Reducing premature mortality from cardiovascular and lung diseases with diagnostic markers and innovative therapeutic strategies
Heart diseases including the ischemic heart disease are the biggest killer worldwide, approximately representing 16% of the world’s total deaths. In addition, with 6% of total deaths, chronic pulmonary diseases are in the top 3 of leading causes of death.
In this collection, Jiao et al and Liu et al report the possible influence of genetic factors in lung diseases as exemplified by the identification of rare variants in some familial and congenital forms of lung diseases. Predicting the pathogenicity of genes mutations by in silico approaches would be soon possible as exemplified by the article from Ahmed et al. The search for blood and/or tissue biomarkers would enable to reach the objective of predicting the severity of diseases. In this objective, Ming et al, Zhang et al and Ren et al show that severity of anemia, miRNAs and epigenetic markers are great candidates. Together with biomarkers, increasing the therapeutic arsenal and optimizing the efficiency of current drugs are keys for implementing a personalized medicine of heart and lung diseases, which will reduce or stop mortality. Supporting this expectation, here, we highlight 7 articles including Fu et al, Zheng et al, Sun et al, Song et al, Wang et al, Darkwah et al and Gouda et al, prospecting the cell-based therapy, the possible combination of the current drugs and the role of new drugs issue from plants or Chinese traditional medicine in the treatment of heart diseases.
Edited by
Amar Abderrahmani(Lille University, France)