Medical Updates
03/18/2010
Boston Sci Could Resume ICD Sales Within 30 Days
By Susan Kelly, Reuters
Boston Scientific Corp. (BSX.N) could be selling implantable heart rhythm devices again within 30 days if no new issues arise beyond the paperwork problems revealed this week.
03/18/2010
Widespread Public Defibrillators May Save Lives
By Serena Gordon, Bloomberg BusinessWeek
The availability of public automated external defibrillators (AEDs) increases the odds of surviving a heart attack with little neurological consequences, suggests new research.
03/16/2010
Pfizer: More Lipitor Cuts hHart Complications More
By Linda A. Johnson, Associated Press
A reanalysis of research data found a high dose of popular cholesterol pill Lipitor lowers risk of heart attack and stroke in some patients with both heart disease and kidney disease, the drug's maker said Monday.
03/16/2010
Fix for a Faulty Heartbeat
By Thomas M. Burton, The Wall Street Journal
Patients with the most common type of irregular heartbeat who aren't helped by drugs may benefit from a treatment that freezes tiny portions of heart tissue to correct a flaw, a new study shows.
03/15/2010
Remote Monitoring of Implanted Devices reduced Time Between Onset of Events, Clinical Decision-Making
By Cardiology Today
A wireless remote monitoring and notification system based on cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators and implantable cardioverter defibrillators cut the time from onset of events to clinical decisions in response to arrhythmias, CVD progression and device issues by nearly two-thirds, as compared with standard in-office care.
03/15/2010
Heart Health: Doctors Devise Less Invasive Valve Surgery
By Steve Sternberg, USA Today
Leaky heart valves can be fixed without major surgery by guiding a tiny, clothespin-like clip into place from an incision in a vein in the groin, doctors said Sunday.
03/15/2010
Diabetes Heart Treatments May Cause Harm
By Gina Kolata, The New York Times
Three aggressive treatment strategies doctors had expected would prevent heart attacks among people with Type 2 diabetes and some who are the verge of developing it have proved to be ineffective or even harmful, new studies show.
03/12/2010
Heart Test May Be Overused
By Ron Winslow, The Wall Street Journal
A widely used test to detect blockages in the heart's arteries often turns up little or no evidence of disease, a new study found, suggesting that patients are frequently exposed unnecessarily to the risks and costs of the invasive examination.
03/09/2010
Study Looks At Cost-Effectiveness of ECG in Hyperactive Kids
By U.S. News & World Report
Electrocardiogram screening to check for heart problems in hyperactive children before prescribing stimulant medications may help identify those at risk, but is only borderline cost-effective compared to the current practice of taking a patient history and doing a physical examination, a new study shows.
03/05/2010
Air Travel Could Raise Risk for Heartbeat Irregularities
By Alan Mozes, BusinessWeek
Air travel could raise the risk for experiencing heartbeat irregularities among older individuals with a history of heart disease, a new study suggests.
03/05/2010
Newer Blood Test Predicts Diabetes, Heart Disease
By Serena Gordon, US News & World Report
A1C outperforms fasting glucose in predicting heart disease and stroke risk, study finds
03/02/2010
Hospices Not Deactivating Defibrillators in Patients
By Mount Sinai Press
Researchers from Mount Sinai School of Medicine have found that patients admitted to hospice care who have an implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) are rarely having their ICDs deactivated and are receiving electrical shocks from these devices near the end of life. This first-of-its-kind study of hospice patients with ICDs is published in the March 2, 2010 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine.
03/02/2010
Florida No. 1 in Heart Disease Hospitalizations
By Bob LaMendola, Sun Sentinel
Florida leads the nation in the number of seniors hospitalized with heart disease, a federal report found Monday, reflecting the state's large elderly population and higher-than-average heart risks.
02/23/2010
Report: High Blood Pressure Too Low a Priority for Docs
By Monifa Thomas, Chicago Sun-Times
High blood pressure affects nearly one in three adults and is the second-leading cause of preventable deaths, but it's still a "neglected disease," according to a report Monday from the respected Institute of Medicine that criticizes doctors for too often failing to treat the condition aggressively.
02/22/2010
Research Ties Diabetes Drug to Heart Woes
By Gardiner Harris, The New York Times
Hundreds of people taking Avandia, a controversial diabetes medicine, needlessly suffer heart attacks and heart failure each month, according to confidential government reports that recommend the drug be removed from the market.
02/11/2010
Defibrillator Safety Questioned
By Jonathan D. Rockoff, The Wallstreet Journal
Two defibrillator brands made by Boston Scientific Corp. have a design flaw that can result in the devices delivering potentially life-threatening shocks to the hearts of patients, authors of a medical journal article say.
02/11/2010
Getting Better Beats From Weakened Hearts
By Kerry A. Dolan, Forbes Magazine
Better treatments for heart failure are sorely needed. Cytokinetics is testing a drug that strengthens muscle contractions.
01/27/2010
Study Finds Procedure Beats Drugs for Fast Heartbeat
By Marie McCullough, The Philadelphia Inquirer
For selected patients with an increasingly common heart-rhythm disorder, destroying the heart's faulty electrical pathways is far more effective than drugs, an international study shows.
