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Volume 10 Issue 5, May 2004

Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States, and this month's installment of our 10th anniversary focus series homes in on cardiovascular disease. On page 467, Eric Olson casts the past decade's progress in cardiovascular research in historical perspective. Special news features, a historical News and Views and historical Research Notes round out our special content. Cover image depicts the human heart, courtesy of Getty images.

Volume 10 Issue 5

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Editorial

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News

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Correspondence

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Book Review

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News & Views

  • Increasing sodium absorption by overexpressing the epithelial sodium channel in mouse airways results in mucus accumulation and inflammation, changes that occur in the lungs of individuals with cystic fibrosis. The development of lung disease in these mice should provide insights into a disease that has long been lacking an animal model (pages 487–493).

    • Raymond A Frizzell
    • Joseph M Pilewski
    News & Views

  • Fat cells secrete the hormone adiponectin, which regulates glucose metabolism through actions on peripheral tissues. It is now apparent that adiponectin also acts on the brain to reduce body weight and improve glucose metabolism (pages 524–529).

    • Randy J Seeley
    • David A D'Alessio
    • Stephen C Woods
    News & Views

  • A mosquito protein similar to complement, a mammalian immune-fighting substance, enables the insect to fend off the malaria parasite.

    • Allan Saul
    News & Views

  • Defects in a Golgi protein, COG7, underlie a disorder that kills children in the first year of life. The disorder is the first to be defined in a class that will likely expand with future studies (pages 518–523).

    • Thorsten Marquardt
    News & Views

  • Signaling through costimulatory receptors classically occurs in cells of the immune system. Now the distinction between immune cells and osteoclasts, bone resorbing cells, begins to blur. Osteoclasts need costimulatory signals too.

    • Roland Baron
    News & Views

  • Hypothermia resulting from impaired glucose metabolism may be one of the factors that contribute to hyperphosphorylation of the protein tau and subsequent neuronal dysfunction.

    • Jesús Avila
    • Javier Díaz-Nido
    News & Views
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Historical News and Views

  • In 1995, Mark Keating and colleagues identified two genes responsible for congenital long QT syndrome, a cause of sudden cardiac death. Perturbations in the ion channels that orchestrate the beating heart were central to the disorder. This revelation provided a molecular model for the study of ventricular arrhythmias and enabled further dissection of the genetic defects underlying subtleties in the cardiac phenotype. Soon, these discoveries will be further translated to clinical medicine, with the expected release of one of the first comprehensive clinical genetic tests in cardiology.

    • Michael J Ackerman
    Historical News and Views
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Historical Research Notes

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Historical Perspective

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Perspective

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Brief Communication

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Article

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Letter

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Technical Report

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On the Market

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