Influence of Cardiac Glycosides and Prostaglandins on the Physiology of Epithelial Cells

Epithelial cells play a major role in animal and human homeostasis because they selectively regulate the exchange of solutes between two given media, such as blood or urine. Cardiac glycosides (CG) are group highly toxic compounds whose best therapeutic known effect is on heart, although recent evidence has shown that it exerts wide range physiological effects tissues other than heart. Prostaglandins, hand, lipids produce diverse pathological among which inflammation stands out. In this chapter, we describe cardiac modulate key features epithelial cell physiology, including cell-cell contact junctional complexes, cilliogenesis, gap junction-mediated intercellular communication (GJIC) cells. Prostaglandin PGE2 also modulates GJIC through different signaling pathway. addition, CG induce paracrine release prostaglandin PGE2, turn by itself.