Increased Plasma Lipid Peroxide in Patients with Congestive Heart Failure

Oxygen free radicals such as superoxide radicals, hydrogen peroxide or hydroxyl radicals have been suggested to play an important role in ischemia-reperfusion injury, catecholamine injury or adriamycin cardiomyopathy1)- 3). However, the half life of these free radicals is a matter of microseconds, too short a period for their clinical significance to be determined. On the other hand, oxygen free radicals react with membrane phospholipid and produce lipid peroxide which can be reliably measured by thiobarbituric acid test4). Several invesitigators5) -7) have reported increases in plasma lipid peroxide in animal models of adriamycin cardiomyopathy, alcoholic cardiomyopathy or genetic cardiomyopathy. However, few reports have investigated the alteration of plasma lipid peroxide in patients with chronic heart failure, and the clinical significance of lipid peroxide is largely unknown. Therefore, we measured plasma lipid peroxide in patients with dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), ischemic heart disease (IHD) and mitral valve disease (MVD) to determine the clinical significance of lipid peroxide in the pathophysiology of congestive heart failure.