Coronary angioplasty or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) reduces angina and improves quality of life in patients with stable ischemic cardiomyopathy, though the ORBITA study has shed new light on this. Meanwhile, we will assume this is indeed the case, until new studies either confirm or refute the above mentioned, controversial study. Either way, it is...
The title of this article leads us to think that we will find a list of things that we can do to reduce kidney injury. However, (unfortunately) sodium bicarbonate showed no benefit over saline and n-acetylcysteine showed no benefit over a placebo for the reduction of kidney damage after coronary angioplasty. Among the protective measures...
The ASCEND and ARRIVE trials -presented at the European Cardiology Congress and published in The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and The Lancet respectively- have put against the ropes the indication of aspirin in the context of primary prevention. The ASPREE trial, recently published in the NEJM, appears to have definitely overthrown aspirin, since...
Patients with diabetes mellitus experience significantly greater plaque progression, particularly regarding adverse plaque. Male sex and baseline plaque volume >75% were identified as independent risk factors for plaque progression; the latter actually tripled the risk. This study with tomographic follow-up sought to determine the rate and extent of plaque progression, changes in plaque features, and...
Courtesy of Dr. Carlos Fava. TAVR has been shown beneficial in high and moderate risk patients, but there is a group of patients that require dialysis on account of kidney deterioration. This comorbidity is due to bad cardiovascular evolution associated to diabetes, bleeding and thromboembolic events. For some time, we have been using an...
Coronary perforation has an incidence of 0.5% and it is associated with a 13-fold increase in in-hospital events and a 5-fold increase in 30-day mortality. This event is so catastrophic that its management has become indispensable knowledge to all interventional cardiologists. This accident is most frequently provoked by artery over-dilation caused by a balloon or...
There is limited information on the use of antithrombotic therapies and their outcomes in Latin American patients with atrial fibrillation. This stands true in almost all aspects of medicine: large multicenter randomized studies rarely include Latin American countries, and when they do, the population included is not representative of the overall population. The only exception...
Once a big void that prevented us from effectively assessing functional compromise, intermediate aortic stenosis has made us treat many lesions “just in case”, to save us what would be a complicated procedure, had a valve been placed. Auspiciously, some light has been shed by several, most welcome, studies simultaneously published in J Am Coll...
According to this new work (soon to be published in Ann Thorac Surg), discharging a patient during the weekend or a holiday after cardiac surgery is not associated with higher rates of readmission compared with patients discharged during weekdays. A total of 4877 patients were discharged after cardiac surgery in high-volume sites in the United States. Among them,...
The incidence of arrhythmic events up to a year after implantation is high and involves almost half the patients with complete left bundle branch block following the procedure. Significant bradyarrhythmias occur in up to one-fifth of the patients, half of whom ultimately require a pacemaker. These data support the idea of a cardiac monitoring device...