cardiology explain contents

Foreword
Alan Yeung.

Preface
Euan A. Ashley and Josef Niebauer.

Abbreviations

1. Cardiac arrest

2. Cardiovascular examination

General inspection

Taking the pulse

Blood pressure

Jugular venous pressure

Palpation

Auscultation

Summary

3. Conquering the ECG

Electrocardiography

Depolarization of the heart

The ECG trace

ECG abnormalities

Further reading

4. Understanding the echocardiogram

Background

Imaging modes

Transesophageal echocardiography

Contrast echocardiography

Applications

Further reading

5. Coronary artery disease

Background

Assessment

Generalist management

Refer with confidence

Specialist management

Refer with confidence

Cardiac rehabilitation

Further reading

6. Hypertension

Background

Definition

Causes

Assessment

Management

Generalist management

Refer with confidence

Further reading

7. Heart failure

Background

Pathophysiology

Clinical history and examination

Investigations

Management: acute heart failure

Management: cardiogenic shock

Management: chronic heart failure

Nonpharmacotherapies

Palliative care

Further reading

8. Arrhythmia

Introduction

Bradycardia

Bundle branch block

Tachyarrhythmia

Pacemakers

Implantable cardioverter defibrillators

Electrophysiological studies

Drugs in arrhythmia

Further reading

9. Valve disease

The asymptomatic murmur

Aortic stenosis

Aortic regurgitation

Mitral stenosis

Mitral regurgitation

Mitral valve prolapse

Tricuspid valve disease

Pulmonary valve disease

Valve disease in pregnancy

Further reading

10. Infective endocarditis

Background

Diagnosis

Intravenous drug abuse

Etiology

Pathogenesis

Refer with confidence

Specialist management

Prognosis

Prophylaxis

Further reading

11. Cardiomyopathy

Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy

Dilated cardiomyopathy

Restrictive cardiomyopathy

Further reading

12. Aneurysm and dissection of the aorta

Aortic aneurysm

Aortic dissection

Further reading

13. Pericardial disease

Pericarditis

Pericardial effusion and tamponade

Constrictive pericarditis

14. Adult congenital heart disease

Recognizing adult congenital heart disease

Ventricular septal defect

Recognizing VSD

Atrial septal defect

Pulmonary valve stenosis

Patent ductus arteriosus

Fallot's tetralogy

Transposition of the great arteries

Ebstein's anomaly

Further reading

Cardiology explained

Authors: Euan Ashley: Stanford University, USA
Josef Niebauer: Herssentrum der Universität Leipzig, Germany

Description:
This book is ideal for the hospital doctor, generalist, senior medical student, and anyone who may need a cardiology opinion. Or, for that matter, anyone who simply wants some of Cardiology – explained!

One of the most time-consuming tasks in clinical medicine is seeking the opinions of specialist colleagues. There is a pressure not only to make referrals appropriate, but also to summarize the case in the language of the specialist. Cardiology explained is an essential tool in this task. It explains basic physiologic and pathophysiologic mechanisms of cardiovascular disease in a straightforward and diagrammatic manner, gives guidelines as to when referral is appropriate, and, uniquely, explains what the specialist is likely to do. Specific sections focus on conquering the ECG, and explaining the basic science so often discussed without introduction in seminars and lectures.

Readership:
Physicians, clinicians, trainee cardiolgists.

Content:
Cardiac arrest; Cardiovascular examination; Conquering the ECG; Understanding the echocardiogram; Coronary artery disease; Hypertension; Heart failure; Arrhythmia; Valve disease; Infective endocarditis; Cardiomyopathy; Aneurysm and dissection of the aorta; Pericardial disease; Adult congenital heart disease.

Old Media Monday: This week's newsmaking books

The latest news, reviews, and appearances, back from a week (and a day) off. (By the way, if you're as obsessed/contemptuous of the inner workings of that old dinosaur, The New York Times Book Review, as much of the irrepressibly new blogosphere seems to be, take a look at Gawker's lengthy note-taking from a recent appearance of Review editor Barry Gewen at Harvard U.)

