Courtesy of Dr. Carlos Fava. Provitional ventricular assist devices are increasingly used in high-risk angioplasties, particularly those involving unprotected left main coronary artery (LMCA) with defective ventricular functioning. However, so far its true role has not been well-studied. This study analyzed 127 consecutive patients in the USpella registry from 2008 to 2015. These subjects underwent high-risk...
Courtesy of Dr. Agustín Vecchia. The link between operator volume and clinical outcomes has been long and widely debated. After years of discussion, there are promoters and detractors. Currently, interventional cardiology societies all over the world classify centers as “high-volume” or “low-volume” using arbitrary parameters, and require training fellows to perform an also arbitrary number of...
Increasingly, the frequent performances of elective angioplasties are in hospitals that do not have a cardiac surgery team. The occurrence for the need of emergency surgery varies from 0.1 to 0.4% in the contemporary age. There is an ongoing debate on health policy about whether to perform elective coronary angioplasty at hospitals without cardiac surgery...
Original title: Heparin monotherapy or bivalirudin during percutaneous coronary intervention in patients with non-ST-segment elevation acute coronary syndromes or stable ischemic heart disease: results from the Evaluation of Drug-Eluting Stents and Ischemic Events registry. Reference: Bangalore S et al. CircCardiovascInterv. 2014;Epub ahead of print. Bivalirudin compared to unfractionated heparin as monotherapy is associated with a lower risk of...
Original title: Trends in cause of death after percutaneous coronary intervention. Reference: Spoon DB et al. Circulation. 2014; Epub ahead of print. This retrospective study evaluated the specific cause of death in 19077patients who received angioplasty in a center between 1991 and 2008. To perform the analysis, the track was divided into three time periods: 1991-1996, 1997-2002,...