Kawasaki disease is an acute inflammatory disorder of medium-sized arteries that predominantly affects cardiac coronary arteries and children under the age of 5 years. Cardiac involvement usually happens later than 10 days after the onset of illness. Most of cardiac complications are coronary artery abnormalities (ectasia or aneurysms) and subclinical myocarditis. Clinical myocarditis (symptoma...

BACKGROUND It has been shown that heart rate variability is decreased in patients with congestive heart failure and that depressed heart rate variability is associated with a propensity to ventricular arrhythmias. Little is known, however, about heart rate variability in patients with both congestive heart failure and ventricular arrhythmias. METHODS Spectral heart rate variability was analys...

despite improvement of mechanical ventilation devices for infants, lung injury still causes morbidity and mortality in many cases. to determine the effect of high frequency oscillatory ventilation (hfov) in infants with severe respiratory failure, 10 neonates were evaluated prospectively. mean gestational age of these patients was 35 weeks and alveolar-arterial oxygen gradient (a-ado2) and the ...

We observed breathing pattern abnormalities and arterial oxygen desaturation in patients with stable congestive heart failure during overnight polysomnography. To determine whether congestive heart failure was the reason for these abnormalities, we then studied six additional patients before and after treatment of heart failure. Breathing was more abnormal (153 +/- 87 episodes/night) during dec...

enterococci are normal inhabitants of gastrointestinal tract, being responsible for 5 to 18% of infective endocarditis and the incidence appears to be increasing. eleven patients with enterococcal endocarditis were studied. in a case series group, 10 men (average 57 years) and one woman (37 years) were studied. two patients had rheumatic heart disease, 5 patients arteriosclerotic disease and on...

Futcher and Schroeder (1) and Warren and Stead (2) suggested that changes in endocrine activity might be present in congestive heart failure and might explain some of the symptoms such as edema and sodium retention. Merrill, Morrison, and Brannon (3) found an increased concentration of renin in the renal venous blood. No other reports of endocrine changes in congestive heart failure appear in t...

OBJECTIVES We evaluated the use and the impact of echocardiography in patients receiving an initial diagnosis of congestive heart failure in Olmsted County, Minnesota, in 1991. BACKGROUND The American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association clinical practice guidelines recommend echocardiography in all patients with suspected congestive heart failure. No data are available on use and...

Inflammatory breast cancer is a rare highly malignant form of breast cancer. Clinical signs and symptoms with histologic examination usually confirm the diagnosis. There are rare reports of breast edema of congestive heart failure which were difficult to differentiate from inflammatory carcinoma. The differential becomes more difficult when congestive heart failure is associated with unilateral...

BACKGROUND In a canine model of congestive heart failure beta endorphin concentrations were high and opioid receptor antagonists exerted beneficial haemodynamic effects. In humans previous studies have suggested that opioid peptides may modify the perception of breathlessness and fatigue in heart failure. METHODS Plasma concentrations of beta endorphin were measured in patients with acute and...