What diseases are in Neurocardiology?


Clinical issues in Neurocardiology include hypoxic-ischemic brain injury, neurogenic stress cardiomyopathy, cerebral embolism, and encephalopathy, neurologic sequelae of cardiac and thoracic surgery and cardiac interventions, and cardiovascular findings in patients with primary neurological disease. Neurological disabilities include a wide range of disorders, such as epilepsy, learning disabilities, neuromuscular disorders, autism, ADD, brain tumors, and cerebral palsy, just to name a few. Heart failure, myocardial infarction, myocardial aneurysm, endocarditis/myocarditis, and noncompaction are further causes of cerebral embolism. Another cardiac cause of neurological complications is low output failure due to systolic dysfunction, arrhythmias, or valve stenosis.

  •          The speciality that deals with the brain-heart connection has become known as neurocardiology
  •     Neurocardiology refers to (patho) physiological interplays of the nervous and cardiovascular systems

Cardiovascular diseases are traditionally related to well known risk factors like dyslipidemia, smoking, diabetes and hypertension. More recently, stress, anxiety and depression have been proposed as risk factors for cardiovascular diseases including heart failure, ischemic disease, hypertension and arrhythmias. Interestingly, this association has been established largely on the basis of epidemiological data, due to insufficient knowledge on the underlying pathophysiologic mechanisms. The nervous system and cardiovascular system develop in concert and are functionally interconnected in both health and disease. This white paper focuses on the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie neural–cardiac interactions during development, during normal physiological function in the mature system, and during pathological remodelling in cardiovascular disease.

The cardiac nervous system is intimately involved in a number of cardiac pathologies. For example, as mentioned earlier, when enhancement of sensory information derived from cardiac afferent neurons occurs, as in the presence of myocardial ischemia (heart attack), unusually high levels of sensory input may impinge on central neurons to influence our consciousness. This may account for the genesis of symptoms such as a feeling of impending doom and/or the perception of pain. Central neuronal behavior alterations induced as a consequence of such increased sensory input may result in the modification of cardiac efferent neuronal function

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