Myocardial remodeling during pathophysiology: Relevance for cardiac dysfunction

Upon various forms of cardiac damage or disease, such as myocardial infarction, pressure overload or genetic cardiomyopathies, the heart attempts to adapt to its altered circumstances by myocardial remodeling, consisting of electrical, structural and contractile remodeling. Even though myocardial tissue remodeling is a natural rescue process that is initiated to maintain sufficient blood supply to the organs throughout the body, when remodeling is massive and heterogeneous, it aggravates the damage, eventually leading to heart failure. In this thesis, we focused on myocardial remodeling of predominantly the intercalated disc and tissue architecture during various cardiomyopathies such as Dilated Cardiomyopathy, Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy, Ischemic Cardiomyopathy, and Arrhythmogenic Cardiomyopathy; and upon artificially induced pressure overload in mice, where we studied the effect of fibrosis and inflammation.