The New York Times:

Sunday's Book Review cover: Remainder by Tom McCarthy: "What fun it is when a crafty writer plays cat and mouse with your mind, when you can never anticipate his next move and when, in any case, he knows all the exits to the maze and has already blocked them.... You find yourself exhilarated by your confusion, wanting to be caught--if only to learn, as the fangs sink in, what the chase was actually for."
Last Sunday's cover: Dancing to "Almendra" by Mayra Montero (three cheers for the Times, by the way, for putting relatively unknown novels on its cover two straight weeks): "Her writing is swift and agile; it dances like a tough kid in a good suit--well pressed but never boring, and never calling attention to the strength that lies behind it."
Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman: "What André Aciman considers, elegantly and with no small amount of unbridled skin-to-skin contact, is that maybe the heat of eros isn't only in the friction of memory and anticipation. Maybe it's also in the getting."
Leap!: What Will We Do with the Rest of Our Lives? by Sara Davidson: "When Ms. Davidson wrote "Loose Change" in 1977, she took on the voice-of-a-generation mantle. Years passed. Her generation didn't do anything interesting. But now it's in a pickle, and it needs a voice again."

The Daily Show:

Tue., Feb. 27: Man in the Middle by John Amaechi
Thu., Mar. 1: A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting by Sam Sheridan

Oprah®:

Tue., Feb. 27: In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing by Lee and Bob Woodruff

Fresh Air:

Fri., Feb. 23: The Dogs Who Found Me by Ken Foster
Thu., Feb. 22: In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar, Jeb: America's Next Bush by S.V.Date, and When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It by Ben Yagoda
Wed., Feb. 21: A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
Tue., Feb. 20: Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life by Allen Shawn

All Things Considered:

Fri., Feb. 23: The Art of Aging: A Doctor's Prescription for Well-Being by Sherwin Nuland and Fledgling by Octavia Butler
Wed., Feb. 21: Four Hundred Million Customers: The Experiences--Some Happy, Some Sad of an American in China and What They Taught Him by Carl Crow

The New Yorker:

Mar. 5 issue: No book reviews (outside Briefly Noted), but there's a story by Steven Millhauser (a personal favorite), that begins, "You are angry, Elena. You are furious."

--Tom, Amazon Bookstore

Award Update: PEN/Faulkner, Bollingen, Bronte

We're late in catching up with the PEN/Faulkner award announcement from Monday. It always sneaks up out of nowhere, in part because they don't announce the nominees ahead of time, thereby disappointing office-pool fans across America, and in part, at least this year, because the announcement came the day after the Oscars. This year, for the third time, the award went to Philip Roth, for Everyman, which got solid reviews but until now had been ignored by award juries. He told the Washington Post he was pleased because "there just seems to be a consistency to the quality of the winners" of the PEN/Faulkner. One consistency is their love of Philip Roth: this is his third win in the last 14 years

The other nominees were all short story collections:

All Aunt Hagar's Children by Edward P. Jones
The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel
The Dead Fish Museum by Charles D'Ambrosio
Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg

More award news: Yale University's Bollingen Prize, given every two years, usually for lifetime achievement, and perhaps the most prestigious American poetry award, was given to Frank Bidart, who teaches at Wellesley and whose latest collection is Star Dust. (He's also the editor of Robert Lowell's Collected Poems.) The Bollingen Prize winners, as listed on their pretty but confusing and not up-to-date site, are a roll call of American 20th-century poetry: Frost, Moore,Pound, Cummings, Auden, Stevens, Rich, Ashbery... Jeez, Mr. Bidart: that's a helluva club you've just joined.

And starting a brand new club, the finalists for the inaugural Brontë Prize were announced on Friday. Named after Charlotte B., the prize models itself after the Hugos and the Edgars in honoring one of the most popular literary genres, defined as "romantic fiction." The winner, "One title chosen the best from more than 400 love stories published in North America in the last year," will be named on March 15 from these nominees (and given a $12,500 prize):

Angels Fall by Nora Roberts
Bee, Balms & Burgundy by Nelson Pahl (not available on Amazon?!? Here's his site.)
Finding Noel by Richard Paul Evans
Tear Down the Mountain by Roger Alan Skipper
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

--Tom, Amazon Bookstore

Arthur Schlesinger, 1917-2007

Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who lived history and wrote it at the center of American political life for over six decades, died yesterday of a heart attack in Manhattan. (He started as a Roosevelt New Dealer and lived long enough to blog.) One of the big nonfiction books we've already been hearing about for the fall is his two-volume collected Journals: with his years of access to the powerful (and his reputation as a prodigious note-taker and a great gossip), they were sure to be a fascinating and detailed look into the later American century, and now they will stand as a personal testament to his very public life.

