Ten patients (six women and four men) with endomyocardial disease, four with and six without hypereosinophilia, were studied by two-dimensional echocardiography (2-D echo). Eight had biventricular congestive heart failure and two had atypical chest pain with ischemic electrocardiographic changes. The patients were 15-50 years old (mean 40 years) and duration of illness was 2-9 years (mean 4.4 y...

Growing evidence indicates that reactive oxygen species (ROS) may play a key role in human heart failure (HF). Monoamine oxidase (MAO) is emerging as a major ROS source in several cardiomyopathies. However, little is known about MAO activity in human failing heart and its relationship with redox imbalance. Therefore, we measured MAO activity in the left (LV) and in the right (RV) ventricle of h...

Restrictive cardiomyopathy (RCM) is the least common among cardiomyopathies. It can be idiopathic, familial, or secondary to systematic disorders. Marked increase in left and/or right ventricular filling pressures causes symptoms and signs of congestive heart failure. Electrocardiographic findings are nonspecific and include atrioventricular conduction and QRS complex abnormalities and supraven...

background: this study was undertaken to compare the outcome in patients with moderate to severe ischemic mitral regurgitation (imr) undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (cabg) with either mitral valve repair or mitral valve replacement. methods: between march 2002 and february 2005, 49 consecutive patients (mean age: 62.84±8.42 years; mean euroscore: 10.03±3.12) with coronary artery dise...

Correspondence to: Dr Siân E Hughes, Department of Histopathology, Royal Free and University College Medical School, University College London, UCL Hospitals NHS Trust, Rockefeller Building, University Street, London WC1E 6JJ, UK; [email protected] _________________________ C ardiomyopathies are defined as diseases of the myocardium, which cause cardiac dysfunction with heart failure, arrhy...

BACKGROUND Recent evidence suggests that chloride channels may be involved in ischemic preconditioning (IPC). In this study, we tested whether the cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) chloride channels, which are expressed in the heart and activated by protein kinase A and protein kinase C, are important for IPC in isolated heart preparations from wild-type (WT) and CFTR k...

Cardiomyopathies are diseases of heart muscle that may result from a diverse array of conditions that damage the heart and other organs and impair myocardial function, including infection, ischemia, and toxins. However, they may also occur as primary diseases restricted to striated muscle. Over the past decade, the importance of inherited gene defects in the pathogenesis of primary cardiomyopat...

"... . any classification is necessarily incomplete and acts as a bridge between complete ignorance and total understanding...." (Goodwin JF: The frontiers of cardiomyopathy, Br Heart J 1982;48:1-18) nhe conditions we now call cardiomyopathies were regarded as a diversity of "uncommon noncoronary myocardial diseases" in the 1950s.' Goodwin and colleagues2 defined cardiomyopathies as "4primary h...

regular participation in intensive physical exercise is associated with electro-morphological changes in the heart.   this benign process is called athlete’s heart. athlete’s heart resembles few pathologic conditions in some aspects. so differentiation of these conditions is very important which otherwise may lead to a catastrophic event such as sudden death. the most common causes of sudden de...

Cardiomyopathies are chronic diseases of heart muscle, in which the muscle is abnormally enlarged, thickened, and/or stiffened (1). According to American Heart Association, “Cardiomyopathies are a heterogeneous group of diseases of the myocardium associated with mechanical and/or electrical dysfunction that usually (but not invariably) exhibit inappropriate ventricular hypertrophy or dilatation...