La semaine des hôpitaux : organe fondé par l'Association d'enseignement médical des hôpitaux de Paris 

About: La semaine des hôpitaux : organe fondé par l'Association d'enseignement médical des hôpitaux de Paris is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Cancer & MEDLINE. Over the lifetime, 2092 publications have been published receiving 5894 citations.

Rheumatic heart disease

Abstract: RESEARCH into rheumatic heart disease has progressively yielded a series of important facts and a good deal that is still speculative. It has been shown that many tissues, especially vascular structures, throughout the body are injured in attacks of rheumatic fever, and that the most serious damage occurs in the heart, to the myocardium and to its valves. It is generally considered now to have been conclusively shown that infections of body tissues with type A hsemolytie streptococci play a causative and key role in the pathogenesis of this disease, but only a small proportion of human beings infected with type A streptococci develop rheumatic heart disease. It is also widely held that the rheumatic lesions in the myocardium, including the so-called Aschoff bodies, are non-myogenic lesions of the connective tissue and do not involve the heart muscle fibres. However, G. E. Murphy,' in a long and very detailed paper, subsequently reprinted as a monograph,\" has set out to demonstrate that this last-mentioned interpretation is not correct, and that it is the heart muscle and plain muscle fibres which are affected. He was able to produce typical cardiac changes in a small proportion of rabbits with multiple focal infections due to type A heemolytie streptococci, and these gave material for study at various stages of the cardiac changes. In addition, he made a detailed microscopic study of the hearts of over 100 patients who had died with active rheumatic heart disease and of the left atrial appendages removed from 150 other patients at the time of mitral commissurotomy. The histopathological findings are presented in considerable detail with 162 beautiful reproductions of coloured sections of cardiac tissue illustrating the points made in the text. A study of the text and the slides makes clear the author's claims that the changes in the myocardium, both in man and in rabbits, are really in the muscle cells and not in the fibrous tissue.

Free radicals in medicine and biology

Abstract: Free radicals have long been well known by physicists but have only interested biologists since 1969 when Fridovich showed that O2 was produced during an enzymatic oxidation. O2 and related radicals are highly toxic. This implies that, in all aerobic cells, mechanisms exist which inactivate free radicals as soon as they are produced by oxidative metabolism. O2 radicals are eliminated by a family of enzymes called superoxide dismutases (SOD). These SOD are present in the cytosol (CuSOD) and in the mitochondria (MnSOD). Overproduction of free radicals, originating in molecular oxygen, may explain the lesions which result from inflammation, ischemia, and radiation exposure. Free radicals can cause damage to membranes, macromolecules, and DNA. Whether free radical production is mainly intracellular or extracellular may determine to a degree which kind of damage will occur.