Principles of Cardiovascular Neural Regulation in Health and Disease

1 General Concepts and Hypotheses in the Study of Cardiovascular Neural Regulation.- The Negative Feedback.- The Central Neural Mechanisms.- The Cardiovascular Sympathetic Afferent Fibers.- The Positive Feedback.- The Continuous Interaction of Opposing Mechanisms.- Conclusions.- 2 Pathophysiological Mechanisms and the Loss of a Finalistic Purpose.- Ischemic Heart Disease.- Arterial Hypertension.- Congestive Heart Failure.- Cardiac Pain.- Pharmacological Considerations.- 3 The Sympathovagal Balance Explored in the Frequency Domain.- The sympathovagal balance.- Neural and cardiovascular rhythms as markers of functional states.- Computer analysis of cardiovascular signal variability.- Human studies.- Animal studies.- Pharmacological blockades and neural lesions.- Modeling approaches.- The genesis of rhythms.- Solving the puzzle.- 4 Pathophysiological Alterations of Sympathovagal Balance.- Requirements for a tool.- Comparisons among tools.- Human pathophysiological studies.- Prognostic indices.- Acute myocardial infarction.- Patients after myocardial infarction.- Transient myocardial ischemia.- Patients at risk of malignant arrhythmias.- Clinical considerations.- Pure autonomic failure.- Chronic orthostatic intolerance.- 5 Variability and Nonlinear Dynamics.- Definition of nonlinear dynamics.- Experimental studies.- Frequency tracking locus.- Definition of regularity.- Definition of synchronization.- Definition of coordination.- Patterns and symbols.- Chance.- 6 The Necessary Apical Principle in Science and Medicine.- Transparency.- The ethical needs.- The structure of medicine.- The lost art of healing.- Reciprocal education.- The final goal of medicine.- The role of physicians.- The way out.- Appendix for the general reader.- References.