Encyclopedia of Heart Diseases

Cardiovascular disease currently is responsible for more than 14 million deaths worldwide annually and is estimated that this will increase to more than 25 million deaths in the year 2025 in a population of 7.9 billion people.This widespread disease causes more deaths than all forms of cancer, diabetes, infections, and lung diseases.This epidemic can only be curbed by relevant and sound research.Such research, however, requires acquisition of accurate core knowledge. The budding researcher needs to know what is truly proven and what needs to be proven.Clinicians require online medical updates brought rapidly to their computers so as to render more efficient care for their patients.• This encyclopedic work is directed at all physicians who render care to cardiovascular patients and to all who wish to pursue a research career in medicine, pharmacology, biomedical engineering, and technologic innovations.Hopefully, practicing clinicians would glean crucial and up-to-date information that would provide ameliorating benefits for their patients.At the end of a patient-doctor consultation, it is the prescription handed to the patient that provides a cure or salutary effect.Thus, the text gives considerable amount of information on cardiovascular therapeutics.• Both career researchers and those who wish to devote only a few years in research will find the information provided invaluable.Postgraduates in science and technology, including MDs and PhDs, who wish to pursue research in the medical sciences must have a reference source that provides core knowledge in medicine, particularly, pathogenesis, pathophysiology, clinical diagnostic features, diagnostic techniques, and management strategies.The text provides this information.• In addition, our senior college youth worldwide are clamoring for new knowledge that is not provided by tutors who prefer students to research topics.Much is provided by the internet but inaccuracy abounds.Some material in the text is at times simplified to reach the college audience.• The text often describes historical events that led up to certain hallmark discoveries; this is done to indicate to those interested in research that simple thoughts and perseverance bring fruits from research.It is my hope that this historical and relevant cardiologic information will provide motivation and awakening of new interests in the solving of the pathogenesis, pathophysiology, diagnosis, and management strategies of a variety of heart diseases.• Often, major discoveries are made by those who pursue only a few years in research, and innovations may be made by simple thought processes.A prime example is the one revealed by Reverend Hales, the father of hemodynamic medicine.During his studies in theology at Cambridge, he was fortunate to do mathematics and science and had conversations with a medical student.In 1733, after many years in his ministry, at Teddington outside London, he found the time for the study of circulation.Figure 1 in the entry ▶ Blood Pressure shows Hales observing the blood pressure in a horse, and he is credited to be the first to demonstrate the measurement of blood pressure.• The vascular surgeon Korotokoff, in Russia in 1900, recognizing that a constricted artery makes no sound, used a stethoscope to observe the sounds made by the blood flowing through the artery in the arm constricted by an arm band; he heard sounds as the band was released.The first sounds were taken as the systolic blood pressure and the sounds are called Korotkoff sounds; the technique is used to this day without change.Korotokoff 's innovative discovery required only his thought of sound; he was not a researcher.Surgeons do not normally use stethoscopes but vascular surgeons do so, because they listen over expanded arteries, aneurysms that emit a loud bruit, a sound made as the blood strikes the expanded wall of the artery.• Many of the technologic advances in medicine have been provided for us by the collaboration of engineers, physicists, biologists, and medical doctors.Einthoven would not have produced the electrocardiogram in 1901, if Adler had not provided the wireless telegraph; also, the string galvanometer, a nonmedical device, was then available to Einthoven.• The advent of ultrasonography was an innovation prompted by the Titanic disaster and the underwater search for submarines in 1939.At the end of the war, physicists and medical doctors collaborated to provide the ultrasound for neurologic investigations.Echocardiography stemmed from an engineer who worked in collaboration with a medical student and a physician.In 1964, Dr. Harvey Feigenbaum saw the unsophisticated machine at the American college of

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