Despite the enormous increase in the use of stents in recent decades, there is little or no good evidence comparing their use to the alternatives of CABG surgery or optimal medical therapy in patients also eligible for these strategies. Now two new meta-analyses published in JAMA Internal Medicine provide new evidence that the alternatives to PCI remain attractive…
Dramatic Increase in Use of Radial Artery Access for PCI in the U.S.
June 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
In the last six years interventional cardiologists have dramatically increased their use of radial access for PCI, according to a retrospective study published in Circulation. Using data from the CathPCI registry on more than 2.8 million procedures between January 2007 and September 2012, Dmitriy Feldman and colleagues found that radial access PCI increased 13-fold, from a negligible 1.2% at the beginning of the study…
ESC Gives A Shot In the Arm To Radial Access For PCI Procedures: The New Default?
January 28, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Radial access is now the preferred approach for percutaneous coronary interventions, according to a consensus document from the European Society of Cardiology and other European organizations and published online in EuroIntervention. However, at least one prominent US interventional cardiologist thinks the “hard benefits” of radial access “are more controversial,” though he supports increased use of…
CABG Highly Cost Effective In Diabetics With Multivessel Disease
January 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment
In November the main results of the FREEDOM trial showed that diabetics with multivessel disease do better with CABG than PCI. Now the findings of the trial’s cost-effectiveness study, published online in Circulation, demonstrate that CABG is also highly cost-effective when compared with PCI. Elizabeth Magnuson and colleagues found that although CABG initially cost nearly $9,000 more…
New Guidelines Define State-of-the-Art STEMI Care
December 17, 2012 by Leave a Comment
New guidelines published online today in Circulation and the Journal of the American College of Cardiology provide an efficient overview of the best treatments for STEMI patients. (Click here to download the PDFs of the full version (64 pages) or the executive summary (27 pages) of the 2013 ACCF/AHA Guideline for the Management of ST-Elevation Myocardial Infarction.) “We’re looking to a future where more…
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