December 13th, 2010
False-Positive CT Angiogram Leads to Heart Transplant
Larry Husten, PHD
A 52-year old woman with atypical chest pain ended up with a heart transplant after a CT angiogram to “reassure” her sparked a devastating sequence of events. Following a false-positive CT angiogram, the patient underwent coronary angiography and suffered a dissection of the left main coronary artery, followed by emergency CABG, subsequent graft failure, and […]
December 10th, 2010
Heart Failure Death Statistics: Don’t Believe What You Read on the Internet
Mary Knudson, Health Journalist
Well-known science journalist Mary Knudson is the author of HeartSense, a blog about heart failure, from which the following post is taken. In this post, she takes issue with the grim and outdated prognosis data presented to the public by a prominent heart failure website. In its website section on heart failure facts, the Heart Failure Society of America […]
December 9th, 2010
The Language of Medicine: Getting to the Heart of Physician-Patient Communication
CardioExchange Editors, Staff
CardioExchange welcomes this guest post, reprinted with permission, from an anonymous medical resident. The post originally appeared on her blog, A Medical Resident’s Journey. An article in the Wall Street Journal, Taking Medical Jargon Out of Doctor Visits, emphasizes that the use of medical jargon leads to poor communication between physicians and patients, and consequently leads […]
November 30th, 2010
ASCENDing Into the Depths of the Nesiritide Controversy: Questions for Eugene Braunwald
CardioExchange Editors, Staff
Results of ASCEND-HF (Acute Study of Clinical Effectiveness of Nesiritide in Decompensated Heart Failure Trial), presented as a late-breaking clinical trial at the AHA meeting, showed that there were no significant differences in the pre-specified endpoint of dyspnea among some 7,000 patients with acute, decompensated HF randomized to receive standard therapy and either continuous intravenous nesiritide or placebo. This trial was started in […]
November 16th, 2010
“Phone It In” Heart-Failure Monitoring Offers No Advantage Over Usual Care
Larry Husten, PHD
CardioExchange welcomes Sarwat I. Chaudhry, first author of an NHLBI-funded trial in which 1653 recently hospitalized heart-failure patients were randomized to telemonitoring or usual care. The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, failed to show an advantage of telemonitoring in the primary endpoint: rehospitalization for any reason or death from any cause […]
November 14th, 2010
New LVAD Shows Promise as Bridge-to-Transplant
Larry Husten, PHD
ADVANCE (Evaluation of the HeartWare HVAD Left Ventricular Assist Device System for the Treatment of Advanced Heart Failure) evaluated the clinical efficacy of a novel small centrifugal flow pump as a bridge-to-transplant. In the trial, 140 patients who received the device were compared to a contemporaneous control group of 499 similar patients who had received a commercially […]
November 14th, 2010
ASCEND-HF: Nesiritide Is Safe But Not Effective
Larry Husten, PHD
ASCEND-HF (Acute Study of Clinical Effectiveness of Nesiritide in Decompensated Heart Failure Trial) was started in response to the enormous controversy over the safety and efficacy of nesiritide, which was being used in growing numbers of heart failure patients. The trial randomized 7141 patients with acute, decompensated HF to receive standard therapy and either continuous intravenous nesiritide or placebo. Results of ASCEND-HF, presented as a […]
November 14th, 2010
Emphatic Support for Eplerenone in NYHA Class II Heart Failure
Larry Husten, PHD
Aldosterone antagonists have proven beneficial in heart failure patients with moderate-to-severe symptoms and in MI patients with LV dysfunction and heart failure. Now EMPHASIS-HF (Eplerenone in Mild Patients Hospitalization and Survival Study in Heart Failure) has extended these benefits to patients with systolic HF and mild symptoms. EMPHASIS HF randomized 2737 patients with NYHA class II […]
November 14th, 2010
ICD-CRT Found Beneficial in RAFT
Larry Husten, PHD
RAFT (Resynchronization-Defibrillation for Ambulatory Heart Failure Trial) randomized 1798 patients with NYHA class II or III heart failure, LVEF < 30%, and a wide QRS complex to either an ICD alone or an ICD-CRT. After a mean followup of 40 months, the rate of death or heart failure hospitalization was 40.3% in the ICD group […]
November 11th, 2010
Heart Failure: A Scary Name That Doesn’t Make Sense
Mary Knudson, Health Journalist
Well-known science journalist Mary Knudson is the author of HeartSense, a blog about heart failure, from which the following post is taken. In this post, she questions the aptness of the designation “heart failure.” For the last week, I have been mulling over the term heart failure, questioning how the collective conditions that bear this label ever got such a name, […]
NEJM Journal Watch — Recent Cardiology Articles- To Lower Stroke Risk in Patients Undergoing Atrial Fibrillation Ablation, Is a Device or a Medication Better?
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