One in three people with a high risk of developing cardiovascular disease (CVD) over the next 10 years have not been diagnosed, according to a major UK study in the September issue of IJCP, the International Journal of Clinical Practice.
The shortfall in identifying people at high risk is greatest when it comes to middle-aged men, says the study of more than 71,000 men and women, which was carried out by Oxford University and funded by Unilever.
The best place to seek novel compounds for pharmaceutical drugs, alternative energy sources, and a host of industrial applications, is within natural systems that have evolved over millions of years. Scientists now realise that the precise molecular arrangements within natural pathways in organisms have been highly tuned for specific processes and provide both compounds that can be exploited directly and vital information over how to synthesise new products by mimicking biochemical processes.
Importantly, the Food and Drug Administration recently summarized a statement that in various controlled clinical trials the cardiovascular risks of COX-2 selective drugs have been indistinguishable from non-selective NSAIDs, thus also raising serious questions about the safety of the latter. As such, the FDA mandated a "boxed warning" for COX-2 selective inhibitors and traditional NSAIDs alike in view of the potential of these agents to increase adverse cardiovascular outcomes.
Long procedures require long fluoroscopy times with a serious amount of radiation for physician and personnel. The idea is that both the performance of procedures can be improved by robotic navigation systems and that the amount of complications can be reduced. At present two systems are extensively tested in cardiology: a robotic system that allows manipulating conventional catheters directly in the heart (Sensei, Hansen) and the Niobe (Stereotaxis) system that allows steering special magnetic catheters with the help of two large external magnets.
When patients present with symptoms, or when there are objective signs of poor tolerance in patients without symptoms, surgery should be performed using as often as possible surgical mitral valve repair, as this treatment has shown safety, efficacy and good long-term results.
A study of Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis in children has identified a gene that influences whether children get these diseases early in life, and points to a potential new target for treatment.
The findings of the international team that performed the study were published online this week by the journal Nature Genetics.
In his PhD, Jesús López Taberna put forward two protection techniques so that wind generators continue to be operative despite breaks in electricity supply
Cardiac ultrasound imaging, also known as echocardiography, has been recently challenged by several new imaging methods. However, echocardiography has unique characteristics that make it very attractive: it is cheap, can be done bedside and without ionizing radiation. Recently devices have also become very small.
Actually, in echocardiography there are two diverse and ongoing trends: the development of handheld miniature echo devices and even more advanced systems for more quantitative analyses.
Cardiac computed tomography has revolutionized cardiac imaging in recent years by providing exquisitely detailed cardiac anatomy, including, but not limited to, coronary anatomy. Non-invasive coronary angiography by computed tomography (CTA) is performed in ever increasing numbers, over 150 000 per year in the United States. However, the specific role of CTA in the diagnostic pathways of cardiology remains to be defined, and practice patterns of the technique often neglect established insights into coronary artery disease. The following characteristics of CTA need to be understood:
Imaging has gained attention in many areas of medicine but its relevance and importance in clinical cardiology cannot be underestimated. While chest X-ray and heart radioscopy have been used for many decades, it is the maturation of echocardiography which has propelled non-invasive imaging to the foreground of our diagnostic arsenal in cardiology. More recently, cardiovascular magnetic resonance and computed tomography have joined this club.
Molecular imaging aims at the use of imaging probes to visualize specific cellular or sub cellular processes that occur before changes in morphology and function. This is highly relevant because impairments of such processes often are precursors or earliest stages of cardiovascular disease. They are also involved in the early response to therapy or may identify candidates most suitable for a specific therapy.
The LEADERS (Limus Eluted from A Durable versus ERodable Stent coating) Study randomly assigned 1,707 patients with 2,472 lesions to treatment with either a biolimus-eluting stent with a biodegradable polymer or a sirolimus-eluting stent with a durable polymer. The study involved a broad range of patients for whom a stenting procedure was considered suitable, designed to reflect routine clinical practice.
Annually, approximately 40 million people undergo noncardiac surgery in the European Union. Of these patients approximately 400,000 (1%) will suffer a perioperative myocardial infarction (PMI) while approximately 133,000 (0.3%) die because of cardiac complications. In particular in patients undergoing noncardiac vascular surgery the incidence of perioperative cardiac complications is high with cardiac mortality rates exceeding 2%. Indeed perioperative cardiac events are the major cause of adverse outcome in vascular surgery patients.
Several epidemiological and experimental studies suggested that n-3 PUFA could exert favourable effects on the atherotrombotic cardiovascular disease including arrhythmias. The GISSI team investigated whether n-3 PUFA could improve morbidity and mortality in a large population of patients with symptomatic heart failure of any cause.
Dr. Salim Yusuf and Dr. Koon Teo, professors in the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University and clinicians at Hamilton Health Sciences, led the study. Results were presented today at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich, Germany.