Pulmonary arterial hypertension is one of the most common and serious complications in congenital heart disease.Identification of whether the pulmonary arterial hypertension is dynamic or resistance remains as the great importance for deciding to transfer for surgery,intervention or conservative therapy and directly concerning with the prognosis and choice of treatment.This review mainly deals with the problems such as grading,staging,pathophysiology and the correlative mechanism with clinical assessment of pulmonary arterial hypertension in congenital heart disease and furthermore providing comprehensive informations for clinical diagnosis and treatment.

Along with the advances in interventional therapy, compression methods for arterial closure require prolonged compression or long arterial sheath dwelling period, which in turn would increase the procedural time, complication rates, and patients' discomfort. Under this circumstance, a variety of percutaneous arterial closure devices was invented offering rapid and reliable hemostasis but there are still some controversies concerning, whether it can reduce the incidence of postoperative complications or not. This paper reviewed and comprehended many researches and literatures to assess the efficacy and complication rates of device-mediated closure versus the gold standard of manual compression. (J Intervent Radiol, 2006, 15: 564-567)

Objective To investigate the image quality and diagnostic accuracy using 64-slice spiral computed tomography (64-CTA) scanner in patients with suspected coronary artery disease. Methods Sixty eight patients with chest pain or post PTCA underwent CT coronary angiography (CTA) and selected coronary angiography (SCA). The SCA results were served as "gold standard" to evaluate the diagnostic accuracy of CTA, while the sensitivity, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) were calculated, respectively. Results 64-slice spiral CT could clearly demonstrate the coronary arterial trunk and branchs with stenosis, calcifications abnormal orifise origination and bridge vascular disease; especially with high accuracy in revealing calcification and even with quantification. The sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV of the degree of stenosis more than 75% for coronary artery segments evaluated by CTA were significantly higher than those of the degree of stenosis less than 50% for coronary artery segments(P

Objective To investigate the effect of antisense telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) on 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) induced proliferation and cell cycle of pulmonary artery smooth muscle cells (PASMCs). Methods PASMCs were cultured and divided into four groups: control group (cultured in RPMI-1640 culture medium), 5-HT group (cultured in culture medium containing 5-HT), antisense oligonucleotide (ASODN) group (cultured in culture medium containing 5-HT and ASODN TERT), and sense oligonucleotide (SODN) group (cultured in culture medium containing 5-HT and SODN TERT). The apoptosis of PASMC was observed by fluorescence microscopy with Hoechst staining. Apoptosis and cell cycle was analyzed with flow cytometry. Expression of proliferated cell nuclear antigen (PCNA) was determined by immunohistochemistry staining. Results Hoechst staining showed that apoptosis in 5-HT group (161?33) was significantly higher than that in control group (63?16, P

Objective To explore the role of hypoxia-inducible factor-1? (HIF-1?) in the expression of telomerase reverse transcriptase (TERT) in the pulmonary arterial smooth muscle cells (PASMCs) under anoxia.Methods HIF-1? and TERT mRNA in the PASMCs were examined by RT-PCR with the presence of HIF-1? inducers (CoCl_2,DFX),inhibitor (FAS,CBZ-LLL) and oligodeoxynucleotides,or under anoxia.HIF-1? protein in the PASMCs was determined by Western blotting.Results Expressions of HIF-1? and TERT mRNA significantly up-regulated under anoxia (0.59?0.07,0.60?0.06) compared with that in control group ( 0.11? 0.02,0.1?0.01,P0.05).Antisense oligodeoxynucleotides invalidated CoCl_2-induced increase in TERT mRNA levels (0.45?0.04) compared with CoCl_2 group (0.95?0.08,P