CardioExchange Archive

August 22nd, 2012

NHLBI Announces 7000-Patient Trial to Test Inflammation Hypothesis

Larry Husten, PHD

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has announced the launch of a large clinical trial testing the inflammation hypothesis. Paul Ridker is the principal investigator of the trial, which will be known as  the Cardiovascular Inflammation Reduction Trial (CIRT). CIRT will enroll 7,000 patients who are stable following a heart attack but are at high risk for a […]

---

May 8th, 2012

Selections from Richard Lehman’s Literature Review: Week of May 7th

Richard Lehman, BM, BCh, MRCGP

This week’s topics include a comparison of abciximab and manual aspiration thrombectomy in STEMI, the quality of U.S. clinical trials, 2-year data on PARTNER, TAVR in inoperable decompensating stenosis, clopidogrel genetic testing, and strategies to reduce MI mortality.

---

January 3rd, 2012

Missing Data: The Elephant That’s Not in the Room

Harlan M. Krumholz, MD, SM

There is a problem so grave that it threatens the very validity of what we learn from the medical literature. Bad data? Not exactly. Actually, it’s missing data — information, relevant to the risks and benefits of treatments, that is simply not published. In some cases, these data would make a critical difference in the […]

---

April 15th, 2011

Harnessing the Power of the EMR for Clinical Research Recruiting

Peter B Berger, MD

The days of passively recruiting for outpatient clinical trials by having a research coordinator in a clinic manually review charts to determine which patients are eligible will soon be over. How soon is hard to tell, but institutions like Geisinger Medical Center in Pennsylvania, where I am Director of the Center for Clinical Studies (and […]

---

March 30th, 2011

Many Elderly Patients Excluded from Heart Failure Trials

Larry Husten, PHD

Despite the large and growing burden of heart failure in the elderly population, older people are often excluded from heart failure clinical trials. In a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Antonio Cherubini and colleagues  examined 251 heart failure trials and found that a quarter of the trials excluded patients by an arbitrary upper […]

---

October 29th, 2010

Is the Time Right for a Preprint Archive for Clinical Trials?

Larry Husten, PHD

Here’s a great idea: a preprint archive for clinical trials. Taking inspiration from the well-established use of preprint archives in physics, math, and other scholarly areas, Martin Fenner, a cancer researcher, proposes the establishment of a preprint archive for clinical trial research papers. Fenner points out that “the results of clinical trials are rarely first reported in a […]

---