Articles related toCardiopulmonary Medicine

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.