Tag Archives: colchicine

HEAT-PPCI: heparin outperforms bivalirudin in primary PCI The major talking point of this year’s American College of Cardiology meeting was without doubt the aptly named HEAT-PPCI trial which generated more heat than has been seen at such conferences for quite some time. The trial acronym stands for How Effective Are Antithrombotic Therapies in Primary PCI (percutaneous coronary intervention), and the study – conducted in the UK under the leadership of Dr Rod Stables (Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital) – compared unfractionated heparin with bivalirudin (Angiomax®, the Medicines Company) in patients with ST-elevation myoca

FREEDOM: CABG beats PCI in diabetes patients with multi-vessel disease Coronary artery by-pass graft (CABG) surgery was associated with better outcomes than percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in patients with diabetes with multi-vessel coronary artery disease in the FREEDOM (Future Revascularization Evaluation in Patients With Diabetes Mellitus: Optimal Management of Multi-vessel Disease) trial. Senior FREEDOM investigator, Dr Valentin Fuster (Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, USA), said the results (table 1) would change practice. He estimated that patients in this study represent about a quarter of patients undergoing PCI. In

ARISTOTLE: apixaban superior to warfarin in AF patients Another oral anticoagulant has shown good results in comparison to warfarin for use in the prevention of stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF). The new oral factor Xa inhibitor, apixaban, was superior to warfarin in preventing stroke or systemic embolism and was also associated with less bleeding and lower mortality than warfarin in the ARISTOTLE trial. Apixaban is the third of the new generation of oral anticoagulants to be tested in this indication, and seems to have performed the best. The other two agents – dabigatran and rivaroxaban – have also been shown to be viable