Strategies to rule out myocardial infarction (MI)2 in the emergency department include stress test echocardiography, electrocardiography, and assessment of cardiac biomarkers such as troponin I and T (1). The potential for new high-sensitivity cardiac troponin testing to simplify and expedite these rule-out protocols is of great interest. Is all the hype justified? Or are we placing unreasonabl...

Abstract Aims To study aetiologies of in-hospital cardiac arrests (IHCAs) and their association with 30-day survival. Methods Observational data from national registries. Specific (n = 22) IHCA patients between April 2018 December 2020 were categorized into vs. non-cardiac six main aetiology categories: myocardial ischemia, other causes, pulmonary infection, haemorrhage, causes. Main endpoints ...

Autophagy is an intracellular bulk degradation process for proteins and organelles. In the heart, autophagy is stimulated by myocardial ischemia. However, the causative role of autophagy in the survival of cardiac myocytes and the underlying signaling mechanisms are poorly understood. Glucose deprivation (GD), which mimics myocardial ischemia, induces autophagy in cultured cardiac myocytes. Sur...

Autophagy is an intracellular bulk degradation process for proteins and organelles. In the heart, autophagy is stimulated by myocardial ischemia. However, the causative role of autophagy in the survival of cardiac myocytes and the underlying signaling mechanisms are poorly understood. Glucose deprivation (GD), which mimics myocardial ischemia, induces autophagy in cultured cardiac myocytes. Sur...

The role of caveolae, membrane microenvironments enriched in signaling molecules, in myocardial ischemia is poorly defined. In the current study, we used cardiac myocytes prepared from adult rats to test the hypothesis that opioid receptors (OR), which are capable of producing cardiac protection in vivo, promote cardiac protection in cardiac myocytes in a caveolae-dependent manner. We determine...

The story of volatile anesthetics being “friendly” for the brain originated many years ago with the observation that anesthetized patients seemed to experience minimal or no neurologic injury after cardiac arrest. In the ensuing years, animal cerebral ischemia models were studied to evaluate volatile anesthesia neuroprotection. (1) Although cardiac arrest rarely occurs in pediatric anesthesia, ...

Ischemia and reperfusion activate cardiac myocyte apoptosis, which may be an important feature in the progression of ischemic heart disease. The relative contributions of ischemia and reperfusion to apoptotic signal transduction have not been established. We report here that severe chronic hypoxia alone does not cause apoptosis of cardiac myocytes in culture. When rapidly contracting cardiac my...

AIMS We evaluated the effects of RU28318 (RU), a selective mineralocorticoid receptor (MR) antagonist, Captopril (Capt), an angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor, and Losartan (Los), an angiotensin receptor blocker, alone or in combination with ischemia/reperfusion- (I/R-) induced cardiac dysfunction in hearts obtained from normal and diabetic rats. METHODS Isolated hearts were perfused for...