Repeated sauna treatment improves vascular endothelial function, resulting in an improvement in cardiac function and clinical symptoms.

chocardiography is now recognized as an integral diagnostic tool that enables noninvasive quantification of cardiac chamber size, ventricular mass, and function in the clinical setting. Furthermore, technological advancement in Doppler echocardiography enables quantitative assessment of ventricular diastolic function as well as systolic function. Thus, echocardiography has become an important cardiac imaging technique in a number of clinical trials evaluating the efficacy of drug treatments or new therapeutic strategies.A guideline for quantifying cardiac chamber size and function using echocardiography, and references values for Circulation Journal Vol.72, November 2008 these echocardiographic measurements, were provided by the American Society of Echocardiography in conjunction with the European Association of Echocardiography. 1 Likewise, Doppler echocardiographic criteria for assessing left ventricular (LV) diastolic function were provided by the Canadian Consensus, 2 European 3 and American Medical Association guidelines, 4 and diastolic function parameters were reported to decline gradually with age. 5 However, most of these data are derived from American and European populations and because physical 6,7 and racial 8-10 differences can influence cardiac chamber size and function, it is important to evaluate the echocardiographic parameters in other populations. Reference values based on a large Asian population have not been previously reported, although some investigators have reported these values in a small population. 11 In addition, most studies that have investigated the relationship between age and cardiac chamber size and function have focused on a few parameters and have not assessed all of them in a large population.Accordingly, we designed and conducted a multicenter study, the Japanese Normal Values for Echocardiographic Measurements Project (JAMP) study, to determine the normal values for echocardiographic measurements and evaluate the relationship between these parameters and age in a large, healthy Japanese population. J 2008; 72: 1859 -1866 (Received February 27, 2008 revised manuscript received June 11, 2008; accepted June 26, 2008; released online September 29, 2008) Circ

It is suggested that the higher incidence and greater severity of ischemic mitral regurgitation in patients with inferior compared with anterior myocardial infarction can be related to more severe geometric changes in the mitral valve apparatus with greater displacement of posterior papillary muscle caused by localized inferior basal left ventricular remodeling, which results in therapeutic implications for potential benefit of procedures, such as infarct plication and leaflet or chordal elongation, to reduce leaflet tethering.