CardioSource WorldNews August 2015 | Page 16

THE BE T Multimedia Highlights From the CardioSource WorldNews YouTube Channel | Scan the QR code to watch the full video 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.” 14 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