background: assessment of myocardial function is essential in heart disease, but in regard to systolic and diastolic functions such evaluation has limitation. ejection fraction is difficult to assess in abnormally-shaped ventricles, and diastolic inflow velocity pattern may be fused because of tachycardia.   objective: a myocardial performance index (mpi) or tei index has been developed for adu...

Regional myocardial wall motion analysis has been used in clinical routine to assess myocardial disease, such as infarction and hypertrophy. These diseases can be distinguished from normals by looking at the local abnormality of cardiac motion. In this paper, we present a first result of a feature extraction experiment using the Independent Component Analysis (ICA), where abnormal patterns of m...

The non-invasive study of cardiac mechanics has been improved after the recent introduction of advanced magnetic resonance and echocardiographic imaging techniques. Tagged and diffusion-sensitive cardiac magnetic resonance allows the study of myocardial torsion dynamics as well as the anatomical disposition of myocardial fibers. Local myocardial strain and synchronicity of myocardial contractio...

Changes in cardiac metabolism in myocardial failure and after alcohol ingestion are discussed. The main effect of alcohol ingestion is loss of cardiac contractility. Since heart muscle does not contain alcohol dehydrogenase, its toxicity is probably the result of a direct toxic effect of ethanol and acetaldehyde on the myocardial cell, possibly involving various membrane systems. Alcohol inhibi...

The role of cGMP in myocardial contraction is not established. Recent reports suggest that nitric oxide, released by endothelial cells or within myocytes, modifies myocardial contraction by raising cGMP. We studied the effects of 8-bromo-cGMP (8bcGMP, 50 grmol/L) on contraction (cell shortening) and simultaneous intracellular Ca2' transients (indo 1 fluorescence ratio) in intact adult rat ventr...

BACKGROUND Myocardial cells from failing human hearts are characterized by abnormal calcium handling, a negative force-frequency relationship, and decreased sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca2+ ATPase (SERCA2a) activity. In this study, we tested whether contractile function can be improved by decreasing the inhibitory effects of phospholamban on SERCA2a with adenoviral gene transfer of antisense phospho...

Decreased myocardial contraction occurs as a consequence of a reduction in blood flow. The concept of hibernation implies a downregulation of contractile function as an adaptation to a reduction in myocardial blood flow that serves to maintain myocardial integrity and viability during persistent ischemia. Unequivocal evidence for this concept exists in scenarios of myocardial ischemia that last...

J Rehabil Med 47 © 2015 The Authors. doi: 10.2340/16501977-1891 Journal Compilation © 2015 Foundation of Rehabilitation Information. ISSN 1650-1977 Objective: To locate and trace endogenous endothelial progenitor cells (EPCs) in rabbits subjected to myocardial ischaemia and/or physiological ischaemia training. Methods: Rabbits were randomly divided into 4 groups: a myocardial ischaemia group (s...

The classical ischemic cascade anticipates perfusion disturbances to precede the development of wall motion abnormalities, but does not account for regional heterogeneity of both perfusion and function. In this issue of JACC: Cardiovascular Imaging, Xie et al. (1) examine the impact of subendocardial ischemia (identified using real-time myocardial contrast echocardiography [MCE]) on myocardial ...

We analyze RR heartbeat sequences with a dynamic model that satisfactorily reproduces both the long- and the short-time statistical properties of heart beating. These properties are expressed quantitatively by means of two significant parameters, the scaling delta concerning the asymptotic effects of long-range correlation, and the quantity 1-pi establishing the amount of uncorrelated fluctuati...