A large proportion of patients undergo primary angioplasty beyond the timelines recommended by clinical practice guidelines. These patients have poorer 5-year outcomes compared with those subjected to a pharmaco-invasive strategy. ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction guidelines recommend primary angioplasty as the strategy of choice within 120 min after a diagnostic electrocardiography. If that is not possible, thrombolytic...
Courtesy of Dr. Carlos Fava. One of the major challenges we interventional cardiologists still face is access management. Reduced device diameter and improved transcatheter closure, together with increased operator experience, have significantly reduced vascular complications. However, we shouldn’t lose sight of the secondary access, usually transfemoral, generally used in case of primary access site related...
Intolerance to aspirin is relatively frequent and there is no other non-steroid anti-inflammatory medication to replace it. The new guidelines of chronic coronary syndromes make class IIb recommendations to use prasugrel or ticagrelor in aspirin-intolerant patients. This is not meant to replace dual antiaggregation therapy in aspirin intolerant patients, when needed; it is just a...
According to a recent study published in Circ. Cardiovasc Interv, after a scheduled angioplasty, the rate of arrhythmia requiring some kind of treatment is very low, low enough to deem unnecessary the routine monitoring of all patients. The standard policy at many institutions is continuous cardiac monitoring for several hours after undergoing coronary angioplasty, with...
Courtesy of Dr. Carlos Fava. In modern studies, carotid artery stenting (CAS) has been shown equal to surgery in terms of the composite end point of periprocedural stroke, death, acute myocardial infarction and late ipsilateral stroke. This was tested in different groups and by trained operators. In the CREST-2 Registry (C2R) 2141 patients were included,...
The GLOBAL LEADERS study includes a pre-specified sub-study, GLASSY, that showed that ticagrelor monotherapy after one month of dual antiplatelet therapy is non-inferior (but not superior) to conventional treatment in terms of ischemic events. As regards safety, ticagrelor monotherapy did not decrease major bleeding compared with conventional therapy. The GLOBAL LEADERS randomized 15,991 patients who required...
There is no such thing as coincidence, at least not for the evidence-based medical science. This is what the NOBLE 5-year outcomes, soon to be published in the Lancet, seem to say, in line with the BBC exposé of the EXCEL study. The NOBLE study randomized patients with left main disease to compare PCI vs...
After coronary angioplasty, the use of drugs whose efficacy for the reduction of major events has been proven declines over time, which is associated with worse patient prognosis. Sometimes, without meaning to, we convey to patients the idea that, once the stent has been implanted, the artery is “cured” or that the only potential future...
According to this contemporary study, in the current organized STEMI network, patients admitted to a tertiary high-volume center for primary PCI are managed similarly and have similar prognosis regardless admission time. Several prior studies have shown primary PCI during off-hours (6 pm to 8 am) had worse outcomes vs. on-hour interventions (8 am to 6...
The aim of revascularization, whether through angioplasty or surgery, is to restore adequate flow to the myocardium; that much is obvious. However, after millions of “successful” procedures with the best technology applied to drug-eluting stents and optimal medical treatment, we still have a high ratio of patients who experience new events. Could an optimal angiographical...