Procollagen type III amino terminal peptide and myocardial fibrosis: A study in hypertensive patients with and without left ventricular hypertrophy.

Introduction And Objectives: An exaggerated accumulation of type I and type III fibrillar collagens occurs throughout the free wall and interventricular septum of patients with primary hypertension and left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH). In the present study the serum concentration of procollagen type III amino terminal peptide (PIIIP) was measured to determine the value of this peptide as a potential marker of ventricular fibrosis in hypertensive patients, particularly those with LVH.

Methods: The study population consisted of patients with never-treated mild to moderate essential hypertension and 30 normotensive control subjects.

Oral anticoagulant therapy. Fundamentals, clinical practice and recommendations.

Oral anticoagulant therapy remains one of the most frequent options for treatment and prevention in patients with arterial and venous thromboembolism. Clinical guidelines have been updated in recent years by various associations such as the American Heart Association (AHA), the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the European Society of Cardiology (ESC), as well as organizations in several other countries. The authors present a review of therapy with vitamin K antagonists, focusing on their mechanism of action and metabolism, as well as on the fundamentals of such therapy.

The relation between the erythrocyte nitric oxide and hemorheological parameters.

We stimulated human erythrocytes obtained from patients with hypercholesterolemia (HC; n = 42), renal transplantation (RT; n = 18) and hypertension (HT; n = 10) with acetylcholine (ACh 10 microM) and measured the amperometric NO production, comparing with the NO levels achieved on erythrocytes of healthy persons (n = 27). We also measured the hemoglobin, hematocrit, erythrocyte aggregation, erythrocyte deformability, plasma viscosity and fibrinogen concentration from human blood samples. The erythrocytes NO levels were of 2.