For patients undergoing myocardial revascularization surgery, endoscopic harvesting of saphenous veins in expert hands is similar to traditional methods in terms of events, according to this study presented at the American Heart Association (AHA) Congress and published simultaneously in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). This study, called REGROUP, was able to demonstrate that...
Hopes were raised high by the ARTS study, when set to show the benefit of bilateral internal mammary arteries (BIMA) during coronary artery bypass graft surgery compared over the use of a single internal mammary artery (SIMA) at 10 year follow up, but only one sub-study was able to show an advantage over radial grafts....
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,...
EXCEL patients with chronic kidney disease and left main coronary artery disease have higher rates of acute renal failure and other events compared with the general population. However, acute renal failure was less frequent with angioplasty than with surgery, while other events such as death, stroke, or infarction at 3 years were similar for both revascularization...
Several studies (some of them recent, some of them not so much so) have compared left main coronary artery angioplasty and myocardial revascularization surgery. Combined, these works compose a large corpus of evidence, but follow-up has not gone beyond 5 years in any case. The main aim of this study (presented at TCT 2018 and published simultaneously...
Fenestrated of branched endoprostheses are appealing options for the repair of anatomically-complex aortic aneurysms. Their use is limited by their cost (which is high for everyone, everywhere) and also by the lack of a head-to-head study showing best results than open surgery. This work offers results at 2 years for these devices, including an economic assessment...
Courtesy of Dr. Carlos Fava. Mitral regurgitation accounts for around 25% of valvular diseases and is a strong mortality predictor in heart disease. One of the challenges of this disease is that patients respond favorably to medical treatment for a long time, which makes hard to establish the right time to perform an intervention without...
Courtesy of Dr. Carlos Fava. The incidence of kidney disease is increasing. In its final stage, this pathology is related with coronary disease and increased mortality. Furthermore, we know that, in many occasions, it is associated with diabetes. Nowadays, the evidence comparing the progress of patients with impaired kidney function who have undergone left main...
Courtesy of Dr. Carlos Fava. Stroke is one of the most undesirable complications we can face and, regarding transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), major studies presented have rates of stroke of about 4%. In others, rates have been slightly higher. This meta-analysis included 5 randomized studies between 2011 and 2017: PARTNER, CoreVALVE, NOTION, PARTNER 2, and SURTAVI....
Since the publication of the original SYNTAX trial, there have been great technical advancements that have influenced the results of angioplasty: New tools for risk stratification using the SYNTAX II score which integrate clinical and anatomical variables to the team’s decision-making process. Functional revascularization (hybrid use of fractional flow reserve or instantaneous wave-free ratio). Optimization of...