Sudden death is probably the greatest challenge facing modem cardiology today. This is mainly due to the impact of its brusque appearance and the socioeconomic implications. The incidende is presently decreasing somewhat, mainly due to the decline in new cases of ischemic heart disease on one hand, and to better preven tion in risk patients on the other. Nevertheless, the figures are still high and represent over 300.000 patients per year in the United States alone. This book is an updating of the problem of sudden death from a multifactorial standpoint. It includes not only...

Today, coronary artery disease is one of the major causes of mortality and morbidity in the Western World. In the last decade many major diagnostic and therapeutic advances have been made, considerably furthering our potential in the management of coronary artery disease. At the same time, a new generation of cardiac tools has appeared. The field which has, perhaps, undergone the most important technological innovations is echocardiography. Nowadays, in fact, the world of ultrasounds ofters the cardiologist a wide range of technical applicatons: two-dimensional real-time imaging, intra-and...

The noninvasive evaluation of hemodynamics in congenital heart disease is an application for which Doppler ultrasound is ideally suited. The pediatric cardiac sonographer has used 2D and TM imaging for several years to study the structural abnormalities associated with various lesions. Pulsed Doppler, continuous wave Doppler, and more recently, color flow mapping techniques have been used to study the pathophysiology, and to make quantitative measurements thereof. To those already working in pediatric echocardiography, this book is intended to serve as a guide to the applications of the...

Recently, much progress has been made with echocardiography and Doppler techniques and these ultrasound methods have grown in importance and reliability as non-invasive diagnostic procedures for many cardiovascular disorders. The objective of this t~xtbook is to offer a detailed yet concise overview of the echocardiographic diagnosis of the various cardiovascular diseases. The book focuses upon the practical echocardiographic (including Doppler) exam- ination. Accordingly, the fundamental principles of echocardiography and the Doppler techniques (pulsed and continuous wave and color flow...

This monograph represents an attempt to collect the methods developed within the past decade in which echocardiography was being used to guide or to assess the results of some cardiovascular interventions or to overcome the imaging limitations of transthoracic approaches. I have entitled this book Echocardio graphy in Cardiac Interventions, although I am aware that this title is not entirely applicable to all the included methods. In these interventive procedures echocar diography preserves its noninvasive nature, and by combining it with invasive procedures, they become more accurate, safer...

Hypertension is the major cause of left ventricular hypertrophy. While the electrocardiogram is an extremely insensitive measure of anatomic left ven- tricular hypertrophy, it provides a time-tested important marker of an adverse cardiovascular outcome. There has been a recent temporal decrease in the incidence of electrocardiographic evidence of L VH even within the hyperten- sive population; no doubt this is the result of large antihypertensive treatment experts. Anatomical evidence of left ventricular hypertrophy is best docu- mented pre-morbidly using echocardiographic techniques. It...

This book is a comprehensive overview of electrocardiography and the major effects of current cardiac pharmacological therapy on electrocardiography. The text is based on work presented at the International Symposium on Non-invasive Cardiovascular Diagnosis and Therapy, held in May, 1987 at the University of Cologne. The theme of the book is to review, in broad clinical perspective the current state-of-the-art of electrocardiography as it pertains to standard electrocar diograms, exercise testing, ambulatory electrocardiography, electrocardiographic telemetry, and high resolution...

There are few techniques that have influenced therapeutic strategies in modem cardiology to a similar extent as coronary arteriography. Bypass surgery as well as transluminal coronary angioplasty would not have been possible without coronary angiography serving as a 'midwife' in their evolu tion. Despite the widespread and long-standing use in clinical practice, however, the interpretation of coronary angiograms has not changed very much since the early days. Most angiogr s are still reviewed in a visual and semi-quantitative and thus often very subjective way. In the face of an almost...

H. E. D. J. TER KEURS & M. I. M. NOBLE The "Starling's Law of the Heart" and "The Frank-Starling Mechanism" have long been the cornerstone of cardiac mechanical physiology. It is often forgotten that Frank and Starling carried out fundamentally different exper- iments. Frankl measured the isovolumic pressure developed by frog heart at different volumes. He therefore discovered the pressure-volume-volume rela- tionship which depends directly on the force-length relationship of the 2 sarcomeres. Starling ,3 studied cardiac shortening as manifest by cardiac output and its relationship to...