Trial acronyms may have started out as a succinct and easy-to-remember way to crystallize the intention of the study but this naming obsession has taken on a life of its own. sometimes becoming bigger than the trial itself. The reality is that every trial doesn’t have an easy-to-remember name and by conforming to this obsession to try to create one, we are coming up with cumbersome and completely random names for our studies.

Laying out a road map for better trials and ultimately better outcomes for this confounding condition

The publication in JAMA of the NIH’s Trial to Assess Chelation Therapy (TACT) has reignited a heated debate about the trial. The TACT investigators have generously agreed to respond to questions posed by Harlan Krumholz.

The NIH TACT trial of chelation therapy has been the subject of intense criticism. In my opinion, the arguments that the TACT results are dubious or not valid are overstated. While the debate surrounding TACT is clearly warranted and welcome, I hope it generates more light than heat.

Larry Husten is back from ESC and discussing two trials that exemplify how medicine is supposed to work, and one that exemplifies what can go wrong, especially when commercial interests are at stake.

The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) has announced the launch of a large clinical trial testing the inflammation hypothesis. Paul Ridker is the principal investigator of the trial, which will be known as  the Cardiovascular Inflammation Reduction Trial (CIRT). CIRT will enroll 7,000 patients who are stable following a heart attack but are at high risk for…

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This week’s topics include a comparison of abciximab and manual aspiration thrombectomy in STEMI, the quality of U.S. clinical trials, 2-year data on PARTNER, TAVR in inoperable decompensating stenosis, clopidogrel genetic testing, and strategies to reduce MI mortality.

There is a problem so grave that it threatens the very validity of what we learn from the medical literature. Bad data? Not exactly. Actually, it’s missing data — information, relevant to the risks and benefits of treatments, that is simply not published. In some cases, these data would make a critical difference in the…

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The days of passively recruiting for outpatient clinical trials by having a research coordinator in a clinic manually review charts to determine which patients are eligible will soon be over. How soon is hard to tell, but institutions like Geisinger Medical Center in Pennsylvania, where I am Director of the Center for Clinical Studies (and…

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Despite the large and growing burden of heart failure in the elderly population, older people are often excluded from heart failure clinical trials. In a paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine, Antonio Cherubini and colleagues  examined 251 heart failure trials and found that a quarter of the trials excluded patients by an arbitrary upper…

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