Cardiovascular Diseases

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death in rich countries.¹ Heart failure is due to leakage or narrowing heart valves, heart insufficiency, disturbed electrical activation of the myocardium, etc. Two major arterial pathologies are aneurisms² and atherosclerosis, which have been targeted by physical and mathematical modeling. Genetic and environmental risk factors contribute to the variability in disease susceptibility for cardiovascular diseases. Cardiac pathologies remain the number one cause of death from congenital malformations in infancy (45–50% of postnatal deaths due to congenital anomalies). The majority of congenital heart defects arise from abnormal development of the valvuloseptal compartment.