The etiology of cerebrovascular disease (CVD) in young patients is difficult to establish if the common causes of a focal neurological deficit are excluded by appropriate investigations. Since in some observations prolapse of the mitral-valve (MVP), alterations of platelet function, or both have been linked with cerebral ischemic events, we studied the in vivo platelet release reaction and the ...

Background Standard mitral valve replacement (MVR) in patients with chronic mitral regurgitation results in consistent reductions in resting postoperative ejection fraction. This has been attributed to removal of the low-impedance ejection pathway into the left atrium or to disruption of the chordal apparatus. Mitral valve repair (MVP) does not reduce ejection fraction at rest. However, whether...

S olving the puzzle that ties mitral valve prolapse (MVP) to sudden cardiac death necessarily means overcoming 2 central challenges: establishing a mechanistic association between a very common disorder (MVP) and a rare outcome (sudden cardiac death) and discerning the cause and effect of an increasing array of associated structural, electrocardio-graphic, and now pathological findings. In this...

The biosynthetic mevalonate pathway (MVP) produces the building blocks for a wide range of biological molecules, from cholesterol to the long-chain prenyl groups that mediate the membrane association of Ras family GTPases (1). Mutations in the tumor suppressor p53 can up-regulate the MVP, a phenomenon that enhances the invasiveness of certain breast cancer cell lines by an unknown mechanism (2)...

0195-668X/02/010087+07 $35.00/0 especially its title. Whether MVP claimed the life of Shylock in the Merchant of Venice who claimed the heart of Portia’s lover or Antonia in the Tales of Hoffman who sang herself to death, there is no question that, though generally a benign condition, MVP may be a deadly disease at times. Up to 1989, 106 cases of sudden death have been reported as a complicatio...

Vaults may contribute to multidrug resistance by transporting drugs away from their subcellular targets. To study the involvement of vaults in the extrusion of anthracyclines from the nucleus, we investigated the handling of daunorubicin by drug-sensitive and drug-resistant non-small lung cancer cells, including a green fluorescent protein (GFP)-tagged major vault protein (MVP)-overexpressing t...

The data collected until recently was based on autopsy studies of SCD victims in whom MVP was the only pathologic cardiac finding, pointing for a specific subgroup of MVP patients, particularly women of younger age without significant MR as a risk group for SCD [1]. Otherwise, population-based studies looking into the natural history of asymptomatic MVP patients revealed an elevated 10-year all...