Left ventricular morphology and function in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

Objectives: Congestive heart failure (CHF) and inflammation are important contributors to the excess of overall morbidity and mortality in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA). CHF rather than ischaemic heart disease (IHD) appears to participate on the mortality in these patients. However, there are controversial results about significance of plasma N-terminal of pro-B type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) and other inflammatory markers investigation for an early detection of heart dysfunction.

Acute and long-term effect of infliximab on humoral and echocardiographic parameters in patients with chronic inflammatory diseases.

Tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) plays an important role in the pathogenesis of chronic inflammatory diseases, i.e., rheumatoid arthritis (RA), ankylosing spondylitis (AS), Crohn's disease (CD), and ulcerative colitis (UC).

Clinically silent adrenal adenomas - their relation to the metabolic syndrome and to GNB3 C825T gene polymorphism.

Objectives: Aim of the study was to assess the prevalence of C825T GNB3 gene polymorphism in patients with adrenal incidentaloma (AI) as well as its relation to the metabolic syndrome (MS) and cortisol status.

Subject And Methods: Alltogether 82 subjects (50 patients with AI, mean age 57.9 + 15 years and 32 subjects without AI, mean age 53.

[Mitral stenosis evaluated with three-dimensional echocardiography].

The authors evaluated the possibilities of three-dimensional echocardiography in the assessment of the severity of mitral valve stenosis. In 45 patients, the Doppler pressure half-time method was compared with two three-dimensional echocardiographic methods in the measurement of mitral valve orifice: anyplane echocardiography and surface rendering. There was significant relation between them: r = 0.