Basic concepts in pathopysiology

At the Hungarian medical schools, regular pathophysiology teaching started in 1949. As founder of the Department of Pathophysiology at the University of Pécs, Professor Donhoffer established teaching of this subject. Ten years later he published his monumental textbook on pathophysiology. Since then, however, the development of medicine necessitated editions of new books. These were mainly multi-author books. The authors of the present book had several decades of coordinated common practice in teaching pathophysiology. They did not mean to compile a huge textbook on pathophysiology in general, rather 
– also considering the ideas of our founder – they intended to present the most important functional changes of organs ad organ systems, the mechanisms of their developments and emphasizing their interactions with other organ functions, altogether the basic concepts of the subject. Keeping in mind this mission, as well as the most frequent problems and questions of our students, we hope that this book 
provides appropriate information for those students involved in preclinical studies, and also hope that the book may be useful even at later clinical studies or in the clinical practice. A new feature of  this book is that it repeatedly tries to call attention to the aging-related aspects of the pathophysiological processes.