Publications by authors named "Naila Ijaz"

Article Synopsis
  • Frailty is a clinical syndrome characterized by increased vulnerability due to reduced cognitive, physical, and physiological reserves, significantly impacting patients in the cardiac intensive care unit (CICU).
  • While it mainly affects older adults, around 30% of younger patients under 65 years old admitted to the CICU are also frail, leading to higher complications and lower chances of receiving optimal treatment for cardiovascular issues.
  • This review highlights the importance of properly assessing and managing frailty in the CICU to improve health outcomes and resource use for these vulnerable patients both during and after their hospital stay.
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As the older adult population expands, an increasing number of patients affected by geriatric syndromes are seen by cardiovascular clinicians. One such syndrome that has been associated with poor outcomes is cognitive frailty: the simultaneous presence of cognitive impairment, without evidence of dementia, and physical frailty, which results in decreased cognitive reserve. Driven by common pathophysiologic underpinnings (eg, inflammation and neurohormonal dysregulation), cardiovascular disease, cognitive impairment, and frailty also share the following risk factors: hypertension, diabetes, obesity, sedentary behavior, and tobacco use.

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Importance: The existing models predicting right ventricular failure (RVF) after durable left ventricular assist device (LVAD) support might be limited, partly due to lack of external validation, marginal predictive power, and absence of intraoperative characteristics.

Objective: To derive and validate a risk model to predict RVF after LVAD implantation.

Design, Setting, And Participants: This was a hybrid prospective-retrospective multicenter cohort study conducted from April 2008 to July 2019 of patients with advanced heart failure (HF) requiring continuous-flow LVAD.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates how the development of frailty and cognitive impairment (CI) over five years impacts cardiovascular health in older adults without a history of coronary artery disease.
  • It found that participants who developed both frailty and CI simultaneously faced the highest risk for major cardiovascular events, compared to those who developed them separately.
  • The research highlights the importance of diagnosing frailty and CI to better assess cardiovascular risks in older individuals.
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Background & Aims: The prevalence of nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is increasing globally. We assessed independent associations of NAFLD with all-cause and cause-specific mortality in older community-dwelling adults in the United States.

Methods: Data from the Rancho Bernardo Study cohort, who participated in the research from 1992 to 1996 with mortality data (followed up to July 2019), were analyzed.

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With the aging of the world's population, a large proportion of patients seen in cardiovascular practice are older adults, but many patients also exhibit signs of physical frailty. Cardiovascular disease and frailty are interdependent and have the same physiological underpinning that predisposes to the progression of both disease processes. Frailty can be defined as a phenomenon of increased vulnerability to stressors due to decreased physiological reserves in older patients and thus leads to poor clinical outcomes after cardiovascular insults.

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Background: Variable definitions and an incomplete understanding of the gradient of reverse cardiac remodeling following continuous flow left ventricular assist device (LVAD) implantation has limited the field of myocardial plasticity. We evaluated the continuum of LV remodeling by serial echocardiographic imaging to define 3 stages of reverse cardiac remodeling following LVAD.

Methods: The study enrolled consecutive LVAD patients across 4 study sites.

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Bisphenol A (BPA) is an endocrine disrupting chemical with ubiquitous environmental exposure. Animal studies have demonstrated that in utero BPA exposure leads to increased adult body weight. Our aim was to characterize human fetal BPA exposure by measuring BPA concentration in second trimester amniotic fluid (AF) samples and to study its relationship with birth weight (BW) in full term infants.

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