Cardiomyocytes - Active Players in Cardiac Disease

This book summarizes ourcurrent understanding about the biology and patho-biology of cardiomyocytes anddepicts common techniques for the study of these cells. Thebook is divided into two parts; the first part provides insight into role andfunction of cardiomyocytes under normal conditions and describes embryogenesisand differentiation, in the second part the role of cardiomyocytes in aging anddisease is discussed and cellular responses under stress conditions illustrated.Cardiomyocytes representthe main mass of the heart, and cellular malfunction directly modifies heartfunction leading to subsequent heart failure. As such, cardiomyocytes arecausative involved in the main reasons of heart failure, such as post-infarctremodeling, hypertensive heart disease, idiopathic heart failure, andinteractions with other co-morbidities such as diabetes. On the other hand,cardiomyocytes are necessarily target of therapy. Therefore, a preciseunderstanding of cardiomyocytes biology is a pre-requisite for proper diseasetreatment and evidence based medicine.The book is written forcell biologists, pharmacologists and biomedical researchers specialized incardiac and vascular biology. von Schlüter, Klaus-Dieter