This book is intended to provide a resource text for investigators and practitioners interested in the female heart in health and disease. It manages to fill this role. Information on the interaction between gender and cardiac physiology and disease can be found scattered throughout the internal medicine, obstetrics, gynecology, and cardiology literature. This book provides a compilation of the available data from a wide variety of sources to allow easy access to this information.
The book is divided into four sections. The first provides available information on normal female cardiovascular physiology; the second, pregnancy and heart disease; the third, coronary artery disease in women; and the final section a number of selected diseases, including systemic and pulmonary hypertension and mitral valve prolapse. All sections have references that are reasonably recent, in the majority of chapters as recent as 1987. This means, however, that relatively recent drugs are mentioned but their