A dilated left ventricle with reduced ejection fraction is usually attributed to impaired systolic function. To investigate the possibility that ventricular filling might also be disturbed, M mode echocardiograms, phonocardiograms, and Doppler cardiograms were recorded in 30 patients with ventricular disease of varying cause. All but four had functional mitral regurgitation. The size of the lef...

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a connective tissue disease characterised by widespread vascular lesions and fibrosis of the skin and internal organs. Cardiac involvement is recognised as a poor prognostic factor when clinically evident. Primary myocardial involvement is common in SSc. Increasing evidence strongly suggests that myocardial involvement is related to repeated focal ischaemia leading t...

Systemic sclerosis (SSc) is a connective tissue disease characterized by diffuse vascular lesions and fibrosis. Primary myocardial involvement is common in SSc and, when clinically evident, appears as a poor prognostic factor. An increasing body of evidence suggests that myocardial involvement is due, at least in part, to microcirculation impairment with abnormal vasoreactivity, with or without...

Late follow-up (average = 7.2 years) has been obtained in 249 patients with mitral valve disease who had quantitative angiographic assessment of left ventricular function at thetime of initial catheterization in the 1960s. Surgically treated patients with mitral valve disease had significantly improved survival as compared to medically treated patients with mitral disease. The subgroup with mix...

PURPOSE Objective is to evaluate cardiovascular autonomic function in SLE by simple non-invasive tests. METHODS A case control study was carried out involving 18-50 yrs old previously diagnosed SLE patients and same number of age and sex-matched controls. Parasympathetic function was assessed by heart rate (HR) response to Valsalva maneuver, deep breathing and standing. Sympathetic function w...

• The author has no financial conflicts of interest. cc This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecom-mons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Diastolic dysfunction has become a ...

significant advances have been made in diagnosis and therapy of demyelinating disorders of the central nervous system. the most common entities of this disorders in adults – multiple sclerosis and neuromyelitis optica were initially thought to be different phenotypes of more or less the same disease. during the last ten years, this view was subsequently changed and the term neuromyelitis optica...

dementia is defined as significant acquired cognitive impairment in one or more cognitive domains that represents a significant decline from previous baseline and interferes with independence in daily activities. autoimmune dementia is a term that has been used to describe a steroid-responsive autoimmune disorder characterized by a rapidly progressive dementia with a fluctuating course. even co...

Both systolic and diastolic dysfunction have been described during pacing-induced ischemia, but the temporal sequence of systolic and diastolic impairment has not been established. Accordingly, 22 patients with coronary artery disease were paced at increasing heart rates and studied with simultaneous hemodynamic monitoring, electrocardiographic recording, and radionuclide ventriculography. In a...

conclusions lv twist, torsion and untwist and also rate of them are significantly impaired in dcm and this impairment is well-related to lv global systolic and diastolic dysfunction. vvi is a new noninvasive technique that can be used to evaluate lv torsional parameters. results lv twist value (5.54 ± 1.94° in dcm vs. 11.5 ± 2.45° in control group) and also lv torsion (0.71 ± 0.28°/cm in dcm vs...