One of the most important unanswered questions in medicine today– the best treatment for stable ischemic heart disease– may never get a satisfactory answer because cardiologists are unwilling to enter their patients in a clinical trial. One major reason why the question is urgent: about a third of the 1 million PCI procedures performed each year in the…
Study Uncovers Confusion About When To Use An Important Heart Test
March 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Appropriate use criteria (AUC) are designed to help make sure that medical procedures and interventions are performed in people most likely to benefit and, in turn, are not performed in people unlikely to gain benefit. Now a new study published in Annals of Internal Medicine suggests that the AUC for one very widely performed procedure, diagnostic cardiac catheterization, can provide…
FDA Approves New Heart Pump From Abiomed
January 28, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Abiomed has announced that it received FDA approval for its Impella RP System, the first percutaneous single access heart pump that provides support to the right side of the heart. The approval, under a Humanitarian Device Exemption (HDE), is based on results of the single arm Recover Right study, in which 30 patients were enrolled. The overall survival…
Pilot Study Demonstrates Feasibility Of MRI-Guided Catheterization
August 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment
A small pilot study has demonstrated that it may one day be possible to replace x-rays with MRI to guide some cardiac catheterization procedures. As reported in the European Heart Journal, researchers at the National Heart Lung and Blood institute (NHLBI) performed x-ray and MRI-guided transfemoral right heart catheterization in 16 patients (four with shunt, nine…
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