Extract
Editor: Udi Nussinovitch MD PhD
Publisher: Elsevier Publishing Group
Pub date: 28 February 2017
ISBN: 978-0-12-803267-1
Hardback: 766 pages
The first edition of ‘The Heart in Rheumatic, Autoimmune and Inflammatory Diseases’, edited by Prof Udi Nussinovitch from the Rambam Health Care Campus, affiliated with the Technion Institute of Technology, Israel, with contributions from 154 international experts is likely to become a reference book for cardiologists and rheumatologist alike caring for patients with cardiovascular manifestations of inflammatory diseases. This nicely illustrated book takes the reader from general features of (auto-) immune pathophysiology in cardiovascular diseases in the first part, to disease-specific chapters in the second part, followed by a comprehensive discussion of cardiovascular effects of anti-inflammatory drugs used in inflammatory conditions in the third part of the book.
The first part provides details on myocarditis and dilated inflammatory cardiomyopathy ranging from aetiology, diagnosis to treatment, including the role of autoantibodies in this setting. Furthermore, the pathophysiology underlying the inflammatory nature of atherosclerosis is summarized including details of innate and adaptive immunity providing the basis for current clinical trials testing the inflammatory hypothesis in patients with coronary artery disease. The first part is concluded by a chapter describing methods to assess vascular and myocardial injury including arrhythmias at a (pre-) clinical stage.
