CardioExchange Archive

FDA Approves Percutaneous Valve: The FDA has approved its first percutaneous heart valve. The Medtronic Melody Transcatheter Pulmonary Valve and Ensemble Delivery System was approved under the Humanitarian Device Exemption (HDE) program. “The FDA’s approval of Melody allows patients to undergo a much less invasive procedure to treat their heart condition,” said Jeffrey Shuren, director of the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, in a press release. “Congenital heart defects represent the number one birth defect worldwide and this approval represents a new, first-of-a-kind treatment option for some of those patients.”

Obesity & Exercise: Archives of Internal Medicine has many new studies relating to diet and exercise. Here are just a few:

The Louisiana Obese Subjects Study (LOSS), a “pragmatic clinical trial,” found that with brief training primary care practices can help some obese patients achieve a sustained modest weight loss.
A report from the Nurses’ Health Study finds that women who are more physically active at 60 years of age are more likely to be free to major chronic diseases and have no physical, cognitive, or mental limitations when they are 70.
Yancy et al. compared  a low-carbohydrate diet to a combination of orlistat and a low-fat diet and found similar improvements for weight, lipid and glycemic measures, while the low-carb diet was more effective in lowering blood pressure.
In an effort to improve the efficacy of the DASH diet in the real world, the ENCORE Study found that adding exercise and weight loss to the DASH diet “resulted in even larger BP reductions, greater improvements in vascular and autonomic function, and reduced left ventricular mass.”

Smoking & Infants: Infants with mothers who smoke may have a permanently reprogrammed blood pressure control mechanisms that may increase their later susceptibility to hypertension. In an article appearing in Hypertension, Gary Cohen and colleagues studied the responses by babies to a tilt test. At one week, in response to being tilted semi-upright during sleep, the babies with a mother who smoked had double the blood pressure rise compared to babies with nonsmoking parents. At one year the pattern had completely reversed, and the babies with smoking mothers had only half the blood pressure increase as controls in response to tilting. Further, the smoking-exposed babies exhibited an abnormal surge in blood pressure in response to a sudden change from an upright to a horizontal position.