Systemic light-chain (AL) amyloidosis is a multisystem disease characterized by organ toxicity and damage due to monoclonal free light chains, which are produced by a neoplastic clone of plasma cells in bone marrow. Current treatment strategies target the clone in order to decrease the production of the pathologic light chains and thereby stop or reverse organ toxicity and damage. AL amyloidosi...

Vascular endothelial cell injury is considered to be the major factor inducing vascular complications in metabolic diseases and plays an important role in other organ damage. With diabetic and hyperlipidemic rats and cultured VSMCs, the present study was aimed at investigating whether the early damage of VSMCs during metabolic diseases plays a critical role in vascular dysfunction and the under...

Hypertensive patients have a higher risk of developing health complications, particularly cardiovascular (CV) events, than individuals with normal blood pressure (BP). Severity of complications depends on the magnitude of BP elevation and other CV risk factors associated with the target organ damage. Therefore, BP control and management of organ damage may contribute to reduce this risk. BP var...

The role of serum uric acid as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular and renal morbidity is controversial. A better understanding of its relationship with preclinical organ damage may help clarify the mechanism(s) implicated in the development of early cardiovascular disease. We evaluated the association between uric acid and the presence and degree of target organ damage in 425 (265 ma...

Results 23 year old woman suffered cardiac arrest due to a combined drug overdose with high doses of barbiturates, benzodiazepines and opioids. The patient was found unconscious and after 8 minutes of successful resuscitation transferred to the ICU where she rapidly developed multi organ failure due to the hypoxia and hypo perfusion during the time of cardiac arrest. The organ failure included ...

We report here that when untreated mice underwent heat stress, they displayed thermoregulatory deficit (e.g., animals display hypothermia during room temperature exposure), brain (or hypothalamic) inflammation, ischemia, oxidative damage, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis impairment (e.g., decreased plasma levels of both adrenocorticotrophic hormone and corticosterone during heat stress), mul...

 Abstract Fat necrosis secondary to pancreatitis can be either mild and self limited or create severe organ damage, but may rarely lead to abdominal opancreatic pseudotumor. We report a case of fat necrosis secondary to pancreatitis which clinically simulates transverse colon cancer.

Combinations therapy is often used in hypertensive patients whether combination therapy is necessary for preventing end-organ damage is not known. The objective of this study was to determine in four different hypertensive animal models the necessity of adding the calcium channel blocker amlodipine to therapy with the ss-blocker atenolol to modulate end-organ damage. Spontaneously hypertensive ...

Worldwide, nearly 8 million premature deaths, 54% of stroke cases and 47% of ischemic heart disease cases were attributable to high blood pressure (BP >115 mm Hg systolic) (Ruilope, 2011). It is widely known that arterial hypertension has effects on target organs like the brain, the heart and the kidney. Now a large body of evidence on the crucial role of subclinical organ damage in determining...