Tag Archives: FOURIER

ESC President, Professor Barbara Casadei Heart failure highlights PARAGON-HF fails primary end point but benefits for some Heart failure was a key theme of this year’s congress, accounting for more than 1,000 presentations. In the first hotline session of the Congress, the keenly awaited results from PARAGON-HF (Angiotensin-Neprilysin Inhibition in Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction) were presented.1 Up to 64 million people worldwide have heart failure, and that number is rising as the population ages. Evidence-based treatment has focused on about half of these patients who have heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (<

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

Tsimane people show healthiest arteries yet studied Indigenous South Americans from the Bolivian Amazon – the Tsimane people – have the lowest recorded levels of vascular ageing A South American Tsimane person of 80 years is estimated to have the same vascular age as an American person in their mid-50s, according to a study presented at the ACC. The Tsimane people – an indigenous forager-horticulturalist population of the Bolivian Amazon – have the lowest reported levels of vascular ageing for any population, with coronary atherosclerosis being five times less common than in the USA. This has led the researchers to propose that the lo

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