Gene/Protein Disease Symptom Drug Enzyme Compound
Pivot Concepts:   Target Concepts:
Query: UMLS:C0018799 (heart disease)
 34,133 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

The Baker Heart Research Institute (BHRI), one of Australia's finest research facilities, played host to the 27th annual Australasian Section of the International Society for Heart Research meeting, New Science at the Heart of New Therapies, August 7-9, 2003. This report discusses the keynote lectures (Prophylactic Effects of Statins on Ischaemic Heart Disease, Diet and Wine as Cardioprotection, Artificial Heart Technology and Therapeutics) and the symposia presented at the meeting. The topics for the symposia were vascular regulatory mechanisms, adaptation and regulation of myocardial metabolism, signaling and mechanisms in hypertrophy/fibrosis, gender and cardiovascular disease and the dilemma of diabetes. The high standard of the presented material clearly demonstrates the strength that Australia in general and the BHRI in particular have in cardiovascular research.
 ...
PMID:Cardiovascular research in Australia. 1466 52

Wine polyphenols are considered to have beneficial effects on CHD and atherosclerosis. The consumption of red wine is high in Italy and France, approximately four times greater than that in the UK. This disparity in red wine consumption is thought to be the reason for the 'French paradox', where France was shown to have a coronary mortality rate close to that of China or Japan despite saturated fat intakes and cholesterol levels similar to the UK and USA. In the present review, we discuss the effects of wine and some of its polyphenol constituents on early pathological indicators of CHD such as plasma lipids, the endothelium and vasculature, platelets and serum antioxidant activity. The review also examines whether the polyphenols or the alcohol in wine is responsible for the effects on markers of heart disease. The present review concludes that red wine polyphenols have little effect on plasma lipid concentrations but wine consumption appears to reduce the susceptibility of LDL to oxidation and increase serum antioxidant capacity. However, these effects do depend on the amount of wine and period of supplementation. Authors who have examined specific polyphenols suggest that some phenolics appear to have endothelium-dependent vaso-relaxing abilities and some a positive effect on NO concentrations. Red wine phenolics also have an inhibitory effect on platelet aggregation, and individual phenolics also have a similar effect in vitro, although it should be noted that there are often discrepancies as large as ten-fold between the concentrations of polyphenolics tested in vitro and their measured levels in vivo. Evidence suggests that alcohol has a positive synergistic effect with wine polyphenols on some atherosclerotic risk factors. Thus evidence that wine drinking is beneficial for cardiac health continues to accumulate but more research is required to understand fully and exactly the functions of red wine polyphenols.
 ...
PMID:Wine polyphenols and promotion of cardiac health. 1907 20