THOUGH most patients with secondary neoplastic involvement of the heart or pericardium seem to manifest no symptoms or signs of such involvement, a sizable proportion do have actual impairment of cardiac funetion. Refinements in thoracic, and specifically cardiac, surgery, in roentgen therapy, and in the use of isotopic and chemotherapeutic agents have made definite palliation available for met...

INTRODUCTION The intrapericardial delivery has been defined as an efficient method for pharmacological agent delivery. Here we hypothesize that intrapericardial administration of cardiosphere-derived cells (CDCs) may have an immunomodulatory effect providing an optimal microenvironment for promoting cardiac repair. To our knowledge, this is the first report studying the effects of CDCs for myoc...

We report the successful control of bleeding in two patients who underwent post-cardiotomy extracorporeal circulatory support (ECMO) and then developed life-threatening bleeding due to severe coagulopathy. After the failure of conventional techniques, bleeding control was achieved using Celox Gauze (MedTrade Products Ltd, Cheshire, UK) packed on the sternal edges and pericardial cavity.

Formation of pseudoaneurysms of saphenous vein grafts after coronary artery bypass grafting has been reported previously in relation to anastomoses or secondary to infection. Pseudoaneurysm of the saphenous vein graft after late rupture of the saphenous vein and containment by the obliterated pericardial cavity has not been documented. Such a case is reported and published reports of similar ca...

Right atrial hypertension and pericardial effusion developed 2 years after mastectomy for fibrosarcoma. Clinical and echocardiographic features suggested right ventricular tumour. At catheterization the right ventricular cavity was almost obliterated, with an infundibular gradient of 13 mmHg, and biopsy of the mass was attempted. Post-mortem revealed extensive infiltrating and intracavitary rig...

This may be distinguished from intrapericardial bands if the parietal pericardium is thin and fixed, because most of the pericardial bands in our patients had an undulating motion during the cardiac cycle. Awareness of the pericardial abnormalities described here may allow correlation with specific pathologic findings by investigators in the future.9 For the present, these findings may improve ...

The evidence supporting the hypothesis that adenosine is the mediator of metabolic regulation of coronary blood flow was obtained from experiments characterized by myocardial hypoxia. If adenosine serves the role of physiological regulator of coronary blood flow, it must also be released by the normal heart. Experiments designed to study this question were performed on 15 open-chest dogs in whi...