Enrollment in Eplerenone Trial Stopped Early: The Data Safety Monitoring Committee has ended enrollment in the EMPHASIS-HF trial after determining that the trial had met its primary efficacy endpoint. According to a press release issued by Pfizer, the trial was testing eplerenone versus placebo in patients with established mild-to-moderate heart failure who were also at…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

Endarterectomy or Stenting? The results of the Carotid Revascularization Endarterectomy Versus Stenting Trial (CREST), which compared carotid endarterectomy to carotid stenting in 2,502 patients at centers in the U.S. and Canada, have now been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The CREST investigators report that the 30-day rate of stroke, death, and MI…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

Hypertension — Good News and Bad: New results from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), published in JAMA, show that although hypertension control improved dramatically from1988-1994 to 2007-2008 (from 27.3%  to 50.1%), the overall rate of hypertension increased (from 23.9% to 28.5% ) over the same period. Of note, hypertension control was lower in…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

Beta-Blockers May Benefit COPD Patients: Although many physicians prefer not to prescribe beta-blockers to patients with COPD, a new observational study from the Netherlands suggests that COPD patients — even those who don’t have overt cardiovascular disease — may benefit from beta-blocker therapy. In their paper in Archives of Internal Medicine, Rutten and colleagues analyzed records of…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

To ascertain unintended effects of statins, researchers in the U.K. analyzed data from more than 2 million patients, including 200,000 patients taking statins for the first time. In a paper in BMJ, the researchers found a reduced risk for esophageal cancer among statin users, and an increased risk for moderate or serious liver dysfunction, acute renal…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

Confirming the recent finding of the EVAR 1 trial, the DREAM Study Group reports the results of 351 patients who underwent open or endovascular repair of abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). The report appears in the New England Journal of Medicine along with the print publication of the EVAR 1 and 2 trials. The six-year survival…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

Novel Platinum Chromium Alloy Stent Found Safe and Effective: The Taxus Element paclitaxel-eluting stent (PES), which features a novel, thin-strut platinum chromium alloy “designed to enhance radiopacity, radial strength, and conformability,” was found safe and effective in the PERSEUS (Prospective Evaluation in a Randomized Trial of the Safety and Efficacy of the Use of the…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

AHA and Wii: A Controversial Relationship: A deal struck between the American Heart Association and Nintendo of America was the subject of a critical news report on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” AHA president Clyde Yancy told GMA that Nintendo was giving $1.5 million over 3 years to the AHA, prompting Columbia University’s David Rothman to…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

Can Two Million Kidneys Be Wrong? A new meta-analysis in the Lancet offers strong evidence that glomerular filtration rate and albuminuria are powerful independent predictors of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality in the general population. Members of the Chronic Kidney Disease Prognosis Consortium used data from over 100,000 participants in studies utilizing urine albumin-to-creatinine ratio (ACR)…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.

Time Window for TPA in Stroke Extended to 4.5 Hours: A new pooled analysis in the Lancet provides evidence that rt-PA may be beneficial when given up to 4.5 hours after stroke onset. Kennedy Lees and colleagues added data from 2 recent trials (ECASS III and EPITHET) to 6 earlier trials to re-examine the effect…

This content is exclusive to CardioExchange. To continue reading, please log in or request an invitation.