[Paradigm shifts in aortic pathology: clinical and therapeutic implications. Clinical imaging in chronic and acute aortic syndromes. The aorta as a cause of cardiac disease]. / Cambi di paradigma in tema di aorta: implicazioni cliniche e terapeutiche Imaging clinico nelle sindromi croniche ed acute. L'aorta come causa di malattia cardiaca.

Multimodal imaging plays a pivotal role in the assessment of the thoracic aorta, both in chronic and acute settings. Moving from improved knowledge on the structure and function of the aortic wall, as well as on its pathophysiology and histopathology, appropriate utilization of each imaging modality results into a better definition of the patient's need and proper treatment strategy. This review is aimed at highlighting the most critical aspects in this field, providing cardiologists with some novel clues for the imaging approach to patients with thoracic aortic disease.

Dominant and recessive COL6A1 mutations in Ullrich scleroatonic muscular dystrophy.

In this study, we characterized five Ullrich scleroatonic muscular dystrophy patients (two Italians, one Belgian, and two Turks) with a clinical phenotype showing different degrees of severity, all carrying mutations localized in COL6A1. We sequenced the three entire COL6 complementary DNA. Three of five patients have recessive mutations: two patients (P1and P3) have homozygous single-nucleotide deletions, one in exon 9 and one in exon 22; one patient (P2) has a homozygous single-nucleotide substitution leading to a premature termination codon in exon 31. The nonsense mutation of P2 also causes a partial skipping of exon 31 with the formation of a premature termination codon in exon 32 in 15% of the total COL6A1 messenger RNA. The remaining two patients carry a heterozygous glycine substitution in exons 9 and 10 inside the triple-helix region; both are dominant mutations because the missense mutations are absent in the DNA of their respective parents. As for the three homozygous recessive mutations, the apparently healthy consanguineous parents all carry a heterozygous mutated allele. Here, for the first time, we report a genotype-phenotype correlation demonstrating that heterozygous glycine substitutions in the triple-helix domain of COL6A1 are dominant and responsible for a milder Ullrich scleroatonic muscular dystrophy phenotype, and that recessive mutations in COL6A1 correlate with more severe clinical and biochemical Ullrich scleroatonic muscular dystrophy phenotypes.