With his bow tie and quick smile, and with the frequent criticism that he was a mere Kennedy courtier (he worked as a special assistant in the JFK White House and wrote its first major history, A Thousand Days), it's easy to forget how many substantial and influential books he wrote (and how many familiar phrases their titles contributed to our political lexicon). (Nevertheless, the AP obituary quotes him about his one regret in life: "I feel a great frustration. I should have written more books.") Some highlights:

At age 21, his first book, Orestes A. Brownson: A Pilgrim's Progress (1939), was called "masterful" in the Times by Henry Steele Commager.
His next book, The Age of Jackson, published when he was 27, merely won the Pulitzer Prize and redefined the era for a new generation of historians.
In the late '50s, his bestselling three-volume history, The Age of Roosevelt (The Crisis of the Old Order, The Coming of the New Deal, The Politics of Upheaval) did the same for the New Deal era.
In between, he found time to help found the liberal anti-Communist group, Americans for Democratic Action, and write his still-influential (e.g. here) manifesto, The Vital Center.
In 1961, Kennedy brought him on as a liaison to his party's liberal wing, and after the assassination he turned his inside observations of the administration into A Thousand Days, which won not only the Pulitzer but also the National Book Award.
In 1973, he argued for Nixon's impeachment and wrote The Imperial Presidency, a critique of growing presidential power that has become relevant once again.
Robert Kennedy and His Times (1978), about his friend and ally, won his second National Book Award.
In 1991, he angered many of his liberal allies with The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society.

What's most remarkable to me (aside from his dumbfounding productivity) is that every single one of the books above (except, understandably, the first) is still in print. Take it from me: that is an amazing record of longevity for nonfiction books.

The New York Times has a lengthy obituary and a long and very helpful list of links to their reviews of his books and articles about him. On the Post site, Ben Bradlee took online questions today about his old friend. The New York Review of Books links to his articles there, including a 2004 letter to the editor called "Disgrace at Guantanamo," in which he writes, "Recovering from our periodic attacks of panic, we have always hated ourselves in the morning." And here is an LA Times editorial he wrote, on the eve of the Iraq invasion, asking, "How have we gotten into this tragic fix without searching debate?" --Tom, Amazon Bookstore

When You Were Young: Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2

List-lovers that we are, issue 97 of Granta, featuring their second installment of Best Young American Novelists, is right up our reading alley. As pointed out in editor Ian Jack's introduction, in 1983, when they presented their first list of Young British Novelists, the cut-off age was 40. And that continued for the British lists for '93 and '03 as well as the first American list in '96 (which included Sherman Alexie, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Jonathan Franzen). But, ever in tune with the youthful zeitgeist, the maximum age for the '07 round-up was lowered to 35 (as if I didn't already feel old--in my mind I'll always be 29, but now I guess I'm not even considered "young"). The introduction also explains the new judging process and makes for fascinating reading (why no Dave Eggers?).

Daniel Alarcon
Kevin Brockmeier
Judy Budnitz
Christopher Coake
Anthony Doerr
Jonathan Safran Foer
Nell Freudenberger
Olga Grushin
Dara Horn
Gabe Hudson
Uzodinma Iweala
Nicole Krauss
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
Yiyun Li
Maile Meloy
ZZ Packer
Jess Row
Karen Russell
Akhil Sharma
Gary Shteyngart
John Wray

There are more than a few unfamiliar names (to me) who I'm eager to check out. Husband-and-wife winners JSF and Nicole Krauss seem like natural selections and personally I was thrilled to see Gary Shteyngart, ZZ Packer, Karen Russell, Dara Horn, Gabe Hudson, and Amazon in-house favorite Maile Meloy make the list. What do you think about this list? Any of your favorites make/miss the cut?

--Brad, Amazon Bookstore

Canada Reads (and So Do Their Rock Stars)

