OBJECTIVES The purpose of this study was to determine whether endurance exercise training could buffer neuroendocrine activity in chronic heart failure patients. BACKGROUND Neuroendocrine activation is associated with poor long-term prognosis in heart failure. There is growing consensus that exercise may be beneficial by altering the clinical course of heart failure, but the mechanisms respon...

Methods Population-based cohort study using the Quebec Congenital Heart Disease Database of all patients with congenital heart disease coming into contact with the Quebec healthcare system between 1983 and 2005. Subjects with specific diagnoses of congenital heart disease and age 65 years at time of entry into the cohort were followed for up to 15 years. The primary outcome was all-cause mortal...

Myocardiopathy is common in uremia, but its cause in unknown. Excessive entry of calcium in heart cells by catecholamines has been shown to cause necrosis of myocardium. The high blood levels of parathyroid hormone (PTH) in uremia may also enhance entry of calcium into heart cells and exert deleterious effects on the heart. We examined the effect of PTH on rat heart cells grown in culture. Both...

Study of monogenic congenital heart disease (CHD) has provided entry points to gain new understanding of heart development and the molecular pathogenesis of CHD. In this review, we discuss monogenic CHD caused by mutations of the cardiac transcription factor genes NKX2-5 and GATA4. Detailed investigation of these genes in mice and humans has expanded our understanding of heart development, shed...

A new kind of data model has recently emerged in which the database is not constrained by a conventional schema. Systems like ACeDB, which has become very popular with biologists, and the recent Tsimmis proposal for data integration organize data in tree-like structures whose components can be used equally well to represent sets and tuples. Such structures allow great exibility in data represen...

AIMS Hysterectomy for benign indications is one of the commonest surgical procedures in women, but the association between the procedure and cardiovascular disease (CVD) is not fully understood. In this population-based cohort study, we studied the effects of hysterectomy, with or without oopherectomy, on the risk of later life CVD. METHODS AND RESULTS Using nationwide healthcare registers, w...

This short article summarizes UCL’s entry for the PASCAL Classifying Heart Sounds Challenge. The approach focused on the creation of novel segmentation and classification methods based on wavelet decomposition and spectrogram analysis.

BACKGROUND Regional differences in action potential duration (APD) restitution in the heart favour arrhythmias, but the mechanism is not well understood. METHODS We simulated a 150 x 150 mm 2D sheet of cardiac ventricular tissue using a simplified computational model. We investigated wavebreak and re-entry initiated by an S1S2S3 stimulus protocol in tissue sheets with two regions, each with d...