Stem Cells and Myocardial Regeneration is a comprehensive bench to bedside examination of stem cell-based therapies for cardiac dysfunction. The contributors, all leading researchers in their area of expertise, explore recent advances in the laboratory and in clinical trials. This volume emphasizes the near epidemic status of chronic heart failure (CHF) in the United States and abroad, and evaluates the level of success and failure of current optimal medical therapy. Specific attention is also given to both the basic cell types and pathways involved in cardiac stem cell research and the clinical issues that surround it.
Parts I and II of Stem Cells and Myocardial Regeneration examine various cardiac stem cell types, including hematopoietic, mesenchymal, and endogenous cells and critical physiological pathways, including chemokines, stem cell differentiation, and arrhythmia mechanisms. Part III focuses on clinical issues intrinsic to delivery of stem cells to the heart at the time of myocardial infarction (MI) and in patients with CHF. Part IV contains up-to-date reviews and analyses of the findings of stem cell-based clinical trials of acute MI and CHF. The concluding section presents a summary of cardiac stem cell research and outlines potential obstacles to future study.

This open access book explores a range of new and older systems mapping methods focused on representing causal relationships in systems. In a practical manner, it describes the methods and considers the differences between them; describes how to use them yourself; describes how to choose between and combine them; considers the role of data, evidence, and stakeholder opinion; and describes how they can be useful in a range of policy and research settings. This book provides a key starting point and general-purpose resource for understanding complex adaptive systems in practical, actionable, and participatory ways. The book successfully meets the growing need in a range of social, environmental, and policy challenges for a richer more nuanced, yet actionable and participatory understanding of the world. The authors provide a clear framework to alleviate any confusion about the use of appropriate terms and methods, enhance the appreciation of the value they can bring, and clearly explain the differences between approaches and the resulting outputs of mapping processes and analysis.

This book showcases extensive research on gender under state socialism, examining the subject in terms of state policy and law; sexuality and reproduction; the academy; leisure; the private sphere; the work world; opposition activism; and memory and identity.

Day surgery is a major innovation in the delivery of medical care to a growing number of patients. It presents many new and unique challenges with which nurses must cope. Principles and Practice of Day Surgery Nursing provides comprehensive coverage of all aspects of day surgery that nurses and their support staff need to be familiar with.

Over the past 5 years there has been great excitement and controversy in the scientific, financial, and lay literature for the potential of stem cell-based strategies for the prev- tion and treatment of chronic heart failure (CHF). Not that long ago we believed we were born with a set number of cardiac myocytes and that once damaged there was no hope to replace them. The interest in the field stems from the magnitude of cardiovascular disease in the world. Our ability to treat and help patients survive acute myocardial infarction (MI) has resulted in a near epidemic of CHF. There are more than 5 million Americans who currently carry the diagnosis of CHF. With more than 1 million MIs a year in the United States, there are approx 500,000 new cases of CHF diagnosed each year. The goal of Stem Cells and Myocardial Regeneration is to present, in a coherent manner, the current state of knowledge of stem cell-based therapies for cardiac dysfunction, including current findings in both the laboratory and the clinic trials. The first section of this Stem Cells and Myocardial Regeneration focuses on the magnitude of the problem and the successes and failures of what we consider optimal medical therapy. It is on this background that stem cell-based therapy needs to build.

The noted Nez Perce fiction writer and critic W. S. Penn turns his wry and penetrating gaze on the state of modern Native life and literature and considers how modern scholarship has affected the ways Natives and others see themselves and their world. The result is a uniquely frank, witty, and unsettling critique of contemporary theory and its ability to come to terms with the real lives and literatures of Natives in North America. Key to this critique is the troubling issue of what properly constitutes a traditional "Indian" identity and an "Indian" literature within Native communities and in the academy. In confronting this issue, Penn exposes some of the sillier uses of the serious language of diversity as well as the impact of identity politics on Native professors. And yet, Penn argues, the storytelling traditions so central to Native communities remain very much alive today, hidden in the corners of the literary canon.

The thirteen contributors to "As We Are Now" invite readers to explore with them the untamed territory of race and mixblood identity in North America. A 'mixblood', according to editor W.S. Penn, recognizes that his or her identity comes not from distinct and separable strains of ancestry but from the sum of the tension and interplay of all his or her ancestral relationships. These first-person narratives cross racial, national, and disciplinary boundaries in a refreshingly experimental approach to writing culture. Their authors call on similar but varied cultural and aesthetic traditions - mostly oral - in order to address some aspect of race and identity about which they feel passionate, and all resist the essentialist point of view. Mixblood Native American, Mestizo/a, and African-American writers focus their discussion on the questions indigenous and minority people ask and the way in which they ask them, clearly merging the singular 'I' with the communal 'we'. These are new voices in the dialogue of ethnic writers, and they offer a highly original treatment of an important subject.

Did socialism liberate women? Twenty years after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe this collection of essays from European and North American scholars examines socialist policies and women's everyday lives to demonstrate that this question cannot be answered with an emphatic "no," but has multiple answers that require attending to many voices and stories. Focusing on a range of issues--such as worker identity, marital and family relations, consumer culture, leisure, sexuality, reproduction, activism, and resistance--"Gender Politics and Everyday Life "reveals that women experienced socialism in diverse, ambiguous, and in some cases empowering ways. These nuanced and multidisciplinary investigations provide new depth to the study of state policy, gender relations, and women's and men's lives, illustrating that there is no simple, coherent narrative of life under state socialism, but rather multiple, competing, and often contradictory ones.