AIMS Cardioinhibitory syncope (CS) is a neurally mediated response causing bradycardia or asystole. This study reports on changes in blood pressure, heart rate variability (HRV), and ECG patterns before and after syncope with asystole. METHODS AND RESULTS Thirty-five patients with CS and a matched control group were submitted to 60 degrees head-up tilt for 20 min with the addition of nitrogly...

Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia encountered in clinical practice, and it is one of the most common cardiac conditions requiring hospitalization of a patient. Several national organizations have developed guidelines for the management of atrial fibrillation. These guidelines were updated in 2011 to incorporate new advances in antiarrhythmic drug therapy and anticoagulant therap...

Autonomic diabetic neuropathy is a common and serious complication of diabetes mellitus with variable multiple organ involvement, principally of the cardiovascular system, but also of the gastrointestinal and urogenital tracts (1). Cardiac autonomic neuropathy (CAN) causes alterations in heart rate control and vascular dynamics, which may result in disabling clinical and functional manifestatio...

a Department of Internal Medicine I, Klinikum Gütersloh, Academic Hospital of the University of Münster, Gütersloh, Germany b Department of Internal Medicine III, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany c Division of Cardiology, Pulmonology, and Vascular Medicine, Heinrich Heine University Medical Center Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany d Institute of Medical Statistics, Informatics and Epidemio...

Salt-sensitive hypertension is known to be associated with dysfunction of the baroreflex control system in the Dahl salt-sensitive (SS) rat. However, neither the physiological mechanisms nor the genomic regions underlying the baroreflex dysfunction seen in this rat model are definitively known. Here, we have adopted a mathematical modeling approach to investigate the physiological and genetic o...

One of the most overlooked of all serious complications of diabetes is cardiovascular autonomic neuropathy (CAN),1–3 which encompasses damage to the autonomic nerve fibers that innervate the heart and blood vessels, resulting in abnormalities in heart rate control and vascular dynamics.4 The present report discusses the clinical manifestations (eg, resting tachycardia, orthostasis, exercise int...

The Dark Aouti (DA) inbred strain of rats has superior aerobic treadmill running capacity compared with the Copenhagen (COP) strain of inbred rats. This difference in aerobic capacity provides a model to explore the genetic basis of variation in this trait. The present study evaluated intermediate phenotypic differences between 10 male COP inbred rats and 10 male DA inbred rats that might contr...

Limited information is available on whether and to what extent the different patterns of the nocturnal blood pressure profile reported in hypertension are characterized by differences in sympathetic drive that may relate to, and account for, the different day-night blood pressure changes. In 34 untreated middle-aged essential hypertensive dippers, 17 extreme dippers, 18 nondippers, and 10 rever...

SUMMARY The hemodynamic effects of atrial pacing were evaluated in a group of 19 patients soon after cardiac valve surgery. Atrial pacing at 30 beats/min above the control rate of 88 beats/min produced an increase in cardiac index of 600 ml/min/m2. Isoproterenol was infused into eight of these patients to produce an increment in heart rate identical to that during atrial pacing. In these patien...

BACKGROUND Numerous studies have reported an association between stressing work conditions and cardiovascular disease. However, more evidence is needed, and the etiological mechanisms are unknown. Elevated resting heart rate has emerged as a possible risk factor for cardiovascular disease, but little is known about the relation to work-related stress. This study therefore investigated the assoc...