[Assessment of left atrial remodeling in atrial fibrillation].

Unlabelled: Left atrial size, most frequently assessed for practical reasons by echocardiography, is important in clinical decision-making. Left atrium volume measurements allow an accurate assessment of asymmetric remodeling and reverse remodeling in atrial fibrillation (AF) patients.

Aim: To assess a new method (CTEL2) derived from CT scan by ellipsoid formula (CTEL1) to measure LA volume, we compared the conventional echocardiography-ellipsoid method (EEL), as a reference, with CTEL1 and with the new method-CTEL2.

[Correlation between increase of oxidative stress and microalbuminuria in type-1 diabetic patients].

Oxidative stress has an important role in genesis of diabetic complications, especially diabetic nephropathy. The aim of the study was to assess correlations between increase of oxidative stress (OS) and the development of microalbuminuria (MA) in type 1 diabetic patients. We determined the oxidative status by measuring the level of superoxide dismutase (SOD-Minanui method), catalase (CAT-Aebi method), glutathione peroxidase (GPx-Fukuzawa method) and glutathione (GSH-Ellman method) in 87 type 1 diabetic patients (44 with normal urinary protein excretion-group A and 43 with MA-group B) and 38 nondiabetic matched controls, before and 24 hours after a test effort.

[Some aspects of degenerative mitral valve lesions encountered in medical practice].

In recent years, degenerative valvular heart diseases have the tendency to be equal in frequency with rheumatic valvular diseases. The maximum attention has been paid on the degenerative aortic stenosis as being a lesion with maximum frequency and a severe evolution. This study, given on the 18,391 admissions in the period 1997-2001, is a retrospective analysis and it is concerned with the degenerative mitral valvular lesions.

[HDL-cholesterol--active or passive participant in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis? (II)].

It is known that high sanguin levels of cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol (LDLc) have an important role in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis. The treatment of hypercholesterolemia with statins and/or with fibrates have had beneficial effects on coronary heart disease and on other localization of atherosclerosis. The decreased of cholesterol and LDL-cholesterol is the most important effect of this treatment.

[Implications of some risk factors in degenerative valvular heart diseases].

Unlabelled: A retrospective study on 223 patients diagnosed with degenerative heart valvular lesions: 124 women with an average of 74.9 years old and 99 men with an average of 70.1 years old with the lower limit under 50 years old (one woman and one man) and upper limit over 80 years old (22 women and 11 men) revealed that 109 patients (48.