A 47 year old woman with pure autonomic failure complained of dizziness during emotional stress. Emotional stimuli have not previously been reported to cause hypotension in patients with autonomic failure. In the patient, ambulatory blood pressure recording revealed severe hypotension (50/30 mm Hg) after a stressful event. During a tilt table test, hyperventilation was shown to cause a signific...

OBJECTIVES Right heart failure is a major cause of morbidity and mortality after left ventricular assist device implantation and is still hard to predict. This study investigated the haemodynamic effect of a modified Glenn shunt on induced right ventricular (RV) failure. METHODS Isolated RV failure was induced by coronary ligation in 11 pigs. A modified Glenn shunt was established by a superi...

The resistance of shallow foundations to lateral loads is often relied upon to transmit the base shear forces from the ground to a building during an earthquake. Considering the importance of this link in the lateral load path it receives little attention in current design practice in New Zealand. An assumption is commonly made, either explicitly or implicitly, that the combination of sliding f...

BACKGROUND Heart failure (HF) can be caused by left ventricular (LV) pump failure as well as by bradyarrhythmias. Hemodynamic differences between HF by LV pump failure and that by bradyarrhythmia have not been fully investigated. We hypothesized that HF by LV pump failure could be associated with both reduced cardiac output (CO) and increased LV filling pressure due to associated LV diastolic d...

Evaluation of active earth pressure in seismic condition is one of the important problems of geotechnical earthquake engineering. In this study the static and seismic active earth pressure exerted by a homogeneous backfill behind a rigid retaining wall is evaluated using Horizontal Slice Method (HSM). Both cohesionless and cohesive soils are considered using c- soil in the formulation. The fai...

BACKGROUND The prevalence of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction is increasing. The prognosis worsens with pulmonary hypertension and right ventricular (RV) failure development. We targeted pulmonary hypertension and RV burden with the phosphodiesterase-5 inhibitor sildenafil. METHODS AND RESULTS Forty-four patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (heart failure...

Original scientific paper Failure tests were conducted on marble under different unloading confining pressure rates to obtain the energy change curve of whole-process deformation and failure. With increasing unloading rate, the peak stress differences in marble failure were reduced, confining pressure differences in failure increased, the increment ratios of each stress confining pressure were ...

Every doctor should be able to make a probable diagnosis of congestive heart failure by clinical examination. The most revealing clinical sign is an elevated jugular venous pressure. The measurement of this pressure was introduced by Lewis in 1930 and refined and standardised by Borst and Molhuysen in 1952. Still, this method has fallen into disuse and is thought to be not very sensitive for di...

BACKGROUND The independent prognostic value of elevated jugular venous pressure or a third heart sound in patients with heart failure is not well established. METHODS We performed a retrospective analysis of the Studies of Left Ventricular Dysfunction treatment trial, in which 2569 patients with symptomatic heart failure or a history of it were randomly assigned to receive enalapril or placeb...