01/25/2010
Trauma Patients Safe from Mortality Risks Associated With So-Called 'Weekend Effect'
By Science Daily
People who are in car crashes or suffer serious falls, gunshot or knife wounds and other injuries at nights or on weekends do not appear to be affected by the same medical care disparities as patients who suffer heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrests and other time-sensitive illnesses during those "off hours," according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
01/20/2010
Nano Technology Tackles Heart Disease
By BBC News
A molecule designed to find, latch onto, then treat hardened arteries could offer a new way to tackle heart disease, say its inventors.
01/13/2010
AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Merck Heart Drugs Cut Alzheimer’s Disease
By Michelle Fay Cortez, BusinessWeek
Drugs commonly used to lower blood pressure, sold by AstraZeneca Plc, Sanofi-Aventis SA and Merck & Co., may also reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease.
01/12/2010
Cardiovascular Disease Linked to High Resting Heart Rate
By Nursing-Times.Net
A woman’s chance of dying from a heart attack increases by 18% for each 10 beat per minutes rise in her resting heart rate up to the age of 70, a study suggests.
01/12/2010
Abbott Laboratories Settles Lawsuit over Tricor Cholesterol Drug for $22.5 million
Associated Press
Drugmaker Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle allegations it tried to block generic competition to a popular cholesterol medication, according to state officials.
01/10/2010
Old Antidepressant Offers Promise in Treating Heart Failure
ScienceDaily.com
ScienceDaily (Jan. 8, 2010) — A team of Johns Hopkins and other researchers have found in animal experiments that an antidepressant developed over 40 years ago can blunt and even reverse the muscle enlargement and weakened pumping function associated with heart failure.
01/08/2010
FDA Staff Against Wider Approval of Forest Drug
Lisa Richwine, Reuters
The Food and Drug Administration staff memo, prepared for an agency advisory panel, said "the totality of evidence is not convincing to support a claim for treatment of heart failure" with the drug, Bystolic. "Approval is not recommended" for the heart failure use, FDA reviewer Shona Pendse wrote, adding that "several critical changes" were made to the main study "that raise concerns as to the interpretability of findings." Safety data "does not reveal any specific causes for concern," Pendse said.
12/18/2009
New MRI Safety Risk for Patients With Pacemakers Identified
ScienceDaily.com
ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2009) — FDA researchers have found that certain cardiac pacemakers may inadequately stimulate a patient's heart while undergoing a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan due to the magnetic pulses mixing with the electronic pulses from the pacemaker. This inadequate stimulation is potentially dangerous for the patient undergoing the MRI scan, according to research published in BioMed Central's open access journal BioMedical Engineering Online.
11/18/2009
With ARBs, A Bigger Dose is Better for Heart Failure Patients
By Steve Sternberg USA TODAY
A new study suggests that thousands of heart failure deaths and hospitalizations may be averted each year if doctors prescribe higher doses of a critical medication, researchers here said Tuesday.
11/16/2009
Proposed AstraZeneca Anticlotting Drug Better Than Plavix:Study
The Wall Street Journal
An experimental anticlotting drug being developed by AstraZeneca PLC (AZN, AZN.LN) was more effective than the widely used Plavix when used before and after a procedure to open a blocked coronary artery in patients suffering a heart attack, according a new analysis scheduled to be released Sunday.
09/18/2009
Blacks Fare Worse After Cardiac Arrest
By Steven Reinberg, HealthDay News
Black patients who suffer cardiac arrest in the hospital are much less likely to survive than white patients, a new study finds.
09/10/2009
Long-Term Lead Exposure Linked to Heart Deaths: Current OSHA guidelines are probably inadequate, researchers say
Health Day
Exposure to lead over a lifetime may increase the risk of dying from heart disease, new research shows.
07/09/2009
Treating Heart Failure: The Smartest Approach
By Deborah Kotz, US News & World Report
About 5 million people in the United States have heart failure, and 300,000 die from it every year. (Compare that with the 570,000 annual deaths caused by every kind of cancer.) Indeed, heart failure-the heart can't pump enough blood through the body-is the most common reason older folks wind up in the hospital, and more than 1 in 4 heart-failure patients must be hospitalized again within a month of being discharged, according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine.
07/06/2009
Sanofi Drug for Heart Rhythm Disorder Is Approved
By Duff Wilson, The New York Times
The Food and Drug Administration approved a new drug Thursday to treat the heart rhythm disorder known as atrial fibrillation, which affects an estimated 2.5 million people in this country, most of them elderly.
04/27/2009
Balancing Act: Comparative Effectiveness Research and Innovation in U.S. Health Care
New England Healthcare Institute
Comparative effectiveness research (CER) has risen to prominence in the debate over national health care reform. Equally important in this debate is the role of innovation, long the engine for growth and advancement in our health and our health care system. But to date, there has been little discussion about how CER might impact the dynamics of innovation in health care.
In the News
03/18/2010
Training for Marathons Can Cause Heart Damage in Healthy People: Study
By Tracy Miller, NY Daily News
03/16/2010
Heart-Shock Device May Disrupt Quiet Hospice Death
By Lauran Neergaard, Associated Press
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