Coronary Restenosis [antikvár]

Preface Modem medicine is a discipline founded on the premise that humans can alleviate their suffering from diseases by interventions that alter the cause and course of the disease. Over the past two millennia, humans developed diverse ways to interfere with diseases by using physical, chemical, mental, and, most recently, genetic means aimed at improving the quality and duration of life. However, in the course of proactive interventions in disease processes, undesired consequences are often produced while attempting to gain benefits. This experience led ancient medical practitioners to caution, "primum non nocera," a warning to the medical profession to avoid harm prior to considering intervention. In today's medicine, new interventions are required to establish a clinically acceptable "therapeutic index"—meaning that benefits clearly must surpass any liabiUties or harmful consequences to the patient. This philosophy also underwrites the charters of modern regulatory agencies, which seek "safety and efficacy" as the basis for drug or device approval for medical use. With this in mind. Coronary Restenosis: From Genetics to Therapeutics reflects the reality of modern interventional cardiology—mitigating the consequences of an old disease, atherosclerosis, while at the same time eliciting a new pathology, restenosis. The need to relieve obstructions to