introduction: pulmonary involvement is the most common cause of mortality and disability in patients with systemic sclerosis and it significantly affects the quality of life in these patients. therefore, early diagnosis and treatment of pulmonary involvement seems necessary in patients with ssc. in this study, we aimed to assess the health-related quality of life (hrqol) in patients with sclero...

BACKGROUND Impaired right ventricular function has been implicated as a cause of reduced maximal exercise capacity after the Mustard operation for transposition of the great arteries. METHODS AND RESULTS Fourteen asymptomatic survivors of the Mustard operation were studied. Each underwent conventional cardiac catheterization, and after satisfactory hemodynamics were confirmed, load-independen...

Background: To reduce the mortality and morbidity rates of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients, and to have an effective clinical management, it is important to monitor the progression of the disease. The aim of this study was to evaluate the progression of lung disease in CF patients by means of assessing the correlation of the CT scoring system with clinical status and pulmonary function test at th...

Methods for calculation of quality indexes for automatic control systems are presented. For the optimization of quality indexes defined only in a stability domain a vector objective function of varied parameters of the system is proposed. The stepwise principle of successive satisfaction of constraints for the passage into the definition domain of quality indexes is considered, as well as a rat...

AIMS We aimed to assess the impact of surgical pulmonary valve replacement (PVR) for severe pulmonary regurgitation (PR) on biventricular function and its effect on exercise capacity. METHODS AND RESULTS Seventy-three patients (mean age 23.6±11.5 years, 47 females) underwent surgical PVR for PR. Echocardiogram and magnetic resonance imaging to assess ventricular size and function, and a cardi...

Bronchial vascular angiogenesis takes place in a variety of lung inflammatory conditions such as asthma, cystic fibrosis, lung cancer, and chronic pulmonary thromboembolic disease. However, it is unclear whether neovascularization is predominantly appropriate and preserves lung tissue or whether it contributes further to lung pathology through edema formation and inflammation. In the present st...

more than 45,000 of 100,000 exposed patients are suffering from late effects of sulfur mustard (sm) after almost 20 years post-exposure. respiratory complications of sm exacerbate over time and are the greatest cause of long-term disability in exposed patients. a triad of cough, expectoration and dyspnea has been found to be the main symptoms among patients. even those who had not developed acu...