Why is depression bad for heart disease? And how does heart disease contribute to depression? And why is treatment for depressed people with heart disease so often inadequate? Through personal vignettes, accessible scientific explanations, and medical illustrations, Treating the Aching Heart traces the vicious cycle of depression and heart disease and points the way to better care based on cutting-edge science. The book presents a new view of depression as a broad-reaching illness with a distinct neurobiology that influences the most up-to-date model of heart disease. Treating the Aching Heart provides a window into the most studied mind-body problem, the interaction between the brain and the heart. Though many mysteries remain, in no other area is the relationship between a mental disorder and a physical disorder better understood than in the study of depression and heart disease. Anyone who has suffered from depression (about one in four U.S. adults) or some form of heart disease (also about one in four), or has a close family member with either problem, will find this book a useful guide to treatment.

New updated edition first published with Cambridge University Press. This new edition includes 29 chapters on topics as diverse as pathophysiology of atherosclerosis, vascular haemodynamics, haemostasis, thrombophilia and post-amputation pain syndromes.

In November 1986, I was invited to attend a symposium held in Barcelona on Diseases of the Pericardium. The course was directed by Dr. J. Soler-Soler, director of Cardiology at Hospital General Vall d'Hebron in Barcelona. During my brief but delightful visit to this institution, my appreciation of the depth and breadth of study into pericardial diseases, carried out by Dr. Soler and his group, grew into the conviction that these clinical investigators have accumulated a wealth of information concerning pericardial diseases, and that investigators and clinicians practicing in English speaking countries would greatly profit from ready access to the results of the clinical investiga tions into pericardial disease carried out in Barcelona. The proceedings of the Barcelona conference were published in a beauti fully executed volume in the Spanish language edited by Dr. Soler and pro duced by Ediciones Doyma. Because I believe that this work should be brought to the attention of the English speaking scientific and clinical com munities, I encouraged Dr. Soler to have the book translated into English. I knew that this task could be accomplished and that the book would be trans lated into good English without change of its content. My confidence was based upon a translation of my own book, The Pericardium, into Spanish undertaken by Dr. Permanyer, who is a contributor and co-editor of the pre sent volume.

Dr. Brownstein shows readers how they can rev up the human body's least-understood system: the healing system.

Drug overdose, driven largely by overdose related to the use of opioids, is now the leading cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. The ongoing opioid crisis lies at the intersection of two public health challenges: reducing the burden of suffering from pain and containing the rising toll of the harms that can arise from the use of opioid medications. Chronic pain and opioid use disorder both represent complex human conditions affecting millions of Americans and causing untold disability and loss of function. In the context of the growing opioid problem, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched an Opioids Action Plan in early 2016. As part of this plan, the FDA asked the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to convene a committee to update the state of the science on pain research, care, and education and to identify actions the FDA and others can take to respond to the opioid epidemic, with a particular focus on informing FDA's development of a formal method for incorporating individual and societal considerations into its risk-benefit framework for opioid approval and monitoring.

The brain is the most complex organ in our body. Indeed, it is perhaps the most complex structure we have ever encountered in nature. Both structurally and functionally, there are many peculiarities that differentiate the brain from all other organs. The brain is our connection to the world around us and by governing nervous system and higher function, any disturbance induces severe neurological and psychiatric disorders that can have a devastating effect on quality of life. Our understanding of the physiology and biochemistry of the brain has improved dramatically in the last two decades. In particular, the critical role of cations, including magnesium, has become evident, even if incompletely understood at a mechanistic level. The exact role and regulation of magnesium, in particular, remains elusive, largely because intracellular levels are so difficult to routinely quantify. Nonetheless, the importance of magnesium to normal central nervous system activity is self-evident given the complicated homeostatic mechanisms that maintain the concentration of this cation within strict limits essential for normal physiology and metabolism. There is also considerable accumulating evidence to suggest alterations to some brain functions in both normal and pathological conditions may be linked to alterations in local magnesium concentration. This book, containing chapters written by some of the foremost experts in the field of magnesium research, brings together the latest in experimental and clinical magnesium research as it relates to the central nervous system. It offers a complete and updated view of magnesiums involvement in central nervous system function and in so doing, brings together two main pillars of contemporary neuroscience research, namely providing an explanation for the molecular mechanisms involved in brain function, and emphasizing the connections between the molecular changes and behavior. It is the untiring efforts of those magnesium researchers who have dedicated their lives to unraveling the mysteries of magnesiums role in biological systems that has inspired the collation of this volume of work.