More than 100,000 implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) are implanted in the United States annually, fully a quarter of those are generator replacements simply because the battery is depleted. But are all those replacements necessary and should they actually be performed? Writing in the Jan…
For the first time, a joint committee of the European Association for Echocardiography and the American Society of Echocardiography have issued recommendations on image acquisition using three-dimensional echocardiography (3DE)…
“Up until now infarct size has only been measured as part of clinical studies and not in routine clinical practice. The reason being that the reference method of gadolinium based contrast agents in MRI is expensive, takes a great deal of time to perform, and can only be undertaken by imaging specialists,” explains EAE president Dr Luigi Badano, from the University of Padua, Italy…
The heart’s valves, which guarantee the unidirectional flow of blood from one chamber to another, are asymmetrical. For example, the two flaps of the heart’s mitral valve - which regulates blood flow between the left atrium and the left ventricle - vary in size by up to 70 percent…
Just 30 percent the nation’s state police agencies reported that they equip their vehicles with automated external defibrillators, and of those, nearly 60 percent of said only a minority of their fleet have the lifesaving devices on board, according to new research from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania that was presented at the American Heart As…
Pneumonia - not a deep incision surgical site infection - is the most common serious infection after heart surgery, according to new research (Abstract 12247) presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2011. The study also revealed that most infections occur about two weeks after surgery, not one week as physicians previously thought…
A wearable defibrillator can prevent sudden death in people with dangerous heart arrhythmias, according to research presented at the American Heart Association’s Scientific Sessions 2011…
A clinical trial of patients with restenosis in drug-eluting stents (DES) in native coronary arteries found that treatment with paclitaxel-coated balloon angioplasty demonstrated superior results over plain old uncoated-balloon angioplasty (POBA)…
A clinical trial that compared the use of drug-eluting balloons (DEB) and bare metal stents (BMS) to both bare metal stents alone and drug-eluting stents (DES) found that the drug-eluting balloon group did not meet the primary endpoint of reduced late lumen loss…
A study released Nov. 10 at the 23rd Annual Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) scientific symposium in San Francisco reports that patients receiving an innovative new heart valve benefit from a marked increase in quality of life…