CardioExchange Archive

April 17th, 2013

Cardio Oncology: Counseling Women on The Cardiovascular Risks of Radiation Therapy

John Ryan, MD

What to tell women with breast cancer about the cardiovascular risks of radiation therapy for breast cancer.

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April 16th, 2013

Blood Sample Mismatch Leads ‘Anguished’ Authors to Retract Three Lipitor Papers

Larry Husten, PHD

Three substudies of the influential TNT (Treating to New Targets) trial have been retracted after the sponsor of the trial, Pfizer, discovered that blood samples from the study had been matched to the wrong participants. The main results of TNT, published in 2005 in the New England Journal of Medicine, had a major impact on clinical practice and statin prescription patterns. […]

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April 16th, 2013

Small Study Links Left Anterior Fascicular Block to AF and CHF

Larry Husten, PHD

In people without known cardiovascular (CV) disease the presence of left anterior fascicular block (LAFB) has not been thought to indicate increased risk. Now a research letter published in JAMA finds evidence that elderly people with LAFB are more likely to die and to develop atrial fibrillation (AF) and congestive heart failure (CHF) than people without […]

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April 16th, 2013

Selections from Richard Lehman’s Literature Review: April 16th

Richard Lehman, BM, BCh, MRCGP

This week’s topics include fibrinolysis or primary PCI in STEMI, the effect of lower sodium intake on health, and the effect of increased potassium intake on CV risk factors and disease.

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April 13th, 2013

FDA Schedules Another 2-Day Avandia Advisory Panel

Larry Husten, PHD

Once again the controversial diabetes drug rosiglitazone (Avandia, GlaxoSmithKline) will be the subject of a 2-day FDA hearing. According to a meeting announcement scheduled to be published in the Federal Register on April 15, the Endocrinologic and Metabolic Drugs Advisory Committee and the Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee will meet on June 5 and June 6 to  “discuss the results […]

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April 11th, 2013

Cuban History Offers Important Lessons For Global Health Today

Larry Husten, PHD

A large new study from Cuba shows the impressive benefits that can be achieved with weight loss and increased exercise. Much more ominously, the same study shows the dangers associated with weight gain and less exercise. In the study, published in BMJ, researchers took advantage of a “natural” experiment that occurred in Cuba as a result of a […]

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April 11th, 2013

Treatment of Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction: Why Have All the Clinical Trials Failed, and What Can We Do About It?

Sanjiv Shah, MD and John Ryan, MD

Laying out a road map for better trials and ultimately better outcomes for this confounding condition

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April 11th, 2013

Journals, Journals, Everywhere

Tariq Ahmad, MD, MPH

Does creating more subspecialty journals contribute to the creation of too much information, about small aspects of the field, such that specialists move closer to “knowing everything about nothing”?

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April 10th, 2013

Scientific Misconduct: From Darwin and Mendel to Poldermans and Matsubara

Larry Husten, PHD

Responding to recent episodes of scientific misconduct in cardiovascular research involving once prominent cardiovascular researchers, the editor of the European Heart Journal, Thomas Lüscher, has written an editorial discussing the significance of the new cases and placing them in a historical context that includes allegations of scientific misconduct by Mendel and Darwin, among many others. Lüscher writes that scientific […]

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April 9th, 2013

Quinidine Unavailable in Most of the World

Larry Husten, PHD

Quinidine — the only drug known to be effective in preventing lethal ventricular arrhythmias in people with several rare conditions, including Brugada syndrome, idiopathic ventricular fibrillation (VF), and early repolarization syndrome — is no longer available in much of the world. In a study published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Sami Viskin and colleagues […]

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