background: heart failure is a severe chronic disease and has a negative impact on the health-related quality of life (hrql). in addition to preventing disease progress, one of the important goals in heart failure treatment is to improve the patient’s quality of life. this study is aimed to compare three generic to specific quality of life instruments that are used in cardiac rehabilitation set...

diffuse hepatic inltration is an unusual form of hodgkin's disease (hd). its manifestation as progressive hepatitis or with hepatic failure is even rarer and can be difcult to diagnose. we aim to describe an unusual case of liver failure due to hd. a middle-aged woman with a 10 month history of daily febrile episodes, constitutional symptoms and strikingly high levels of serum ferritin was admi...

UNLABELLED Heart failure is a prevalent debilitating disease of poor prognosis in which heart cannot fill with or eject the sufficient amount of blood that is required due to structural or functional cardiac disorder. Depression is 4-5 times as common in heart failure (HF) patients as in the general population, and it might confer a higher risk of developing HF and negatively affect prognosis i...

BACKGROUND In a canine model of congestive heart failure beta endorphin concentrations were high and opioid receptor antagonists exerted beneficial haemodynamic effects. In humans previous studies have suggested that opioid peptides may modify the perception of breathlessness and fatigue in heart failure. METHODS Plasma concentrations of beta endorphin were measured in patients with acute and...

enterococci are normal inhabitants of gastrointestinal tract, being responsible for 5 to 18% of infective endocarditis and the incidence appears to be increasing. eleven patients with enterococcal endocarditis were studied. in a case series group, 10 men (average 57 years) and one woman (37 years) were studied. two patients had rheumatic heart disease, 5 patients arteriosclerotic disease and on...

BACKGROUND Cardiac cachexia is a syndrome of generalised wasting which caries a poor prognosis and is associated with raised plasma concentrations of tumour necrosis factor alpha (TNFalpha). TNFalpha increases secretion of leptin, a hormone which decreases food intake and increases energy expenditure. OBJECTIVE To determine whether an inappropriate increase in plasma leptin concentration cont...