Responding to the News: It’s been an extraordinary week for cardiology news, with major papers and controversies about rosiglitazone, statins, JUPITER, and clopidogrel. Here are a few statements and news reports that you might want to know about:  ACC/AHA release clinical alert in response to FDA boxed warning about anti-platelet agent, clopidogrel (ACC/AHA) New analyses report…

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Study Raises Questions About Statins for Primary Prevention: A new meta-analysis raises questions about the benefits of statins when given to people without a clinical history of heart disease. Kausik Ray and colleagues, in a paper in Archives of Internal Medicine, analyzed data from 65,229 subjects in 11 studies. There were 2793 deaths in the studies, 1447 among those…

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In response to the addition in March of a boxed warning on the Plavix (clopidogrel) label, the ACC and the AHA have published a clinical alert intended to provide guidance to clinicians. David Holmes, Jr, the chair of the writing group, said in a press release that “the majority of patients do very well with standard…

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Two new studies looking at rosiglitazone seem likely to increase pressure on the drug prior to the July FDA advisory panel that will be making recommendations about its future. In the first study, published online in JAMA, the FDA’s David Graham, along with colleagues from Acumen and CMS, analyzed data from 227,571 Medicare beneficiaries taking either rosiglitazone or…

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Diabetes Doubles the Risk of Vascular Disease: An international group of investigators analyzed data from nearly 700,000 subjects without previous vascular disease enrolled in 102 prospective studies and found that diabetes appeared to double the risk of coronary disease, stroke, and other vascular deaths. In a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association and in a paper…

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30% of Echocardiograms Misread: A Milwaukee hospital found that nearly 30% of diagnostic echocardiograms were misread, according to an article by John Fauber in the Journal-Sentinel. An internal review of 235 echocardiograms performed at Aurora St. Luke’s Medical Center turned up 5 cases in which patients “actually went into the operating room with a faulty diagnosis,…

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Lowering Homocysteine Fails Again to Reduce Events: U.K. investigators randomized 12,064 MI survivors to folic acid and vitamin B12 or placebo. No difference was observed between the two groups in either major vascular events or in the incidence of cancer. In their report in JAMA, the SEARCH (Study of the Effectiveness of Additional Reductions in…

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Aggrenox Fails to Beat Aspirin in Japanese Study: Aggrenox, the combination of extended-release dipyridamole and aspirin, is indicated for the reduction of subsequent stroke in patients who have had a TIA or ischemic stroke. But results from JASAP (Japanese Aggrenox Stroke Prevention vs. Aspirin Programme), which compared Aggrenox to aspirin in 1294 patients, found that Aggrenox…

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Coffee and Tea: Go Ahead and Have a Cup: Moderate consumption of both coffee and tea was associated with a reduction in coronary heart disease (CHD) in a Dutch study that followed 37,514 people for 13 years. The paper appears in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology. Compared to people who drank less than 1 cup of…

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PFO Closure Trial Misses Primary Endpoint:  The CLOSURE 1 trial, which was designed to test the efficacy of PFO closure in preventing recurrent strokes and TIAs, failed to meet its primary endpoint, according to a press release from the trial’s sponsor, NMT Medical.  The primary endpoint of the trial, which was designed to compare PFO closure to medical…

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