Sites of interest on the World Wide Web—edited by Rick Neubig
Heart Failure
Cardiovascular disease remains the major killer in the developed world. The article by Lakatta and Sollott in this issue examines cardiac function and changes in aging. One of the major cardiovascular problems in aging is congestive heart failure. Several sites give a good general background on heart failure and its current treatment modalities. Heart Failure Online is aimed at a lay audience (http://www.heartfailure.org), as is information from the Texas Heart Institute (http://www.tmc.edu/thi/chf.html). An article from Hospital Practice on treatment of heart failure provides a useful illustration of the life history of heart failure and points out that end-stage heart failure has a prognosis that is worse than many cancers (http://www.hosppract.com/issues/2000/12/eldkatz.htmCardiogenomics (http://cardiogenomics.med.harvard.edu/) describes efforts of an NHLBI-sponsored program to define genetic factors that cause or contribute to cardiomyopathies, a major cause of heart failure. Finally, an interesting Medical Literature Guide can be found at Amedeo.com. Their pages on congestive heart failure (http://www.amedeo.com/medicine/chf.htm) provide weekly links to recent papers on that topic and they have many other topics included on their main page (http://www.amedeo.com).
Drug Development
The efforts of pharmacologists ultimately lead to the development of new drugs, but the drug development process is not something that many academic pharmacologists think about. Several sites help provide a perspective of the long time-frame, high cost, and extensive effort required to develop and release a new drug. The FDA provides a graphic of The New Drug Approval Process with clickable illustrations that explain the different steps (http://www.fda.gov/cder/handbook/develop.htm). At the FDA Center for Drug Evaluation and Research Web site (http://www.fda.gov/cder/), information is available about new drug approvals and an option to subscribe to periodic updates of information from the FDA.
Smooth Muscle and Inflammatory Mediators
The article by Gerthoffer and Singer in this issue addresses smooth muscle release of and response to cytokines, growth factors, and other inflammatory mediators. This is of obvious importance in airway smooth muscle asthma but plays a role in vascular, uterine, and gastrointestinal smooth muscle as well. There are many useful sites on asthma, including one from Children’s Medical Center at the University of Virginia (http://www.people.virginia.edu/~smb4v/tutorials/asthma/asthma1.html) that has animations and sound illustrations of normal lung function and the disease. The American Lung Association has a compilation of links to recent news and conferences on asthma (http://www.lungusa.org/asthma/).
- © American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Theraputics 2002
