THE BE T
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Drug-coated Balloon for PAD
John R. Laird, MD: “All the balloons are a little
bit different in terms of how they work. [However,] the primary mechanism is that the balloon
is coated with paclitaxel and a carrier molecule
or excipient, which basically allows the drug to
come off the balloon and be delivered into the
vessel wall where it sticks around long enough to
have an impact.”
Long-term Ticagrelor in MI Patients:
PEGASUS-TIMI 54
Paul Spittle: “Where PEGASUS differs is it’s a
new category of patients. It’s looking at people
who had an event at least 12 months previous,
and they’re already on aspirin, and you add ticagrelor on top of that. The primary endpoint
was [a reduction in] cardiovascular death, stroke,
and MI. Both the doses of ticagrelor studied in
this actually hit the primary end point.”
Tepe G, Laird J, Schneider P, et al. Circulation. 2015; 131:495-502.
Bonaca MP, Bhatt DL, Cohen M, et al. N
Engl J Med. 2015; 372:1791-800.
A First: Transcatheter Repair of a Patient’s Severely Regurgitant Tricuspid
Valve
LGE Brings Clarity to the Cause of
Sudden Cardiac Arrest
Schofer J, Bijuklic K, Tiburtius C. J Am
Coll Cardiol. 2015;65(12):1190-5.
Neilan TG, Farhad H, Mayrhofer T, et al.
Am Coll Cardiol Img. 2015;8(4):414-23.
Rebecca Hahn, MD: “These first five [patients]
have all successfully had the devices implanted…
[and] all have had a greater than 50% reduction in
the annular area, which is phenomenal. All have
had somewhere between a 30 to 50% in the
quantification of tricuspid regurgitation. I think,
procedurally, the success rate is phenomenal.”
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CardioSource WorldNews
Raymond Y. Kwong, MD, MPH: “One thing that
will be more obvious, or easier to manage a
patient, is that we can actually delineate their diagnosis. In this paper, a little half of the patients
with abnormal MRI, turn out to have an unrecognized heart attack. There are also patients
who have inflammation of the heart muscle that
were detected. Once we have a better grasp of
what etiology could be the underlying culprit,
then you have a better understanding [of how to
treat].”
Practical Advice for Clinicians on the
Imminent Arrival of hs-Troponin Assays
James L. Januzzi, Jr, MD: “This is an incredibly
important topic because we use troponins daily.
When we are looking at these patients, we are
carefully watching for the presence of myocardial infarction—particularly because that has a
defined treatment strategy. We can tell clinicians
that, when we switch to the highly sensitive
troponins, we will be able to—in much more
rapid fashion—identify or exclude necrosis of the
myocardium.”
Cholesterol Knowledge Still Low in U.S.
Michele Packard-Milam, CAE: “What we’re
discovering is that—in the cholesterol counts
program, which your readers can take the poll at
cholesterolcounts.com—people have lost track
of the idea that they need to know their cholesterol numbers, particularly their LDL numbers.
So we’re trying to figure out just how much work
we have to do to get people to understand the
importa nce of these numbers and to ask their
doctors.”
August 2015