Publications

BACKGROUND

Cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is one of the most exciting recent advancements in heart failure (HF) treatment.

METHODS

This review surveys the available literature regarding the effectiveness of CRT in treating patients with HF.

RESULTS

By targeting ventricular dyssynchrony, CRT attempts to give the failing heart a mechanical advantage that can substantially improve both symptoms and mortality.

CONCLUSION

CRT results in short-term and long-term improvement in cardiac structure and function, often leading to enhanced quality of life and, for some patients, enhanced survival.

Therapeutic breakthroughs have transformed HIV into an illness that is routinized within the clinic. It is unclear, however, how these breakthroughs shape the lives of newly infected adolescents who are beginning to receive what will be life-long care and treatment. The reframing of HIV as no longer exceptional influences the lived experience of urban adolescents, whose futures must shift to incorporate expectations that they live a full life with HIV. They must now manage the clinical demands of a chronic and infectious disease, while navigating the transition from adolescence to a 'normal' adulthood, which, for some, means completing education, findings jobs, and building careers. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in Baltimore, Maryland, I examine the tensions adolescents face as their experiences with HIV conflict with policy makers and researchers' reframing of HIV as a disease like any other.

The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans has served as a fruitful setting for cell death research for over three decades. A conserved pathway of four genes, egl-1/BH3-only, ced-9/Bcl-2, ced-4/Apaf-1, and ced-3/caspase, coordinates most developmental cell deaths in C. elegans. However, other cell death forms, programmed and pathological, have also been described in this animal. Some of these share morphological and/or molecular similarities with the canonical apoptotic pathway, while others do not. Indeed, recent studies suggest the existence of an entirely novel mode of programmed developmental cell destruction that may also be conserved beyond nematodes. Here, we review evidence for these noncanonical pathways. We propose that different cell death modalities can function as backup mechanisms for apoptosis, or as tailor-made programs that allow specific dying cells to be efficiently cleared from the animal.