Pulmonary thromboembolism (PTE) is part of a larger clinicopathological entity, venous thromboembolism. It is also a complex, multifactorial disorder divided into four major disease processes including venous thrombosis, thrombus in transit, acute pulmonary embolism, and pulmonary circulation reconstruction. Even when treated, some patients develop chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension....

AIM Hydrogen sulphide (H2S) intoxication in man is frequently associated with a fatal outcome. In small animal models hydrogen sulphide has demonstrated profound protection against hypoxia. No reports that focus on a potential protective effect in humans have been published. METHODS The frequency and outcome of a large cohort of hydrogen sulphide intoxications is described. RESULTS From 198...

Methemoglobinemia is an uncommon but potentially fatal disorder. Most cases have no adverse clinical consequence and require no treatment, but methemoglobinemia is often overlooked as a cause of low oxygen saturation, and often mistaken for the more common causes of hypoxia by anesthesiologists despite simple bedside tests that indicate the presence of this treatable abnormality. We present a 6...

Atherosclerosis is an inflammatory disease as well as a lipid disorder. Atherosclerotic plaque formed in vessel walls may cause ischemia, and the rupture of vulnerable plaque may result in fatal events, like myocardial infarction or stroke. Because morphological imaging has limitations in diagnosing vulnerable plaque, molecular imaging has been developed, in particular, the use of nuclear imagi...

Preeclampsia (PE) is an often fatal pathology characterized by hypertension and proteinuria at the 20th week of gestation that affects 5-10% of the pregnancies. The problem is particularly important in developing countries in where the incidence of hypertensive disorders of pregnancy is higher and maternal mortality rates are 20 times higher than those reported in developed countries. Risk fact...

Drowning is one of the fatal accidents frequently encountered during the summer and is the most common cause of accidental death in the world. Anoxia, hypothermia, and metabolic acidosis are mainly responsible for morbidty. Cardiovascular effects may occur secondary to hypoxia and hypothermia. Atrial fibrillation, sinus dysrhythmias (rarely requiring treatment), and, in serious cases, ventricul...

BACKGROUND One aspect of brain death is cardiovascular deregulation because asystole invariably occurs shortly after its diagnosis. A suitable neural substrate for mechanistic delineation of this aspect of brain death resides in the rostral ventrolateral medulla (RVLM). RVLM is the origin of a life-and-death signal that our laboratory detected from blood pressure of comatose patients that disap...

Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) is a fatal disease where over 90% of patients succumb to respiratory or cardiac failure. Sleep apnea and sleep disordered breathing (SDB) are noted in a plurality of DMD patients, and the resulting nocturnal episodic hypoxia (EH) cannot be ruled out as a contributing factor to cardiac and respiratory dysfunction. In this study, we investigated the impact of lon...

The arrival of targeted therapies-vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) pathway inhibitors and mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) inhibitors-and programmed death 1 (PD-1) inhibitors has transformed the management of renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Once considered fatal, with a median survival of approximately 1 year, these agents have nearly tripled overall survival and have raised hopes of a...

Physiological studies that have been undertaken in children with apparent life-threatening events point to disturbances of the autonomic nervous system and brain stem abnormalities. These abnormalities are manifested as breathing dysfunctions and sleeping patterns, as well as heart rate variability. The diminished arousal response in infants who are exposed to intermittent hypoxia can be fatal ...