New Insights into Acute Myocardial Ischemia

Dear Colleagues,

The heart consumes an extraordinary amount of energy that comes almost exclusively from oxidative phosphorylation, which is highly dependent on molecular oxygen. The heart has little energy storage, hence the heart’s heavy dependence on uninterrupted oxygenated blood flow in the coronary arteries and the potential catastrophic consequences of insufficient myocardial perfusion.

The insufficient supply of oxygen to the heart, known as ischemic heart disease (IHD), can be caused by chronic and/or acute decrease in coronary blood flow relative to the myocardial demand. Major causes of lower blood flow are intravascular processes (atherosclerosis, thrombus) that narrow or obstruct the coronary lumen. IHD is highly prevalent in our culture, and it is most commonly caused by atherosclerotic coronary artery disease (CAD). Among the established co-morbidities associated with or causative of CAD, the top three of the classical well-established cardiac risk factors are hypertension, hypercholesterolemia, and diabetes. Patients are usually treated clinically for IHD, but eventually require surgical interventions such as percutaneous intraluminal coronary intervention (PCI) and/or coronary artery bypass graft (CABG). A combination of clinical and surgical treatments are available.

The importance of the subject to be addressed in this Special Issue is obvious. Official statistics from The Annual Report on Trends in Health Statistics 2009 (www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus.htm) shows that heart diseases (in 2006) were the leading cause of death adjusting for age in all ethnicities, attributed to ischemic heart disease (IHD) followed by cerebrovascular diseases.

Despite its importance, the currently available treatments can be substantially improved to further optimize prevention or to substantially ameliorate IHD.

This Special Issue will bring a collection of articles by experts in the field addressing actual evidence-based treatments and potentially available ones still in clinical trials.

Prof. Cesario Bianchi Filho
Guest Editor

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• Ischemic heart disease
• atherosclerosis
• thrombus
• coronary artery disease