Constrictive Pericarditis and Cardiac Tamponade (eBook)

Dr. Jonathan N. Bella is Chief of Cardiology at the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. He received his medical degree from the University of the East and his Internal Medicine Residency from Montefiore Medical Center-Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City. He completed his Cardiology Fellowship Training at The New York Presbyterian-Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York City. He is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association and the American Society of Echocardiography. Professor Bella's research interests include cardiovascular disease epidemiology, hypertensive heart disease, cardiovascular imaging and genetic epidemiology of cardiovascular diseases. Professor Bella is well published in the literature and is involved in several major studies, including the Hypertension Genetic Epidemiology Network (HyperGEN) Study, the Losartan Intervention For Endpoint Reduction in Hypertension (LIFE) Study, the Population Architecture Using Genomics and Epidemiology (PAGE) Study and the Strong Heart Study, a population-based study of the 13 American Indian tribes in the United States. He serves as Associate Editor of Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases and Editorial Board Member in several journals. The major impetus for the design and execution of Constrictive Pericarditis and Cardiac Tamponade: Epidemiology, Causes and Management has been the extraordinary wave of breakthrough discoveries in the diagnosis and management of pericardial diseases over the past few decades. Modern advancements in cardiac imaging, including tissue Doppler imaging, cardiovascular computed tomography (CT), and cardiac magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), have allowed for increased accuracy and earlier detection of both constrictive pericarditis and cardiac tamponade. This book is designed to summarize and critically analyze the current understanding of these disease states for a broad audience of internists and cardiologists. There are an abundance of books, review articles, and internet sources that do an excellent job of describing the physiology/pathophysiology of the pericardium and the many pericardial diseases. Constrictive Pericarditis and Cardiac Tamponade: Epidemiology, Causes and Management differs from those other sources in that a conscious effort was made to present the information in this textbook in a "e;how to"e; format, with the chapters and text structured in such a way as to provide the reader with a clear step-by-step narrative. Clinical signs and symptoms are reviewed in detail first, followed sequentially by echocardiographic, CT, MRI, and invasive hemodynamic findings. High-quality images, figures, and illustrations were also specifically chosen and arranged to accompany the text in order to provide easy visual reference for the reading physician, whenever the diagnosis of pericardial disease is relevant to their patient's care. As such, this book seeks to provide reassurance to clinically-oriented internists and cardiologists when caring for patients with suspected pericardial disease.