Abstract
Based on individual analyses of the functional components of an organism, the Oslerian method shows signs of depletion when attempting to explain the pathophysiology of complex syndromes such as cancer and cardiovascular diseases. This is why it is gradually being supplanted by a new paradigm: the methodology of biological systems. This new model strives to integrate knowledge in different modern research areas with the omics sciences and bioinformatics, in order to develop biological networks leading to a better understanding of these complex syndromes. The purpose of this review is to introduce clinical cardiologists and cardiovascular researchers a new tool called systems biology, showing how it integrates data from the omics sciences and its contribution to a new approach to cardiovascular disease. To date, a search of the Medline database has been conducted with the following key words in Portuguese and English: “biologia de sistemas”, “insuficiencia cardiaca”, “sindrome metabolica” e “arritmias cardiacas”; “systems biology”, “heart failure”, “metabolic syndrome” and “cardiac arrhythmias”. This led to the conclusion that systems biology must be used to an increasing extent for a better understanding of complex cardiovascular diseases such as metabolic syndrome, atherosclerosis, hypertension, heart failure and cardiac arrhythmias. Cardiologists, cardiovascular researchers, other healthcare practitioners and basic researchers in other fields of knowledge will build up closer links in a quest to identify health and disease network models that are now called network medicine.
Highlights
The conventional model broadly employed in medicine is based on a reductionist view, which hinders an integrational analysis of the health and disease processes
The impossibility of solving a growing number of problems led to a crisis of model, paving the way to a new paradigm
The objective of this review is to introduce to clinical cardiologists and cardiovascular researchers a new tool referred to as systems biology and the manner how it integrates data from omic sciences, in addition to its contribution to a new approach to cardiovascular diseases
Summary
The conventional model broadly employed in medicine is based on a reductionist view, which hinders an integrational analysis of the health and disease processes. The paradigm of cardiovascular continuum has been used to demonstrate the gradual evolution by the presence of risk factors, which lead to inflammatory changes to the vascular tissue, development of the atherothrombotic process, onset of the clinical phenotype of acute myocardial infarction, followed by structural and functional changes of the left ventricle (cardiac remodeling) that are associated with sudden cardiac death and heart failure (HF) (Figure 1)[7].
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