High-altitude tourism is increasingly frequent, involving also subjects with manifest or subclinical coronary artery disease. Little is known, however, on the effects of altitude exposure on factors affecting coronary perfusion. The aim of our study was to assess myocardial oxygen supply/demand ratio in healthy subjects during acute exposure at high altitude and to evaluate the effect of acetaz...

To delineate the microvascular role of cyclooxygenase-2 (Cox-2) in modulating tubuloglomerular feedback (TGF) signals and to determine its relationship to neuronal nitric oxide synthase (nNOS), afferent (AA) and efferent (EA) arteriolar diameters of rat kidneys were assessed using the blood-perfused juxtamedullary nephron technique. The Cox-2 inhibitor NS-398 (10 μM) did not alter AA diameters ...

A randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled study was conducted to evaluate the effects of theophylline and acetazolamide in the treatment of sleep-disordered breathing (SDB) after fast ascent to high altitude (3,454 m). The study was conducted at a high-altitude research laboratory and included 30 healthy male volunteers. Study medication was either oral slow release theophylline (2x250 mg ...

PURPOSE A recently developed technique which reconstructs quantitative images from original projection data acquired using existing single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) devices enabled quantitative assessment of cerebral blood flow (CBF) at rest and after acetazolamide challenge. This study was intended to generate a normal database and to investigate its inter-institutional consi...

INTRODUCTION Acetazolamide, a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor, remains the only FDA approved pharmaceutical prophylaxis for acute mountain sickness (AMS) though its effectiveness after rapid transport in real world conditions is less clear. METHODS Over 2 years, 248 healthy adults traveled by airplane from sea level (SL) to the South Pole (ALT, ~3200m) and 226 participants provided Lake Louise S...

AIM Sleep-disturbed breathing (SDB) is common in pre-capillary pulmonary hypertension (PH) and impairs daytime performance. In lack of proven effective treatments, we tested whether nocturnal oxygen therapy (NOT) or acetazolamide improve exercise performance and quality of life in patients with pre-capillary PH and SDB. METHODS This was a randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, three pe...

1. The association of varying levels of urinary pH, urinary citrate and urinary calcium and magnesium excretion rates with kidney citrate, calcium and magnesium concentrations in experimental nephrocalcinosis was examined in twenty-four rats in a 3 x 2 multifactorial experiment with four replicates. All rats received the same synthetic diet for 6 weeks before being killed in the seventh week. I...