There is a higher prevalence of CAD in IPF patients compared to a similarly matched COPD group. This increased association appeared to be independent of common coronary artery risk factors. IPF patients with significant CAD appear to have worse outcomes.

Rats received either 0 or 30 preexposures to a tone which was later used as a conditioned stimulus (CS) in a two-way avoidance task. Tone preexposure resulted in retarded conditioning in normal animals and animals with dorsal raphe lesions. This latent inhibition effect, however, was not present in animals with medial raphe lesions. The failure of CS preexposure to retard conditioning in animals with medial raphe lesions was not due to differences in auditory sensitivity or shock reactivity. Biochemical analysis indicated that whereas medial raphe lesions significantly reduced serotonin in the septohippocampal complex, dorsal raphe lesions had no such effect. The results are discussed in terms of the differing roles of the mesolimbic and mesostriatal serotonergic systems in learning to ignore irrelevant stimuli.A number of recent investigations at both behavioral and physiological levels have examined the mechanisms whereby an animal learns to ignore irrelevant stimuli. Although several behavioral paradigms (see Mackintosh, 1973Mackintosh, ,1975 have been used to study this phenomenon, the paradigm that offers the most direct approach is that of latent inhibition.Latent inhibition (LI) refers to the finding that a series of nonreinforced preexposures to a to-be-conditioned stimulus retards conditioning to that stimulus when it is Parts of this research were supported by National Science Foundation Grant BNS 77-14871 and by a faculty research award to Paul R. Solomon. We are grateful to Andrew Crider and John W. Moore for their critical comments on the manuscript and to William C. Moomaw for his help in the spectrofluorometric portion of the assay.

Coronary calcification, as assessed by routine CT of the chest, has very good performance characteristics in predicting underlying significant coronary artery disease in patients with IPF. The routine availability of this study enables the ready screening for coronary artery disease in IPF patients.

No abstract

No abstract