Pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH) is a rare disease of the pulmonary vasculature characterized by endothelial cell apoptosis, smooth muscle proliferation and obliteration of pulmonary arterioles. This in turn results in right ventricular (RV) failure, …

BACKGROUND/AIMS: Myocarditis is an important inflammatory disease of the heart which causes life-threatening conditions. 1, 25(OH)2 D3 has effects on multiple systems and diseases. The present study was aimed to investigate the effect of 1, 25(OH)2 D3 on …

abstract Cardiac tropnoin I (cTnI) plays a critical role in the regulation of diastolic function, and its low expression may result in cardiac diastolic dysfunction, which is the most common form of cardiovascular disorders in older adults. In this study, …

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Endoplasmic reticulum (ER) stress is increasingly recognized as an important causal factor of many diseases. Targeting ER stress has now emerged as a new therapeutic strategy for treating cardiovascular diseases. Here we …

Familial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a disease of the sarcomere and may lead to hypertrophic, dilated, restrictive, and/or arrhythmogenic cardiomyopathy, 38 congestive heart failure, or sudden cardiac death. We hypothesized that hearts from 39 …

Angiogenesis is a critical feature of plaque development in atherosclerosis and might play a key role in both the initiation and later rupture of plaques. The precursory molecular or cellular pro-angiogenic events that initiate plaque growth and that …

Our knowledge of organ ontogeny is largely based on loss-of-function (knockout) or gain-of-function (transgenesis) approaches. However, developmental modulators such as proteins, mRNAs, microRNAs(miRNAs), small interfering RNAs, and other small molecules …

Neurons in layer IV of the rodent whisker somatosensory cortex are tangentially organized in periodic clusters called barrels, each of which is innervated by thalamocortical axons transmitting sensory information from a single principal whisker, together …

The fetal intestinal mucosa is characterized by elevated Toll-like re- ceptor 4 (TLR4) expression, which can lead to the development of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC)—a devastating inflammatory dis- ease of the premature intestine—upon exposure to …

The formation and perfusion of developing renal blood vessels (apart from glomeruli) are greatly understudied. As vasculature develops via angiogenesis (which is the branching off of major vessels) and vasculogenesis ( in vi de no v o vessel formation), …