In clinical therapy of evolving acute myocardial infarction, coronary reperfusion has proven to be the only way to limit infarct size, provided it occurs soon enough after coronary artery occlusion. However, there is also evidence that reperfusion is accompanied by detrimental manifestations known as ‘reperfusion injury’. Reperfusion injury refers to a causal event associated with reperfusion t...

Myocardial stunning involves a profound and slowly recovering decrease in contractility that follows a brief but severe episode of ischemia (1). A report in this issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology (2) challenges the prevailing view that the mechanisms underlying stunning are cellular in origin. Interestingly, Chandrashekhar et al. (2) found there was little difference in...

Patients on hemodialysis have a high incidence of cardiac morbidity and mortality, and echocardiographic evidence of hemodialysis-related myocardial stunning supports a potential link between the hemodialysis treatment itself and cardiac sequelae. Fluid removal rates exceeding 13 mL/kg/hour during hemodialysis have been implicated in the development of myocardial stunning. Providers caring for ...

Late preconditioning (PC) against myocardial stunning develops after coronary artery occlusion (CAO) at rest and subsequent reperfusion. We investigated whether late PC occurs after exercise-induced ischemia (high-flow ischemia) in dogs. A circumflex coronary artery stenosis (by using occluders) was set up before the onset of treadmill exercise in nine chronically instrumented dogs to suppress ...

by Activation of Sarcolemmal but not Mitochondrial ATP-Sensitive Potassium Channels in Mice To the Editor: Recently, Suzuki et al1 reported that attenuation of myocardial stunning by diazoxide in mice was mediated through activation of sarcolemmal rather than mitochondrial K ATP channels. Although the authors used an elegant approach by combining both pharmacological tools (utilizing the mitoch...

Recent studies suggest that the hydroxyl radical (-OH) plays a pathogenetic role in postischemic ventricular dysfunction (myocardial "stunning"). This concept, however, is predicated exclusively on results obtained in anesthetized open-chest preparations, which are subject to the confounding influence of many unphysiological conditions and in which both myocardial stunning and free radical gene...

UNLABELLED Chronic ingestion of small doses of ethanol protects the myocardium from ischemic damage. It was demonstrated that short-term administration of ethanol (SAE) enhances the recovery of stunned myocardium in acutely instrumented, anesthetized dogs. It is unclear whether this beneficial effect of SAE also occurs in awake dogs. Therefore, we investigated the effects of SAE on regional myo...