Heart failure is a common disease that can usually affect the other organs. The presence of a common link between heart failure and its comorbidities, such as muscle wasting, renal failure, and major depression, remains to be elucidated. Heart failure leads to activation of the innate and adaptive immune responses. On the other hand, the immune system cascades are important for the development ...

some of them. There is some hope for therapy of acute and diastolic heart failure. Progress in cardiac surgery and valve interventions still await prove of their relevance for the course of heart failure. It has become clearer which patients benefit from heart failure management programmes. Competing concepts of cell therapy seem to spiral, hopefully upwards; genetics and proteomics are still a...

IMPORTANCE Arteriovenous fistula (AVF) access improves survival in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) compared with other modalities when used at first hemodialysis. Use varies between locations, but, to our knowledge, no study has related this finding to mortality on a national scale. OBJECTIVE To quantify regional variation in AVF access at first hemodialysis, as well as the assoc...

Performance failures are commonplace in most computing environments; without system monitoring they typically go undetected. The performance monitoring project uses low level system monitoring combined with an infrastructure to centralize the information tracks long term system behavior. With the data visualization tools we can detect performance failures, track resource utilization trends, and...

Ion tracks, formed by the interaction of energetic charged particles with matter, have played an important role in the development of modern physics. More recently, MeV-GeV ion track production has been used to modify materials in a controlled manner [1,2], being a potential tool to engineer material properties in the nanometer to micrometer scale. MeV-GeV ions are finding recently wider use in...

A large epidemic of Chikungunya fever currently affects the Caribbean, Central and South America. Despite a high number of reported cases, little is known on the occurrence of severe clinical complications. We describe four Venezuelan patients with a severe and/or lethal course who exhibit unusual manifestations of the disease. Case 1 describes a 75 year-old man with rapid onset of septic shock...

BACKGROUND In Europe, peripartum cardiomyopathy (PPCM) is a rare disorder, often difficult to diagnose and it has a variable clinical course. The aim of this report was to describe and discuss the individual variability of this disorder and its management. PATIENTS AND METHODS Three cases of PPCM manifesting as severe heart failure are compared. Common was the presence of myocardial inflammat...

A 19-year-old woman presented with purpura fulminans and septic shock; subsequently, progressive coagulopathy, widespread purpura fulminans associated with meningococcemia, severe shock, respiratory, and renal failure developed. This clinical course was associated with depletion of functional protein C levels to < 5%. We describe her clinical course and therapy with human recombinant activated ...

Hepatic angiosarcoma is a rare primary tumor of the liver with a mesenchymal origin. Diagnosis is difficult because clinical manifestations and imaging studies are inconclusive. In many cases a diagnosis is obtained during necropsy, not being apparent during the course of disease. It is associated with several risk factors, but these contribute to explaining only a few of all reported cases. Wh...