The World Health Organization (WHO) released the “Global report on hypertension” on September 19, 2023. This report systematically summarizes the prevalence, mortality, diagnosis and treatment of hypertension in various countries, and elucidates the current situation of hypertension management, and gives a series of suggestions on how to manage hypertension, providing new thinking and inspiration for countries to optimize hypertension management. Through the summary of relevant studies and reports, this paper further reviews the present situation, early identification and management of hypertension.
Sclerostin, as a bone-derived secreted glycoprotein, is a suppressor of Wnt signaling pathway. Recently, adverse cardiovascular events in the treatment of osteoporosis with sclerostin inhibitors have raised concerns about the association of sclerostin with atherosclerotic heart disease. Whether the role of sclerostin in atherosclerotic heart disease is harmful or beneficial is not clear. This article reviews the progress of the mechanisms of sclerostin in vascular calcification and atherosclerotic heart disease, focusing on the relationship between sclerostin and vascular calcification, the impact of its concentration changes on atherosclerotic heart disease, and the effect of sclerostin inhibitor on cardiovascular events.
Serum alkaline phosphatase (ALP) has long been used as a biomarker for the liver, kidney, and bone. Currently, increasing evidence suggests a correlation between serum ALP and cardiovascular disease (CVD). Research has shown that serum ALP affects endothelial cell function and induces changes in pyrophosphate through various mechanisms to accelerate vascular calcification and promote cardiac fibrosis. Therefore, this article reviews the potential value of serum ALP in CVD through relevant research, revealing the specific relationship between serum ALP and CVD, in order to provide new ideas for the prevention and treatment of CVD.
Cardiovascular diseases is the leading cause of threat to human life and health worldwide. Early risk assessment, timely diagnosis, and prognosis evaluation are critical to the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. Currently, the evaluation of diagnosis and prognosis of cardiovascular diseases mainly relies on imaging examinations such as coronary CT and coronary angiography, which are expensive, time-consuming, partly invasive, and require high professional competence of the operator, making it difficult to promote in the community or in areas where medical resources are scarce. The fundus microcirculation is a part of the human microcirculation and has similar embryological origins and physiopathological features to cardiovascular circulation. Several studies have revealed fundus imaging biomarkers associated with cardiovascular diseases, and developed and validated intelligent diagnosis and treatment models for cardiovascular diseases based on fundus imaging data. Fundus imaging is expected to be an important adjunct to cardiovascular disease diagnosis and treatment given its noninvasive and convenient nature. The purpose of this review is to summarize the current research status, challenges, and future prospects of the application of artificial intelligence based on multimodal fundus imaging data in cardiovascular disease diagnosis and treatment.
There are various examination methods for cardiovascular diseases. Non-invasive diagnosis and prognostic information acquisition are the current research hotspots of related imaging examinations. Positron emission tomography (PET)/magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a new advanced fusion imaging technology that combines the molecular imaging of PET with the soft tissue contrast function of MRI to achieve their complementary advantages. This article briefly introduces several major aspects of cardiac PET/MRI in the diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, including atherosclerosis, ischemic cardiomyopathy, nodular heart disease, and myocardial amyloidosis, in order to promote cardiac PET/MRI to be more widely used in precision medicine in this field.
The peak period of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is around the time of awakening in the morning, which may be related to the surge of sympathetic activity at the end of nocturnal sleep. This paper chose 140 participants as study object, 70 of which had occurred CVD events while the rest hadn’t during a two-year follow-up period. A two-layer model was proposed to investigate whether hypnopompic heart rate variability (HRV) was informative to distinguish these two types of participants. In the proposed model, the extreme gradient boosting algorithm (XGBoost) was used to construct a classifier in the first layer. By evaluating the feature importance of the classifier, those features with larger importance were fed into the second layer to construct the final classifier. Three machine learning algorithms, i.e., XGBoost, random forest and support vector machine were employed and compared in the second layer to find out which one can achieve the highest performance. The results showed that, with the analysis of hypnopompic HRV, the XGBoost+XGBoost model achieved the best performance with an accuracy of 84.3%. Compared with conventional time-domain and frequency-domain features, those features derived from nonlinear dynamic analysis were more important to the model. Especially, modified permutation entropy at scale 1 and sample entropy at scale 3 were relatively important. This study might have significance for the prevention and diagnosis of CVD, as well as for the design of CVD-risk assessment system.
Circular RNA (circRNA) is a non-coding RNA which exists widely in eukaryotic cells with a structure of covalently closed continuous loop. Its generation, characteristics and functions have received extensive attention, making it one of the hot spots in the field of non-coding RNA research. Many studies have found that circRNA plays an important role in the development of various diseases including cardiovascular disease, nervous system disease and cancer. Cardiovascular disease is a worldwide common disease with high incidence and poor prognosis. Its exact pathogenesis has not been found, which blocks the development of cardiovascular disease treatment. In this review, we summarize the loop-forming mechanisms, the functions and the progress of current researches of circRNA in cardiovascular diseases.
Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease (ASCVD) is a disease caused by the accumulation of atherosclerotic plaques that leads to arterial hardening and impairment of contractility. Proprotein convertase subtilisin/kexin type 9 (PCSK9) can increase low-density lipoprotein cholesterol levels in plasma, which accelerates the development and progression of ASCVD. This article intends to review the biological characteristics and functional mechanisms of PCSK9, elucidate its impact on the development and progression of ASCVD, provide research literature support for the diagnosis and treatment of such diseases and improving the prognosis of patients.
With the discovery of cardiac stem cell, the conception of the heart considered to be a terminally differentiated organ was changed. Cardiac stem cells possess the common characteristics of self-renew, clone formation and differentiating into cardiomyocyte, smooth muscle cell, and endothelial cell. Because of the properties of tissue specificity and lineage commitment, cardiac stem cells are considered to have great advantages over other stem cells in the treatment of cardiovascular disease. However, the low rate of engraftment still remains a problem to be solved. In recent years, people attempted to combine stem cell therapy with other ways, such as tissue engineering, gene therapy, exosome therapy, to cure cardiovascular diseases, aiming at finding better ways to treat the cardiovascular disease. This article is mainly for the reviewing of the mechanisms underlying the stem cell therapy and the combinatory use of new technology emerged these years.
Cardiovascular disease is one of the diseases with the highest morbidity and mortality in the world. Tanshinone ⅡA is one of the main active components of Salvia miltiorrhiza, which can significantly improve heart function. In this paper, the mechanisms of cardiovascular protection by tanshinone ⅡA are reviewed, including reducing myocardial apoptosis, inhibiting inflammatory reaction, improving atherosclerosis, and inhibiting myocardial fibrosis and antioxidant stress, and the related clinical research of tanshinone ⅡA is evaluated, so as to provide reference for the following research and clinical application of tanshinone ⅡA in cardiovascular system.
