Articles related toCardiopulmonary Medicine

Eight blindfolded osteopaths evaluated the cranial movement (CM) of 6 volunteers in this study as a trained clinician applied the Q-test; results were compared to determine whether the osteopaths were able to perceive a palpable change in CM amplitude when the Q-test was applied, which the authors offer as a starting point for understanding the intracranial and extracranial mechanisms of CM.

The authors describe the case of an 84-year-old man with acute cardiopulmonary symptoms who was negative for modified Sgarbossa criteria but later had a confirmed diagnosis, illustrating the necessity of good clinical judgment alongside any diagnostic algorithm.

In an effort to assess potential influence on clinical decision making, the authors evaluated the presence of “spin” —misrepresentation or distortion of research findings that might create a false impression of validity—in the abstracts of 66 randomized controlled trials in cardiology.

Although initially asymptomatic, mitral valve prolapse/myxomatous mitral valve disease (MVP/MMVD) and bicuspid aortic valve (BAV) are currently the 2 most common congenital valvular heart diseases. In this Clinical Practice overview meant to act as a primer for osteopathic physicians, the author explores possible associations between straight back syndrome (SBS) and MVP/MMVD, which may be a key to earlier diagnosis, as well as links between weightlifting and ascending aortic enlargement and with chordae tendineae rupture, where the common theme is blood pressure elevation.

The authors retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 642 patients aged 18 years and older who were diagnosed with pneumonia and treated with azithromycin at an academic teaching hospital, to compare corrected QT (QTc) interval measurements on electrocardiogram (ECG) before and after treatment in response to a 2013 warning from the US Food and Drug Administration regarding the use of azithromycin and the risk of fatal dysrhythmias.

The authors present the case of a 44 year old woman who developed a second degree, Mobitz type II atrioventricular block after consumption of a candlenut, a highly accessible seed marketed as a natural weight loss supplement.

Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) is now more common than heart failure with reduced ejection fraction, affecting more than 50% of patients with the heart failure. In this study, the authors worked to identify risk factors for readmission in patients discharged with a diagnosis of HFpEF.

The parasympathetic mediated inflammatory reflex inhibits excessive proinflammatory cytokine production; noninvasive techniques, including occipitoatlantal decompression (OA-D) and transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS), have been demonstrated to increase parasympathetic tone. In this study, the authors randomized 27 patients to receive OA-D, taVNS (15 minutes; n=9), or no intervention on 3 consecutive days, then tested saliva samples for determination of the cytokines interleukin-1β (IL-1β), interleukin-6 (IL-6), interleukin-8 (IL-8), and tumor necrosis factor α (TNF-α) to test their hypothesis that OA-D and taVNS would increase parasympathetic nervous system activity and inhibit proinflammatory cytokine mobilization and/or production.

In this study of 15,424 trauma patients identified through the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project State Inpatient Databases for California and Florida, the authors assessed the effect of newly developed atrial fibrillation on cardiovascular events such as myocardial infarction and cerebrovascular accident during the patients’ acute index hospitalization period.

In this retrospective chart review of 39,834 patients, the authors evaluated the risk of incident ischemic stroke and mortality along the spectrum of low and elevated ankle brachial index measurement, since there is a known association between acute ischemic stroke and peripheral artery disease, which affects up to 25% of patients 55 years or older.