"Whether you are a hospice professional, relative, or volunteer, this book will be of value to you in servicing the patient or your loved one as they approach their transition."

-Raymond Moody, MD, author of "Life After Life"

"Soul Service" speaks to the medical professional, lay person, dying person and family member about treating the dying from a holistic perspective. It provides a detailed navigation to spiritual and complementary care, as well as examines the phenomenon of metaphysical experiences at death. This book offers ideas on how to honor your loved one's passing and assists with the process of how to choose the best hospice. Soul Service highlights the voices of medical professionals working from the highest level of service. It serves as a useful resource guide to the myriad organizations that are currently available to assist with the dying process.

This book provides an up-to-date review of the fundamentals of lipid metabolism and its role in cardiovascular diseases. Focusing on lipid transfer proteins in the circulation and cells, the role of important lipid transporters, the effect of recently discovered lipid binding proteins, and the link between lipid metabolism disorders and cardiovascular diseases, it covers phospholipid transfer protein, cholesteryl ester transfer protein, lipopolysaccharide binding protein, microsomal triglyceride transfer protein, ABC binding cassette members, and more. The book offers graduate students and researchers a coherent overview of lipid transfer and transport, as well as the limitations of current research in the field, and promotes further studies on cardiovascular diseases, as well as pharmaceutical research on drug discovery based on lipid transfer, transport, and binding.

The heart is invested with a complex, intertwining network of blood and lymphatic vessels which, respectively, provide the cardiac tissue with oxygen and nutrients and eliminate excess fluid from the interstitium. The coronary blood vessels have been the focus of much investigation in the past few decades. On the other hand, the literature regarding the cardiac lymphatic vessels remains sparse, despite their important role in maintaining normal heart function. With this in mind, a better understanding of the cardiac lymphatic network and its ability to regulate fluid homeostasis within the heart could give us insight into developing therapies for the alleviation of several cardiac pathological conditions.

This volume of the series Cardiac and Vascular Biology presents the most relevant aspects of vascular mechanobiology along with many more facets of this fascinating, timely and clinically highly relevant field. Mechanotransduction, mechanosensing, fluid shear stress, hameodynamics and cell fate, are just a few topics to name. All important aspects of vascular mechanobiology in health and disease are reviewed by some of the top experts in the field. This volume, together with a second title on cardiac mechanobiology featured in this series, will be of high relevance to scientists and clinical researchers in the area of vascular biology, cardiology and biomedical engineering.

This collection of papers represents an edited version of the Proceedings of the 9th European Symposium on Metabolism which was held at the University of Padua (Italy) from October 12-14, 2006. As did the Symposium itself, this work unites under a single cover topics dealing with four important metabolic alterations: diabetes, obesity, hyperlipidemia and hypertension. Of vital interest to the scientific community because of their cost in human life and medical expenditure, the latest edition of this Symposium received much attention from investigators in these fields. The 2006 edition focusses on the most recent epidemiologic findings on the role of oxidative stress and of endothelial dysfunction on the development of atherosclerosis. Other topics of particular interest are: abdominal obesity, pro-inflammatory adipokines and atherogenesis; the metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular global risk; coronary and cerebrovascuclar disease in diabetes and in the metabolic syndrome. Finally, the management, prevention and treatment of the metabolic syndrome and its cardiovascular complications are examined in the light of several recent clinical trials in these fields. This volume will certainly be of interest to all those practitioners and specialists who are looking for a broad, though specific overview on several aspects of insulin resistance as a possible pathogenetic mechanism and a guide to preventing and treating the metabolic syndrome and its cardiovascular complications in their patients.

The volume includes more than seventy articles written by well-recognized world leaders in the field of clinical electrophysiology and arrhythmology. It represents an important update on the most recent advances in the diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of cardiac arrhythmias.

This book covers the latest research development in heart valve biomechanics and bioengineering, with an emphasis on novel experimentation, computational simulation, and applications in heart valve bioengineering. The most current research accomplishments are covered in detail, including novel concepts in valvular viscoelasticity, fibril/molecular mechanisms of tissue behavior, fibril kinematics-based constitutive models, mechano-interaction of valvular interstitial and endothelial cells, biomechanical behavior of acellular valves and tissue engineered valves, novel bioreactor designs, biomechanics of transcatheter valves, and 3D heart valve printing. This is an ideal book for biomedical engineers, biomechanics, surgeons, clinicians, business managers in the biomedical industry, graduate and undergraduate students studying biomedical engineering, and medical students.

MORBID OBESITY: WILL YOU ALLOW IT TO KILL YOU?
Following the style of his previous books, Sex and the Cardiac Patient and AnsweringYour Questions About Heart Disease and Sex, informative, educational, entertaining, andbold, Dr. Eduardo Chapunoff takes us this time into the complex world of the morbidlyobese.
This work describes how and why the cardiovascular and other systems become affectedby excessive weights. His own simple, schematic illustrations will help you to understandhow morbid obesity leads to heart attacks, heart failure, strokes, sleep apnea, and manyother conditions, including sudden death.
Major treatment decisions are facilitated by Dr. Chapunoff's down-to-earth explanations.Also addressed here is the unfairness and ineffectiveness of some insurance corporations incovering the costs of weight-loss surgery. For many of those who read this book -patients aswell as health care practitioners and undergraduates- the concepts and the understandingof what morbid obesity is all about will never be the same.