[Statins represent the most important drug among antilipidemic therapy modalities playing dominant roles against atherosclerotic burden. Statin’s outstanding importance is due partly to cholesterol lowering capacity, however their anti-inflammatoric, antiproliferative, antioxidant and vasodilatative efficacies as a pleiotropic potential indicates much more impact on prompt retardation of atherosclerotic progression. The results concerning statin pleiotropic influence are reviewed which are in association with their new indication in ACS management. The second part of this review delineates suspected side effects of statin use. Only one concern brings safety information: it is a fact that patients being treated with statins may have a small increased risk of increased blood sugar levels and of being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes mellitus, but the cardiovascular and mortality benefits of statin therapy exceed the diabetes hazard.]

[After a brief historical summary of molecular imaging and therapy (earlier called isotope diagnostics or nuclear medicine), which has more than 50 years history in Hungary, the author presents comparative international information regarding the status of this particular discipline in Hungary. He distinguishes between “single photon” or traditional techniques and “double photon” or PET methods. Besides listing well-known traditional methods, the author gives additional details and prognosis about Hungarian PET and PET-CT investigations playing increasingly important roles, especially in the field of oncology.]

[From a genomic point of view asthma is a multifactorial disease. It means that the susceptibility to the disease results from interaction of several (possibly several hundred) genes; in addition, the development of the disease requires environmental factors, as well. In the last years the hypothesis-free methods became widespread in the field of genomics investigating the genomic background of diseases. These methods do not need previous knowledge about the pathomechanism of the diseases and make it possible to discover new metabolic pathways. In this review all of the new asthma genes will be presented detected in the last few years by two such methods, by positional cloning and genome wide association study. The careful design of the studies, the large populations, the robust genomic and bioinformatic methods make it likely that these genes are really asthma genes playing important roles in the pathomechanism of the disease and are potential new therapeutic targets.]