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Cardiovascular Pharmacology and Therapeutics
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BN Singh, VJ Dzau, PM Vanhoutte, and RL Woosley; eds. 1231 pages. New York: Churchill Livingstone; 1994. $159.95. ISBN 0-443-088-144. Order phone 800-553-5426.
Cardiology in general, and cardiovascular pharmacology and therapeutics in particular, have been subject to an enormous amount of change and evolution during the last decade. Today, primary care practitioners and cardiologists prescribe hundreds of medications that were not available to most of them while they were completing their training. These medications have complex mechanisms of action, pharmacokinetics, indications, contraindications, and drug-drug interactions. Indeed, the magnitude of this subject has dictated the need for a multiauthor, extensive, and intensive reference book dedicated to cardiovascular pharmacology and therapeutics. The editors of this book and more than 100 contributing authors took on a gargantuan task in publishing this invaluable textbook, and their achievement is admirable.
The textbook is properly organized, well written, and extensively referenced, and it covers nearly all of the therapeutic aspects of cardiovascular medicine. The balance between detail and practicality is the book's strongest virtue. The book is aimed at the practicing physician interested in the pharmacology and therapeutics of cardiac drugs; the practical and in-depth information provided was obtained by inviting renowned clinicians to contribute key chapters. These contributing authors, who are on the cutting edge of pharmacology and therapeutics in their own subspecialties in cardiology, have done a uniformly good job of blending their own practical, clinical experience with reviews of pertinent literature and basic pharmacology. Simply stated, this textbook contains pharmacologic and therapeutic text ingeniously disguised as clinical material. It is this vital ingredient that will appeal to the practicing clinician.
On the other hand, the depth of content is just as useful to the physician seeking basic pharmacologic and therapeutic information about a specific drug. The table of contents is extensive, and topics covered range from antihypertensive and anti-ischemic therapy to genetic therapy and thrombolysis in acute myocardial infarction. Every class of drugs that has a practical or a potential use in clinical cardiology is covered in the 75 chapters. Specific chapters are dedicated to special considerations, such as cardiac transplantation, pediatric practice, geriatrics, pregnancy and lactation, and racial considerations; orthostatic dizziness is also extensively covered. However, the treatment of neurally mediated syncope is not separately addressed.
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