ABSTRACT
Kawasaki disease has replaced rheumatic fever as the most common acquired heart disease in childhood,but its etiology remains unknown. The development and analyses of animal models will help us under-stand KD and find new and effective therapeutic strategies for it. Among these existing animal models, mouse modelof coronary artery inflammation induced by a single intraperitoneal injection of lactobacillus casei cell wall extract is a relatively mature model. In this review,we present an overview of how this model established and some progress in research of the mouse model.
ABSTRACT
Mortality is very unusual in the case of asthma. We recently came across a fatal case of asthma which showed a rare combination of unusual complications like eosinophilic myocarditis, coronary arteritis, biventricular cardiac hypertrophy, eosinophilic pneumonitis and pulmonary hypertension.
ABSTRACT
Kawasaki disease (KD) is a systemic vasculitis of unknown etiology in young children. There has been many trials to find out the causes of KD all over the world since Dr. Kawasaki published the first KD cases in Pediatrics (1973). The studies using animal models have been carried out noticablly in Japan and North America, initiated by Dr. Murata (1979) and Dr. Lehman (1985). The medical doctors and scientists have used many animals for their studies, for example, dog, rabbit, swine and mice. Nowadays, mice is the most popular animal model for patho-physiologic research of KD. However, there is no report about animal model research of KD in Korea. I emphasize that we have to start to search the causes of KD through experimental trials. Candida albicans extract and Lactobacillus casei cell wall extract were used to make coronary arteritis in animal models as in case of KD in humans. Recently, there is a good result in developing new drugs (TNF-alpha blockade) for the treatment of KD patients who are resistant to intravenous immunoglobulin and methylprednisolone through animal model research of KD.