During the past decade enormous progress has been made in the development of new cardiovascular drugs and in our understanding of the clinical pharma- cology and the pharmacokinetics of old drugs. In addition, newer applications of older agents have emerged. For example, vasodilators such as nitroglycerin are now being employed in the treatment of congestive heart failure, and anti- hypertensives such as bretylium are used in the management of ventricular arrhythmias. Individual chapters in this book focus on (1) the clinical pharmacology and pharmacokinetics of the individual drugs, and (2)...

Thus, there are now several chronic canine myocardial infarction- ventricular tachyarrhythmia models which are available for the evaluation of new antiarrhythmic drugs (Table I). The available models fulfill many, but not all of the requirements for an ideal chronic arrhythmia model (Table 11). The sustained arrhythmias initiated in these models using programmed pacing presumably have the same localized reentrant mechanism that characterizes chronic human myocardial infarction and chronic coronary 26 artery disease. However, these models are not suitable for determining whether a new drug...