Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a major cause of sudden cardiac death and heart failure, and it is characterized by genetic and clinical heterogeneity, even for some patients with a very poor clinical prognosis; in the majority of cases, DCM necessitates a heart transplant. Genetic mutations have long been considered to be associated with this disease. At present, mutations in over 50 genes rel...

BACKGROUND Although several loci for familial dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) have been mapped, the origin of a large percentage of DCM remains unclear. Mdm2, a p53-negative regulator, protects cardiomyocytes from ischemic and reperfusion-induced cell death. Mdm4, a homolog of Mdm2, inhibits p53 activity in numerous cell types. It is unknown whether Mdm4 plays a role in the inhibition of p53 in fu...

OBJECTIVE To assess the clinical importance of heart rate variability (HRV) in patients with idiopathic dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). PATIENTS AND METHODS Time domain analysis of 24 hour HRV was performed in 64 patients with DCM, 19 of their relatives with left ventricular enlargement (possible early DCM), and 33 healthy control subjects. RESULTS Measures of HRV were reduced in patients wit...

BACKGROUND Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is familial in about 20-35% of patients. The most frequently encountered mutations associated with DCM are found in LMNA. AIM To define the frequency of LMNA mutations in a series of consecutive DCM patients and to evaluate the phenotype of mutation carriers. METHODS We screened the 12 exons of LMNA in a series of 61 Polish patients with DCM diagnosed...

BACKGROUND Hundreds of genetic variants have been described as disease causing in dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). Some of these associations are now being questioned. We aimed to identify the prevalence of previously DCM associated variants in the Exome Aggregation Consortium (ExAC), in order to identify potentially false-positive DCM variants. METHODS Variants listed as DCM disease-causing var...

BACKGROUND Dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) is a heart muscle disease that is endemic in Africa. Over the past 50 years, South African investigators have made significant contributions to scientific elucidation of the condition. The objective of this review was to summarise their research on the subject of DCM. METHODS AND RESULTS We searched PubMed for articles originating from South Africa and ...

Dichloromethane (DCM) is utilized by the strictly anaerobic, acetogenic mixed culture DM as a sole source of carbon and energy for growth. Growth with DCM was linear, and cell suspensions of the culture degraded DCM with a specific activity of 0.47 mkat/kg of protein. A mass balance of 2 mol of chloride and 0.42 mol of acetate per mol of DCM was observed. The dehalogenation reaction showed simi...

Circulating autoantibodies against the M2-muscarinic acetylcholine receptor (CHRM2) have been detected in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM). However, it has yet to be determined whether the pathogenesis of familial DCM may be linked to the genetic variability of the CHRM2 gene. The coding regions of the CHRM2 gene were examined by direct DNA sequencing. Plasma concentrations of autoant...

OBJECTIVE Tribbles 3 (TRB3) is associated with insulin resistance, an important trigger in the development of diabetic cardiomyopathy (DCM). We sought to determine whether TRB3 plays a major role in modulating DCM and the mechanisms involved. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS The type 2 diabetic rat model was induced by high-fat diet and low-dose streptozotocin. We evaluated the characteristics of ...

Dynamic causal modeling (DCM) of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data allows one to make inferences about the architecture of distributed networks in the brain, in terms of effective connectivity. fMRI data are usually acquired using echo planar imaging (EPI). EPI sequences typically acquire slices at different times over a few seconds. DCM, in its original inception, was not infor...