The cardiovascular system is a closed circulatory system that ensures blood flow through the human body. Blood circulates through two systems; the first is responsible for pushing blood from the heart to the lungs to capture oxygen, and the second is responsible for distributing oxygenated blood to body organs. This system is composed of a double pump with branched tubes that leads blood from t...

Loeffler ’s endocarditis, also known as Loeffler ’s endomyocardial disease, was first described by Wilhelm Loeffler in a patient with progressive heart failure due to eosinophilic infiltration of the endomyocardium, which was found to be secondary to peripheral eosinophilia1. It appears to be a subset of hypereosinophilic syndrome (HES), in which the heart is predominantly involved, characteriz...

Traditional right ventricular pacing prolongs the electrical and mechanical activation of the heart, which reduces the pump function, and in selected patients may lead to pacing-induced heart failure. Pacing the His bundle preserves the normal or near-normal activation pattern of the ventricles that prevents the detrimental effects of right ventricular pacing. This review discusses the techniqu...

By its heat and continuous motion, the lung further concocts the blood brought to it through the arterylike vein [pulmonary artery], and renders it foamier, such as that [blood] already is which reaches the lung through the veinlike artery [pulmonary vein] from the left ventricle of the heart, since it has already been elaborated in both ventricles of the heart. [Our italics] Vesalius, Fabrica,...

BACKGROUND Transgenic mice with transient cardiac expression of constitutively active Galpha q (Gαq-TG) exhibt progressive heart failure and ventricular arrhythmias after the initiating stimulus of transfected constitutively active Gαq becomes undetectable. However, the mechanisms are still unknown. We examined the effects of chronic administration of olmesartan on heart failure and ventricular...

Renin is the rate-limiting step in angiotensin II production. Existence of the cardiac renin is still ambiguous in healthy animals, although there is evidence that under some pathological conditions the heart might express mRNA for renin. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to (i) detect the renin gene expression in the whole rat heart, ventricles, atria and in isolated and purified myo...

This paper describes an electrical model of cardiac ventricles incorporating real geometry and motion. The heart anatomy and its motion through the cardiac cycle are obtained from segmentations of multiple-slice MRI time sequences; the special conduction system is constructed using an automated mapping procedure from an existing static heart model. The heart model is mounted in an anatomically ...

Corticosteroids have specific effects on cardiac structure and function mediated by mineralocorticoid (MR) and glucocorticoid (GR) receptors. Aldosterone and corticosterone are synthesized in the rat heart. To see whether they might also be synthesized in the human cardiovascular system, we examined the expression of genes for steroidogenic enzymes as well as genes for GR, MR, and 11-hydroxyste...