For the last ten years, I've been comforted by the fact that when it was time for Granta to do their second survey of the Best Young American Novelists, I'd still (barely) make it under their 40-year-old cutoff line, and here they go and pull a switcheroo and lower the over-the-hill age to 35. What is this: Logan's Friggin' Run? Of course I didn't exactly help out on my end by writing an actual novel in the meantime, but still. Fair's fair, and I thought I still had a few months left.
So what's an American to do when things haven't gone his way? Move to Canada, where they have a thriving (if terminally underfunded) literary culture and where an American ex-pat like Carol Shields or William Gibson can hope to become a Canadian icon in time. Exhibit A (of many): the annual Canada Reads show on CBC Radio, which is pretty much the only successful translation of reality show gimmicks to the literary world. Every winter for the past five years, the CBC has convened five celebrity panelists, who each advocates for a book of their choice against the others for a week, during which four of the books are voted off the island until one remains, which is supposed to be "the book that Canada reads" that year. And it actually sort of works: the winner (even if it's an experimental Quebec separatist novel from the '70s, like 2003's winner, Hubert Aquin's Next Episode, or a completely forgotten 1928 classic from Newfoundland, like 2005's champ, Frank Parker Day's Rockbound) is a guaranteed national bestseller for months afterward. (All links here are to Amazon.com, if an edition is available, but if not to Amazon.ca.)
This year, as with every good reality show, there was a twist: an All-Star edition, with the celebs--a novelist, a journalist, and three musicians--whose choices won the first five competitions returning to battle again with a new group of books. And of all the many things that an American reader would be surprised and heartened to note about Canadian culture if they tuned in, this is perhaps the most impressive: their rock stars can read. The three smart musicians, Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, Jim Cuddy of Blue Rodeo, and John K. Samson of the Weakerthans, have each won this competition once, and Samson won it again this year for his choice: Heather O'Neill's debut novel of Montreal street life, Lullabies for Little Criminals, which HarperCollins published to strong reviews here in the US last fall. (Meanwhile, O'Neill, like fellow Canadians David Rakoff, Jonathan Goldstein, and Paul Tough, is a regular contributor to NPR's This American Life. Shouldn't they start calling it This North American Life?)
This year's competition just ended today, but you can listen to all five days of discussion and read host Bill Richardson's daily blog (in which he complains, justifiably, about the word "blog"--I'm just glad he's never heard of "plog") on the show's site. Here are this year's failed finalists, in the order they were eliminated:

* Children of My Heart by Gabrielle Roy (a French-language classic set in Manitoba. Yes!)
* Natasha: And Other Stories by David Bezmozgis (many first appeared in The New Yorker and Harper's)
* The Song of Kahunsha by Anosh Irani (a young Vancouver writer's second novel, out this month in the US)
* Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor (another Vancouver writer, and one of my favorite novels from my years as our Canadian editor)

--Tom, Amazon Bookstore

Amazon.com Bookstore's Amazon Blog

TGIF: What are you reading this weekend?

It's Friday night and we can't wait to dig into a big pile of books. Here is what a few of us will be reading this weekend:

Daphne:
First I have to talk about the books I devoured last weekend--The Spellman Files and The Shotgun Rule. Very different, but so much fun. The Spellman Files is a hilarious (I'm talking spit-take funny) light mystery about a private investigator named Izzy Spellman who is trying to get out the family business, but they won't let her go. The Shotgun Rule is a stellar stand-alone from Charlie Huston. Intense and fast-paced and brutal. Four teenagers get mixed up in some bad business and have to fight their way out. A must-read for any Huston fan, and not a bad place to start if you want to give Huston a shot.

This weekend I'm going to try Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (due on June 5). I'm not sure what to expect because the book description is very brief: "It's July 1962. Edward and Florence, young innocents married that morning, arrive at a hotel on the Dorset Coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their private fears of the wedding night to come..." Hmmm. Not giving me much to go on, but I shall put my trust in McEwan.

Anne:
While my friends and neighbors here at Amazon are digging into some juicy new releases this weekend, I'll be curling up with Henry IV, Part I. Sounds kind of like a snoozefest, you say? Well, the jury's still out. In my college lit classes I managed to avoid the Shakespeare histories almost entirely (except for the wickedly wicked Richard III) and I figured that I should kick off a return to the classics with what I sense is the most well-known and -loved of the histories. So far, I'm over the iambic pentameter hurdle and really enjoying the banter between young Hal and his not-so-trusty sidekick. I enlisted my best friend to read along with me, and on Sunday we'll convene to discuss--with ale and cheese to help us along, in true Falstaffian style. The Bard doesn't stop here, though. I'm planning to read (or re-read) at least one Shakespeare play every month, until I work my way through the whole canon. Any recommendations for what to tackle next? With National Poetry Month on the horizon, I may have to break from the plays in favor of this.

Brooke:
I made no plans this weekend, and it's all Daphne's fault. I bought three books from her Mystery Delivers this month (Lisa Unger's Sliver of Truth, Chris Bohjalian's The Double Bind, and Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box), and I hope to be a book glutton and read all three this weekend. If anyone is interested in getting monthly book recommendations, you can sign up for Delivers here.

What are you reading this weekend?
--Amazon Bookstore


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