OBJECTIVE Diabetes has been associated with increased oxidative stress and impaired vascular function. Statins have been shown to reduce low-density lipoprotein (LDL) oxidizability and improve myocardial perfusion in hypercholesterolemic nondiabetic subjects. We studied whether pravastatin decreases LDL oxidation and improves myocardial perfusion in normocholesterolemic subjects with type 1 dia...

We analyzed the incidence and interaction of arteriolar vasomotion and capillary flow motion during critical perfusion conditions in neighboring peripheral tissues using intravital fluorescence microscopy. The gracilis and semitendinosus muscles and adjacent periosteum, subcutis, and skin of the left hindlimb of Sprague-Dawley rats were isolated at the femoral vessels. Critical perfusion condit...

Cardiac rehabilitation is believed to increase myocardial perfusion reserve (MPR), but this has not been adequately studied because of poor delineation of infarcted myocardium in previous studies. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of cardiac rehabilitation on MPR in the remote and infarcted myocardium with contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging; 39 postinfarction patie...

We tested the hypothesis that chronically reducing the heart rate in infarcted middle-aged rats using ivabradine (IVA) would induce arteriolar growth and attenuate perivascular collagen and, thereby, improve maximal perfusion and coronary reserve in the surviving myocardium. Myocardial infarction (MI) was induced in 12-mo-old male Sprague-Dawley rats, which were then treated with either IVA (10...

OBJECTIVE Lower limb perfusion following arterial occlusion depends on the recruitment of collateral vessels. Blood flow through these collateral vessels may be jeopardized by hypersensitivity to vasoconstriction by serotonin (5-HT), as has been reported during hyperlipidemia and diabetes. Therefore the aim of this study was to determine the benefits of chronic treatment with SL65.0472, a mixed...

BACKGROUND This research describes an early preclinical study of the biophysical mechanisms governing changes in myocardial T2 during vasodilation in normal myocardium. METHODS AND RESULTS Theoretical modeling and experimental studies in an instrumented pig model (n=7) provided measures of changes in myocardial T2, relative blood volume (BV), and microcirculation oxygen levels (%O2) during in...

During skeletal muscle differentiation, a subset of myoblasts remains quiescent and undifferentiated but retains the capacity to self-renew and give rise to differentiating myoblasts [1] [2] [3]: this sub-population of muscle cells was recently termed 'reserve cells' [3]. In order to characterise genes that can regulate the ratio between reserve cells and differentiating myoblasts, we examined ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The effect of delayed transit time is the main source of error in the quantitative measurement of CBF in arterial spin-labeling. In the present study, we evaluated the usefulness of the transit time-corrected CBF and arterial transit time delay from multiple postlabeling delays arterial spin-labeling compared with basal/acetazolamide stress technetium Tc99m-hexamethylprop...

OBJECTIVES We compared the accuracy of quantified myocardial flow reserve and absolute stress myocardial blood flow (MBF) alone in the detection of coronary artery disease (CAD). BACKGROUND Myocardial flow reserve, i.e. ratio of stress and rest flow, has been commonly used to detect CAD with many imaging modalities. However, it is not known whether absolute stress flow alone is sufficient for...