Effects of experimental congestive heart failure, ouabain, and asphyxia on the high-energy phosphate and creatine content of guinea pig heart. Circ Res

• Investigations concerning possible bio-chemical abnormalities in relation to mechani-cal failure of the heart have been carried out both in humans and experimental ani-mals. Evidence indicating deficiencies in the creatine and adenine nucleotide stores of the failing human heart was presented by Cowan,1 Herrmann, Decherd and Oliver,2 and Man gun and Myers.3 Experiments on cardiac tissue obtained from experimental animals by Weickei1,4'r ' Mugge,8 and Greiner7 also indi-cated that high-energy phosphate stores were reduced after spontaneous failure. A detailed criticism of these observations was made by Wollenberger,8"10 and his own very careful experiments demonstrated that, in the dog heart-lung preparation, spontaneous failure was not associated with any loss of high-energy phosphate stores. The same result was obtained in experiments utilizing isolated guinea pig atria11 and cat papillary muscle.12 The only investigation of high-energy phos-phate stores relating to cardiac failure in an intact chronic animal was that of Olson and Piatnek,18 who found no loss of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) or phosphorylcreatine (PC) in dogs with chronic congestive heart failure. However, in view of the recent work of Wollenberger, Krause, and Wahler14 on the content of high-energy phosphates in do