Here, we report results of a software comparison with regard to test-retest reliability...