May 5th, 2021 - In a small observational study that tested normothermic regional perfusion (NRP) for donation after cardiac death (DCD), posttransplant cardiac function was "excellent" in 8 of 8 transplant recipients, and survival after a mean of 237 days was 100%. Seven recipients of isolated heart transplants required minimal inotropic support. The eighth patient, a heart-lung recipient, required venoarteria...

Apr 22nd, 2021 - Young athletes are unlikely to experience ongoing heart problems post–COVID-19 infection. In a multicenter study conducted during September-December 2020, only 0.7% of 3,018 collegiate athletes who tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 infection were found to have definite, probable, or possible infection-related cardiac involvement. None experienced an adverse cardiac event and only five (0.2%) requi...

Apr 8th, 2021 - NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Unlike some heart failure (HF) treatments that affect women and men differently, dapagliflozin reduces the risk of worsening HF and death and improved symptoms, function, and quality of life similarly in both sexes, researchers say. "Given that SGLT2 inhibitors are a major breakthrough for the treatment of heart failure, it was important to understand whether their b...

Mar 31st, 2021 - What is Cardiac Rehabilitation? Cardiac rehabilitation (CR) is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, secondary prevention program aimed to optimize cardiovascular health. The programs are multifaceted and address psychosocial, physical, and emotional processes involved in cardiovascular health. The goal of CR is to improve modifiable risk factors, increase functional capacity, and reduce morbidit...

Mar 28th, 2021 - This transcript has been edited for clarity. Hello. I'm Ileana Piña, professor of medicine at Wayne State and at Central Michigan University. This is my blog. I'm also a heart failure transplant cardiologist, which many of you who have been on this blog know. I want to talk today about HFpEF. We've had these conversations before about heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. Do we really...

Mar 23rd, 2021 - Among patients who have recently experienced an ischemic stroke thought to be caused by small-vessel occlusion or large-vessel atherosclerosis, atrial fibrillation (AF) is detected more often with an insertable cardiac monitor (ICM) than with standard of care, a new study shows. ICMs may detect AF in as many as 1 in 8 patients with stroke of this etiology, the researchers report. The findings, ...

Mar 18th, 2021 - The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has published a draft guideline on the management of heart valve disease in adults. Here is a summary of the key recommendations: Referral Consider echocardiogram for adults with murmur and no other signs or symptoms if valve disease is suspected. Offer echocardiogram to adults with a murmur if valve disease is suspected and they have...

Mar 14th, 2021 - Anemia is a frequent comorbidity among patients with heart failure. Its incidence ranges from 30% to 50% and is likely to be higher in certain populations. The presence of anemia is associated with increased symptoms and increased rates of hospitalization and mortality. Patients with heart failure and anemia may experience more dyspnea and fatigue, leading to added impairments in exercise toler...

Mar 10th, 2021 - NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Smart speakers in the home can be used for contactless monitoring of heart rhythm, with results that match closely with standard heartbeat monitors, researchers report. They developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that transforms the smart speaker into a short-range active sonar system that sends inaudible sounds out into a room to measure heart rate and ind...

Mar 9th, 2021 - Being obese and pregnant raises the risk for cardiac complications in women with preexisting heart disease, new research suggests, highlighting the need for earlier interventions in this high-risk population.    The analysis of 790 pregnancies revealed that 23% of women with obesity, defined as body mass index greater than 30 kg/m2, had a cardiac event during pregnancy vs 14% of women with norm...

Feb 22nd, 2021 - Dapagliflozin's benefits in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction appeared quickly after treatment began, and patients who had been hospitalized for heart failure within the prior year got the biggest boost from the drug, according to secondary analyses of the more than 4,700-patient DAPA-HF trial. Dapagliflozin's significant reduction of the incidence of cardiovascular dea...

Feb 21st, 2021 - Two UK hospitals have collaborated to expand the donation after circulatory death (DCD) heart transplant programme to children. Doctors behind the scheme said the world-first paediatric heart transplant technique, previously only available to adults, has enlarged the donor pool and increased the number of transplants for eligible children by 50%. "Above all, none of this would be possible witho...

Feb 21st, 2021 - One of the ways to diagnose high blood pressure is with a 24-hour blood pressure monitor. In healthy people, nocturnal blood pressure dips by about 15% compared with daytime values. Patients who don't have this blood pressure drop at night, often called non-dippers, are at increased risk for cardiovascular mortality, heart failure, and stroke. This has led many researchers to consider the issue...

Feb 16th, 2021 - Dr Bernard Lown walks on the bridge renamed in his honor in Lewiston, Maine. BOSTON (AP) — Dr. Bernard Lown, a Massachusetts cardiologist who invented the first reliable heart defibrillator and later co-founded an anti-nuclear war group that was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, died Tuesday. He was 99. The Boston Globe reported the Lithuania-born doctor's health had been declining from congestive h...

Feb 11th, 2021 - NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Cancer patients who sustain a heart attack were less likely than non-cancer patients to be treated with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in a retrospective study. The authors say PCI is "underutilized" in cancer patients, despite comparable rates of in-hospital mortality and major adverse cardiovascular and cerebrovascular events (MACCE) to patients without c...

Feb 7th, 2021 - (Reuters Health) - The starkest disparities in heart transplant survival between Black patients and their non-Black counterparts in the U.S. may occur among younger adults, and within the first year posttransplant, a new study suggests. Researchers examined registry data on 22,997 adult heart recipients from 2005 to 2017. Overall, Black recipients had a 2.05-fold higher risk of mortality compar...

Feb 4th, 2021 - Screening for cardiac amyloidosis and excluding patients with cardiac amyloidosis from trials of new therapies for heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) may increase the chances of finding drugs that actually work, a new analysis suggests. When investigators retrospectively studied a cohort of 317 patients with HFpEF related to cardiac amyloidosis, they found that between 16% a...

Jan 14th, 2021 - The Food and Drug Administration has determined that data collected on the dual SGLT1/2 inhibitor sotagliflozin (Zynquista) for treating patients with type 2 diabetes in the SOLOIST and SCORED pivotal trials can help support a New Drug Application (NDA) submission, according to a statement released on Jan. 14 by Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, the company developing this drug. Lexicon concurrently sai...

Jan 13th, 2021 - In September 2019 Nicola Smith, a molecular pharmacologist in Australia, faced a brutal decision. She'd realized that she'd made a mistake — or rather, failed to catch a mistake in her group's research before the crippling error was published — in two academic articles which were the culmination of years of work. And she could either tell the world, or pretend it never happened. Her students ha...

Jan 4th, 2021 - NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Echocardiographic screening of middle-aged U.S. Blacks revealed a significant association between the V122I transthyretin amyloidosis genetic variant (TTR V122I) and worse cardiac structure and function, possibly portending symptomatic heart failure later in life, researchers suggest. About 4% of Black Americans have the TTR V122I variant, and "early identification i...