Carolinas HealthCare System’s Sanger Heart & Vascular Institute became the first in the world to implant a branched stent graft specifically designed for branch vessel repair of thoracic aortic aneurysms on Thursday. This is the first arch graft available in a clinical trial and both the device and surgical approach are novel.

Endologix, Inc. (Nasdaq:ELGX), developer and marketer of innovative treatments for aortic disorders, announced today that Roderick de Greef will retire from the Board of Directors at the end of his current term, which ends on May 23, 2013, the date of the Company's annual shareholder meeting. Thomas F. Zenty, III will stand for election as a Class III director to fill the resulting vacant position at the upcoming annual shareholder meeting.

AtheroNova Inc. (OTCBB:AHRO), a biotech company focused on the research and development of compounds to safely regress atherosclerotic plaque and improve lipid profiles in humans, today announced that John Kastelein, MD, Ph.D., Chairman of the department of vascular medicine and Strategic Chair of Genetics in Cardiovascular Disease at the Academic Medicine Center of the University of Amsterdam, has joined the Company as a member of the Medical Advisory Board and will be a Co-Principal Investigator in the Company's upcoming clinical trials. 

Darwin Labarthe, MD, MPH, PhD, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Division of Heart Disease and Stroke Prevention, proposes that an emphasis on cardiovascular health rather than cardiovascular disease heralds a “positive health” revolution. In a blog post on the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s website, he discusses the idea of health assets. 

The Canadian Diabetes Association recommends statin therapy for patients with diabetes mellitus who are 40 years old or older in its 2013 Clinical Practice Guidelines.

James Chen-tson Fang, M.D., has been named chief of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Utah School of Medicine and director of the cardiovascular service line at University of Utah Health Care.

A Q&A posted on CNN’s website featured John P. Reilly, MD, editor-in-chief of the Society of Cardiovascular Angiography and Interventions’ secondscount.org and a vice chairman and cardiology fellowship program director at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans.

Medtronic, Inc. (NYSE:MDT) today announced market release of the CardioGuide™ Implant System, a novel real-time navigation system for cardiac resynchronization therapy pacemakers and defibrillators (CRT-P and CRT-D), in the United States and Canada. The system helps physicians determine the most appropriate location for left-ventricular lead placement by generating 3-D images of the cardiac veins; enhanced software for the system will be commercially available later this year that also analyzes the motion of select cardiac vessels on the left side of the heart. Clinical studies have shown that appropriate left-ventricular lead placement may improve CRT response in heart failure patients (1,2,3).