“…Mitochondrial dysfunction is increasingly recognized as an important aspect of the pathophysiology of several neurological and cardiovascular disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (Baloyannis et al, 2004), Parkinson's disease (Fiskum et al, 2003), heart failure (Marin-Garcia et al, 2001), myocardial and cerebral ischemia (Sims and Anderson, 2002;Sadek et al, 2003), and, potentially, epilepsy (Patel, 2002). Alteration of electrical excitability is central to many of these diseases, leading to either neuronal excitotoxicity or cardiac arrhythmia (Doble, 1999;Janse, 2004).…”