Complicated Intramural Hematoma with Medionecrosis of the Aortic Wall.

Medionecrosis and medial degeneration are rare complications associated with intramural hematomas (IMHs). We present a case of a 69-year-old Asian female with an IMH with medionecrosis and medial degeneration of the aortic wall. The patient underwent successful surgical intervention, and pathological findings were significant for cystic medial degeneration of the aortic wall.

Ochronotic heart disease leading to severe aortic valve and coronary artery stenosis.

Cardiac ochronosis is a rare disease, estimated to affect 1 in 250,000 persons. While there is extensive evidence of the musculoskeletal alterations of the disease, cardiac involvement has not been widely studied and most information we currently have derives from case reports and case series. We report the case of a 64-year old patient with a known history of alkaptonuria who presented with dyspnea and weight loss.

Diazoxide preserves myocardial function in a swine model of hypothermic cardioplegic arrest and prolonged global ischemia.

Objective: Adenosine triphosphate potassium sensitive channels provide endogenous myocardial protection via coupling of cell membrane potential to myocardial metabolism. Adenosine triphosphate potassium sensitive channel openers, such as diazoxide, mimic ischemic preconditioning, prevent cardiomyocyte swelling, preserve myocyte contractility after stress, and provide diastolic protection. We hypothesize that diazoxide combined with hyperkalemic cardioplegia provides superior myocardial protection compared with cardioplegia alone during prolonged global ischemia in a large animal model.

A single injection of crystallizable fragment domain-modified antibodies elicits durable protection from SHIV infection.

In the absence of an effective and safe vaccine against HIV-1, the administration of broadly neutralizing antibodies (bNAbs) represents a logical alternative approach to prevent virus transmission. Here, we introduced two mutations encoding amino acid substitutions (M428L and N434S, collectively referred to as 'LS') into the genes encoding the crystallizable fragment domains of the highly potent HIV-specific 3BNC117 and 10-1074 bNAbs to increase their half-lives and evaluated their efficacy in blocking infection following repeated low-dose mucosal challenges of rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta) with the tier 2 SHIV. A single intravenous infusion of 10-1074-LS monoclonal antibodies markedly delayed virus acquisition for 18 to 37 weeks (median, 27 weeks), whereas the protective effect of the 3BNC117-LS bNAb was more modest (provided protection for 11-23 weeks; median, 17 weeks).