AIMS To assess changes in cardiac adrenergic activity with cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT), and to investigate whether these changes are related to improvement in left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF). METHODS AND RESULTS Sixteen patients (13 males, age 66 +/- 7 years) were studied at baseline and after > or =6 months of CRT (mean follow-up 9.2 +/- 3.2 months). LVEF was assessed b...

Patients with neurodegenerative disorders lose body weight as their diseases progress. In Parkinson’s disease (PD), however, autonomic dysfunction is associated with increased body mass index (BMI). We investigated the correlation between BMI, clinical features, and autonomic dysfunction in patients with multiple system atrophy with predominant parkinsonism (MSAP). BMI, clinical features, cardi...

I-131 MIBG scintigraphy is routinely used in the diagnosis of neuroendocrine tumours with high specificity. The radiopharmaceutical is taken up via uptake mechanism and actively transported into storage vesicules. The organs with dense sympathetic innervation such as salivary glands, heart, lachrymal glands, spleen and rarely adrenal medulla are normally visualized with I-131 MIBG. Asymetrical ...

It is likely that a close association exists between findings obtained by two methods: dobutamine stress echocardiography and 123I-MIBG scintigraphy. Both of these methods are associated with beta-adrenergic receptor mechanisms. This study was conducted to demonstrate the relation between myocardial response to dobutamine stress and sympathetic nerve release of norepinephrine in the failing hea...

AIMS It has been reported that carvedilol improves cardiac sympathetic nerve activity (CSNA) in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). However, the influence of carvedilol on cardiac (123)I-meta-iodobenzylguanidine (MIBG) scintigraphic findings and left ventricular (LV) remodelling has not been determined in DCM patients. METHODS AND RESULTS In 30 patients with DCM and 10 normal controls...

Introduction. Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) showed reduced myocardial (123)I-MIBG uptake, which may affect autonomic regulation. We investigated correlation between MIBC accumulation and cardiovascular autonomic function in PD. Methods. We performed myocardial MIBG scintigraphy, heart rate variability (HRV) analysis, and the head-up tilt test (HUT) in 50 PD patients (66.4 ± 7.8 years; ...

During heart transplantation complete denervation of allograft occurs. Partial reinnervation may develop after one year or later. It can be detected by different methods i.e., iodine123-meta-iodobenziylguanidine (MIBG) scintigraphy, positron emission tomography (PET), heart rate variability (HRV), etc. We propose an alternative noninvasive method based on visual diagnostics (VD) and supported b...

UNLABELLED The aim of this study was to evaluate the role of radionuclide imaging in the characterization of nonhypersecreting adrenal masses. METHODS A total of 54 patients (19 men, 35 women; mean age, 50 +/- 16 y) with nonhypersecreting unilateral adrenal tumors that had been originally detected on CT or MRI underwent adrenal scintigraphy using different radiotracers. None of the patients s...

At the age of 53, a 65-year-old man had been diagnosed with extra-adrenal pheochromocytoma in the retroperitoneum and underwent total tumorectomy. Afterward, he had his serum catecholamine periodically measured in an outpatient clinic. In February 1999, 12 years after surgery, he complained of lower left abdominal pain. Computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging revealed an osteolytic l...

Cardiac I-meta-iodobenzylguanidine (MIBG) uptake was measured in 11 patients with dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), 10 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and 10 age matched control subjects. The severity of cognitive impairment and duration of symptoms in patients with DLB matched that in the patients with AD. The heart/mediastinum (H/M) ratio of MIBG uptake in the patients with AD was indi...