Mitochondrial medicine: Problems and tasks
The paper considers the most urgent problems of mitochondrial medicine. The latter is shown to run through the increasingly more space of traditional pathology in its different aspects, by changing the notion of classical diseases, such as diabetes mellitus, schizophrenia, heart failure, and many others. The core of this area includes diseases that are caused by primary mitochondrial damages with the clinical phenotypes being greater than 80 in number and the etiologically relevant mutations approaching 300. There is an even wider range of abnormalities, in which mitochondrial disorders are called secondary. Finally, a large number of pathological conditions are associated with exogenous mitochondrial damages, including iatrogenic ones. Emphasis is placed on the significance of investigating the individual tissue energy metabolism features that are of great importance for preventive medicine. The diagnostic efficiency of different, both clinically adopted and new, methods in evaluating polysystemic mitochondrial dysfunctions is comparatively considered. The need to detect dysenergy conditions is emphasized by the fact that there is a large group of energotropic medicines that increase energy metabolism rates at the cellular level. The urgency to develop science in relevant areas is determined by not only the extension of the ideas on the role of mitochondrial dysfunctions in the pathogenesis of diseases, but also on the involvement of mitochondria in the physiological and adaptational regulations of the body. Thus, the priority tasks of modern medicine are to solve the problems associated with the pathogenesis and epidemiology of mitochondrial diseases, their diagnosis and treatment.