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Monday, March 15, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM
Each year at the ACC meeting, program planners pour through abstracts to include in the late-breaking clinical trials sessions. This year, they picked 30 abstracts out of more than 100 that were submitted. Many of the late-breaking selections promise to be game-changers. If you want to get a sense of what your future practice might look like, you need to sit in on this session.
Written by David Smith, MD
There are cases presented to all physicians when we have to balance benefits of a particular treatment with concerns around safety for certain patients. In interventional cardiology, we see this dilemma with drug-eluting stents (DES). While this technology provides effective therapy for many patients with ischemia-inducing coronary lesions, there are certain patient groups that encounter problems for different reasons.
The APPOSITION II clinical study, designed to compare the effectiveness of the Stentys self-expanding stent and a conventional balloon-expandable stent in acute MI patients, has enrolled its first participant, according to medical device provider Stentys.
In patients with heart rates of 65 beats per minutes or less, dual-source CT angiography has a higher specificity and accuracy at segment-based analysis than 64-slice CT, but provides a comparable diagnostic accuracy on a patient-based level, according to a study in this month's Radiology.
Washington, DC—Maurice Buchbinder, MD, director of the Foundation for Cardiovascular Medicine in La Jolla, Calif., opened a lecture at CRT 2009 by asking, “Why do we need biodegradable stents? What we know about metallic stents is so complete and polished, why should we start all over again and try to define a new prosthesis that goes away?”
Compared with femoral arterial access, transradial access for stent implantation can result in less bleeding, less down time, lower costs and less risk overall, particularly for obese patients, according to Ramon Quesada, MD, medical director of interventional cardiology at Baptist Cardiac & Vascular Institute in Miami, Fla.
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Written by Justine Cadet
Washington, D.C.—The Mo.Ma Ultra proximal cerebral protection device (Invatec/Medtronic) used in combination with FDA approved carotid stents in high surgical risk subjects resulted in excellent safety and effectiveness outcomes, according to the ARMOUR trial presented at the annual conference of Cardiovascular Research Technologies (CRT), Feb. 21-23.
A positive correlation between post-procedural myocardial injury and volume and fraction of low-attenuation plaque within target lesions measured by multidetector CT angiography after elective PCI was discovered by Tadayuki Uetani, MD, from the department of cardiology at Chubu Rosai Hospital in Nagoya, Japan, and colleagues.
A meta-analysis of nearly 80,000 patients published in the Nov. 17 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology adds to a growing body of research seeking to evaluate and understand possible sex differences associated with antiplatelet therapies. This analysis found it to be effective in reducing cardiovascular events in both men and women with no statistically significant sex differences in terms of expected clinical benefit or increased harm.
Washington, D.C.—Despite studies that attest to the efficacy of intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) during PCI, the technology is “way underused,” according to Gary S. Mintz, MD, chief medical officer of the Cardiovascular Research Foundation in New York City, who discussed the topic with Cardiovascular Business News last week at the Cardiovascular Researcher Therapies (CRT) 2009 conference.
Washington, DC—Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) could help physicians make treatment decisions with complex lesions that fall within the intermediate SYNTAX score range, between 23 and 32, according to Peter J. Fitzgerald, MD, who spoke here last week at the Cardiovascular Research Technologies (CRT) 2009 conference.
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Middle age introduces itself in many ways; one is atrial fibrillation (AF). My onset of AF seems to have coincided with a mountain bike accident in the woods of North Carolina that resulted in some cracked ribs.
The use of health IT to reduce rehospitalizations will be welcome but also disruptive, said Stephen Jencks, an independent consultant in healthcare safety during a Feb. 24 webinar on the potential use of health IT to mitigate rehospitalizations, sponsored by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).