Figure 5.

Cardiac injury in bacteremia is abated by caspase inhibition and exacerbated by Kupffer cell ablation. (A) Serum CK-mb levels were measured during mild and severe bacteremia. Serum CK-mb increased only at 24 h in the severe bacteremia model (*p < 0.001). Similarly, there was an increase in caspase-3 activity in myocardial lysates at 24 h in the severe bacteremia model (*p < 0.001). (B) Pretreatment with z-VAD-fmk followed by infection with the severe bacteremia model resulted in no evidence of increased CK-mb or cardiac caspase-3 activity. (C) Pretreatment with GdCl₃ followed by infection with the mild bacteremia model resulted in a trend toward increased CK-mb levels at 16 h and evidence of increased cardiac caspase-3 activity at 16 h (*p < 0.01) compared with mice infected with mild bacteremia alone.