Tag Archives: evolocumab

What’s new in transplantation Are kidney donors worse off? The meeting was opened by Dr Anna Price (Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, Birmingham) who addressed the long-term cardiovascular effects of unilateral nephrectomy in living kidney donors.1 Previous studies have shown a significant prevalence of cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD),2,3 but the effects of reduced renal function in living kidney donors has been unexplored until now. A recent study by Price et al. demonstrated that living kidney donors had a reduction in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) from 95 to 67 ml/min

In the study, patients newly diagnosed with hip fracture from 2005 –2013 were followed until late 2016. Among 34,991 patients, 4602 (13%) received osteoporosis treatment during follow-up. Alendronate was associated with 67% and 45% lower risks of one-year CV death and heart attack, respectively. It was associated with an 18% reduced risk of stroke within five years and a 17% reduced risk of stroke within 10 years. Protective effects were not evident for other classes of osteoporosis treatments. “There is a world-wide crisis in the treatment of osteoporosis, due to patients’ awareness of the extremely rare side effects,” said senior au

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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